Habermas the Freelance Journalist: The Relationship between Theory and Practice in Habermas’s Early Career

Although Jürgen Habermas is one of postwar Europe’s leading philosophers and public intellectuals, the secondary literature often portrays him as an apolitical thinker with little interest in “real politics.” This article demonstrates that from the beginning of his career Habermas was an intensely political thinker, who tried to mediate his political convictions and philosophical interests. Drawing on articles he produced as a freelance journalist before arriving at the Institute for Social Research in 1956—as well as the correspondence contained in the Habermas archives at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main—the article shows that Habermas sought to combine his political and philosophical interests from the start. It argues that these relatively unknown and understudied texts highlight the development of Habermas’s understanding of the relationship of theory to practice and also help explain his attraction to the Frankfurt School in general, as well as to Theodor Adorno specifically.

Jürgen Habermas is one of the most important philosophers of the postwar era. His development of the theoretical paradigm of communicative action and of the concept of the public sphere (Öffentlichkeit), which forms the basis of his “talk-centric” conception of modern democratic politics, lies at the heart of his wide-ranging interdisciplinary philosophical project.¹ In keeping with his commitment to open debate as the basis of political legitimacy, Habermas has also engaged extensively in the key social and political debates of his time, acting as “an engaged public intellectual in the very same ‘political public sphere’ that he theorized as a philosopher.”²

Although he has “devoted as much energy and passion to his work as a public intellectual as to his philosophical work,” the existing literature focuses on the latter to the detriment of the former.³ However, Habermas is better known to the German reading public for his political interventions—which cover a wide range of issues from the meaning of the Holocaust in German national identity, the problems of reunification and the place of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) in the European Union, to the legitimacy of COVID-era lockdowns, and German support for Ukraine following Russia’s full-scale invasion of February 2022—than for his philosophical insights.⁴ In this sense, his career can be seen as “part of the dramatic intellectual reconstruction of the postwar period that enduringly liberalized and Westernized German politics.”⁵

Despite this fact, as Max Pensky observes, there is a “peculiar imbalance on the side of theory that has characterized Habermas’s reception in English-speaking countries.”⁶ The lack of attention to his work as a public intellectual has led to a number of misunderstandings of Habermas and his work. In particular, despite his own application of his concept of the public sphere in his work as a public intellectual, much of the scholarship portrays Habermas as an apolitical or even antipolitical figure whose work cannot serve as an “effective source of orientation or a guide to action.”⁷ This misconception is so common and widespread that it can even be divided into two main strands: one external and one internal.

What I call the “external” critique of Habermas comes from a group of self-styled “realists” who argue that theory should be directly “connected to practical interventions.” As one of the leaders of this movement, Raymond Geuss is particularly critical of Habermas’s focus on discussion “as an ordering principle in philosophy.” As a result of the emphasis the mature Habermas places on outlining the characteristics of communicative action, Geuss accuses him of engaging in “ethics-first” theorizing, in which the philosopher seeks to create “an ideal theory of how we should act, and then in a second step . . . [seeks to] apply that ideal theory to the action of political agents.”⁸ Given their lack of engagement with Habermas’s work as an engaged public intellectual, Geuss and his realist followers fault Habermas for failing to “connec[t] political reality and political theory” in a way that gives “autonomy to distinctively political thought.” They therefore attack Habermas as a “German Rawls,” that is, as a mainstream, status quo, quietist “high liberal” whose work needs to be drawn out “into a ‘real’ world from which [Habermas] otherwise remains isolated.”⁹

A second strand of this critique is internal in the sense that it comes from other critical theorists who disagree with Habermas’s approach. To a certain extent this includes Geuss, who wrote a book about the Frankfurt School early in his career, in which he argued that critical theory was “better off” insofar as it remained “closer to Adorno . . . than to Habermas.”¹⁰ However, it extends beyond him as well. Although Habermas and Theodor Adorno were friends and intellectual allies until the latter’s death in 1969, these internal critics of his work allege that Habermas has “abandoned” the practical aspirations of the Frankfurt School by creating a mainstream liberal “philosophy which finds peace within itself . . . [and] has nothing to do with critical theory.”¹¹ They thus see Habermas’s approach as “an insidious ruse.” In so doing, they reflect a broader tendency in the secondary literature that pits “the ‘good’ Adorno against the ‘bad’ Habermas.”¹²

I push back on these claims by showing that, from the beginning of his career, Habermas has been an intensely political thinker who has tried to mediate his political convictions and philosophical interests. I make this argument by drawing on newspaper articles that Habermas wrote in the 1950s, as well as the correspondence contained in the Habermas Vorlass at the archives of the University Library Johann Christian Senckenberg in Frankfurt am Main. These relatively unknown texts shed a new light on a number of important aspects of Habermas’s thought. Three are particularly important.

First, this textual base highlights Habermas’s long-standing interest in writing for the broader reading public. In his mature work, Habermas develops a conception of the philosopher as public intellectual based on a strict separation of philosophy as a form of academic research (Wissenschaft) from his interventions as a public intellectual. Whereas the former is oriented toward the search for “a form of truth which can be defined only in terms of methodological research,” the latter allows him to intervene in public affairs “when current events are threatening to spin out of control,” and as a fellow citizen who “cannot rely on anything except the strength and precision of his or her arguments.”¹³

The writings examined here show that Habermas’s early journalism does not yet display the “role-differentiation” that he later ascribes to himself. However, even at this early stage, Habermas is already attempting to engage in both theory and practice in a way that “respect[s] the autonomous logics of the differentiated ‘value spheres’ (Max Weber)” that define modernity. In fact—and this is the second insight that emerges from these overlooked and understudied tests—I show that it was precisely his search for a way to integrate his long-standing desire to “intervene on behalf of rights that have been violated and truths that have been suppressed, reforms that are overdue and progress that has been delayed” with his philosophical career that led him to join Adorno at the Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung) in Frankfurt am Main in 1956.¹⁴

Finally, my reading of Habermas’s earliest publications reveals three key philosophical affinities he shared with Adorno: (1) an interest in the effects of technology on both work and consumption in late capitalism, (2) a concern about enduring social and political continuities between the Third Reich and the early FRG, and (3) a turn to art (and culture more generally) as a possible source of liberation and critique. My basic thesis is that Habermas’s early writings—particularly the journalism he produced in the early to mid-1950s—have important, overlooked implications for how we conceptualize his relationship to Adorno and the rest of the first generation of the Frankfurt School.

A brief methodological note is in order before I proceed. In using these texts from Habermas’s early career to address both the thematic interests he shared with Adorno—which are important for the subsequent history of the Frankfurt School—and to document his long-standing desire to intervene in political debates, I am consciously violating Quentin Skinner’s warnings about the dangers of “treat[ing] the past as a separate realm.” While the methodology of the Cambridge School, which emphasizes meaning of the text at the time it was written, is powerful in its own right, it is also limiting. As a result, Skinner himself has recently expressed “regret [for] what I said in my early manifestoes on historical method.”¹⁵ Rather than follow this approach, I locate my work in the broader “turn to the present” in political theory, not only insofar as I focus on recent texts produced by a contemporary figure but also as it allows me to use historical material to engage in important contemporary debates.¹⁶

I start by highlighting how the journalistic texts that Habermas produced before arriving at the institute accentuate a key point in the development of his understanding of the relationship of theory to practice. My chronological analysis of Habermas’s early work begins in the second section with an overview of his philosophical background and the pieces he published as a student from 1951 to 1953. These demonstrate not only his early political commitments but also his nascent philosophical ideas about deliberation as the basis of democratic legitimacy.

The third section turns to the articles he produced during his two years working as freelance journalist prior to his arrival at the institute in 1956. As I show, Habermas initially chose to pursue a career as a journalist rather than as a philosopher precisely because he believed that the former would allow him to bring his theoretical and political interests together more readily than the latter in the context of the early FRG. In the fourth section I briefly examine the circumstances surrounding Adorno’s invitation to Habermas to join the Institute for Social Research. I conclude by reflecting on the importance of these early texts for our understanding of the connection between Adorno and Habermas, as well as for the history of the Frankfurt School more generally.

Theory and Praxis in Habermas’s Thought

Looking back on his decision to join Adorno at the institute, Habermas notes that he was attracted to critical theory because in this tradition “academic controversies also had political connotations from the beginning.”¹⁷ Throughout his prior philosophical education, Habermas had been frustrated by the unwillingness of his professors to engage with the world outside the classroom. Before arriving in Frankfurt, he had found an outlet for his political convictions and “in the visual arts,” especially theatre and film. However, his affiliation with the Frankfurt School allowed him to bring his politics into his philosophy more organically. In Habermas’s words, critical theory opened “a new universe . . . a world of completely unexpected, fascinating colors and shapes that revolutionized my previous perception of the world.”¹⁸

Despite what both his internal and his external critics say, Habermas does not think that “one can complete the work of ethics first, attaining an ideal theory of how we should act, and then in a second step . . . apply that ideal theory to the action of political agents.”¹⁹ Although he denies that modern philosophy can be “action-guiding” in any direct or unmediated way, Habermas is committed to the idea that the philosopher can influence politics as a public intellectual who “broadens the spectrum of relevant arguments in an attempt to improve the lamentable level of public debates.”²⁰ By engaging in political debate in this mediated manner, the mature Habermas has sought to performatively “refute the objection that the theory of communicative action is blind to institutional reality,” while maintaining a strict separation between his roles as an academic theorist and a public intellectual to ensure that theory “does not sabotag[e] thinking and thereby itself.”²¹

The texts highlighted in this article show how Habermas’s conception of the relationship between theory and praxis developed out of his early interest in journalism. In contrast to how he later mediates his vocation (Beruf) as a philosopher and his secondary vocation (Nebenberuf) as a public intellectual, the newspaper articles Habermas publishes in the 1950s bring his theoretical and political interests together more directly.²² Instead of strictly separating his philosophical from his political writings, in this period he blends his concerns regarding the effects of technology on both work and consumption in late capitalism, his fears regarding the social and political continuities between the Third Reich and the early FRG, and his interest in art and culture as possible sources of liberation together in his work as a journalist writing “with a sense of the topicality of the urgent problems of the day.”²³

The materials that form the basis for my argument have received little attention in the literature to date. In large part this lacuna is due to issues of availability, as few of Habermas’s texts from before the late 1950s have been republished in later collections of his work or as part of the twelve volumes of his Short Political Writings (Kleine politische Schriften). Even fewer exist in English translation. In addition to not granting permission for these texts to be republished—one of the only editions that include a few of these writings is a pirated, unofficial collection printed without his consent²⁴—Habermas has also dismissed their importance to his own development, referring to them as “youthful sins.”²⁵ However, I argue that the seventy articles he wrote for German newspapers before his arrival in Frankfurt are crucial not only to the intellectual history of critical theory but also to how his understanding of the relationship of theory to practice developed over time.

One of the only sources to engage with this material is Roman Yos’s 2019 book on “the young Habermas.”²⁶ Currently available only in German, this monograph covers much of the same period as this article. However, its main focus is on the contemporary reception of Habermas’s early work and on how it lays the foundation for his first book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere  (1962). Yos uses this material to highlight that “the names of Adorno and Horkheimer were far less present in Habermas’ early work than one would initially assume.” He argues that this (lack) of influence “reveals why Habermas cannot simply be considered an epigone of the founders of the Frankfurt school.”²⁷ By contrast, I demonstrate that not only the motivations behind Habermas’s short career as a freelance journalist but also the thematic content of these writings show why he can rightly be counted as an heir to the first generation of critical theory.

Habermas’s early journalistic texts help explain why he has repeatedly noted that Adorno “played an electrifying role [eine elektrisierende Rolle] for me.”²⁸ Today Adorno is primarily known for his theories of dialectics and negation. However, he was also one of the early FRG’s most important public intellectuals.²⁹ Although Habermas soon realized that he could not build his own philosophy on Adorno’s, he was drawn to his mentor at the institute because Adorno offered him a model for how to influence public debate while remaining committed to a form of philosophy that “effects change precisely by remaining itself.”³⁰ In this sense I agree with Stefan Müller-Doohm, Habermas’s biographer and one of the few other scholars to engage with these texts, that the “intransigence Habermas displays in his public political interventions is a crucial reason why he is still counted as a member of the circle around Horkheimer and Adorno.”³¹

The tradition of critical theory thus gave the early Habermas the tools he needed to think philosophically about the public sphere and its role in modern democratic life, instead of just as a journalist writing for the public sphere. This is crucial to understanding not only how Habermas’s political commitments shape his philosophical interests but also why the mature Habermas develops a conception of theory and practice that separates the former from the latter. Following Adorno, who writes disdainfully of the “elitist desires for authority [elitären Herrschaftswünsche]” demonstrated by Martin Heidegger and other philosophers who lent their theoretical influence to the Nazi cause, Habermas insists that after 1945 German philosophers have given up their right to act as “teachers of the nation.”³² As the next section makes clear, Habermas’s political commitment to the need to break with the traditions and practices that led Germany into the abyss of the Third Reich is deeply rooted in his biography and his philosophical education.

Philosophical Education and Retreat from Academe

Habermas was born in 1929 to a middle-class family from Gummersbach in western Germany. While there is no reason to believe that his parents or siblings were ardent believers in the Nazis’ racist ideology, Habermas notes that his home was typical of the time in terms of its “bourgeois adaptation to the political environment.”³³ As a result, like many in his generation of “45ers” or “antiaircraft gun assistants [Flakhelfer],” he experienced the end of the war as a decisive rupture: “Overnight, as it were, the society in which we had led what had seemed to be a halfway normal everyday life and the regime governing it were exposed as pathological and criminal.”³⁴

After 1945 Habermas gave up his childhood dream of studying medicine. Instead, he expressed a desire to become a journalist who would write “with a sense of the topicality of the urgent problems of the day.” However, when it came time to go to university, he changed his mind again: “I was captured by the enthusiasm for existentialist philosophy at the time.”³⁵ Although he notes that he was already “highly politicized,” Habermas’s philosophical education offered him little opportunity to bring together his academic and political interests, given the “apolitical self-image of the German universities.”³⁶ While he could familiarize himself with the main currents of academic philosophy, his professors in Göttingen, Zurich, and Bonn—many of whom had actively collaborated with the Nazi regime—covered only topics that allowed them to steer clear of current sociopolitical issues and questions about the recent past.

In 1951 Habermas published his first piece of journalism in his old high school newspaper after he graduated under the title “Is Our Generation Modern?”³⁷ In this initial publication, which is often left out of bibliographies of his work, Habermas compares his cohort, which had lived through World War II as adolescents, to the youth that had lived through the Great War. In contrast to his contemporaries, he argues that the interwar generation had confronted the historical break they had experienced, “affirming the fact that they had been uprooted.” By contrast, Habermas diagnoses his generation as being too conformist and “uncritical,” resulting in a “search for security in traditional forms of community.” Instead of confronting the homelessness of the German tradition after the horrors of Auschwitz and the Holocaust, he accuses his peers of seeking to build themselves a new domicile built of “illusions handed down on matchboxes [aus den Streichholzschachteln überlieferter Illusionen].” While he sees some benefits in the individualistic pacifism of his cohort, he concludes that the “great failure of our generation” is “that we cannot set alight and recast the old tracks, institutions and conventions.”³⁸

Habermas’s concern with how his generation—and German society at large—should relate to its traditions in the aftermath of the rupture of Nazism is closely tied to what Adorno later labeled “working through the past [Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit].”³⁹ However, at this point Habermas had no way of connecting his interest in the recent past to his philosophical work. As a result, he channels these concerns through an “interest in dramatic literature, particularly Georg Kaiser, [Walter] Hasenclever, [Frank] Wedekind, and, of course, [Jean-Paul] Sartre, [who] served a mediating function” between his philosophical studies and political interests.⁴⁰ Reflecting on the meaning of German cultural and intellectual traditions in the wake of the Third Reich, in a 1952 article he observes that it is “a truism that we live by appropriating our traditions. However . . . another truism should be repeated: Goethe and Hegel have been dead for over a hundred years.” Rather than “assuming that we already hold the truth in our hands,” he observes that “no time demands greater caution regarding the practical solutions offered by tradition and a greater openness in terms of that which is seen as a solution in the first place” than the kind of “transitional stage, from whose probing movements a new historical answer can spring,” which the FRG was experiencing at the time.⁴¹

Habermas’s concerns about postwar Germany’s confrontation with the legacy of the past already highlight an important intersection with Adorno. In contrast to his future mentor’s deep interest in aesthetics, art and literary criticism are largely absent from Habermas’s mature philosophy. However, they are a staple of his early publications as a student.⁴² Given the stilted nature of political discourse in the FRG at the time, which prioritized rebuilding over denazification, for Habermas “discussions about dramaturgy were the medium in which to discuss political questions at a higher level of generality.”⁴³

A good example of this is a series of reviews he wrote for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ). His evaluation of Gottfried Benn’s Voice behind the Screen (Stimme hinter dem Vorhang) makes it clear that Habermas admires the author’s work. However, he is wary of Benn’s active collaboration with the Nazi regime, given that he had not only signed a vow of personal allegiance to Hitler but even defended the Nazi regime, arguing that under National Socialism “German workers are better off than ever before.”⁴⁴ These political considerations make Habermas suspicious of the emphasis Benn placed on abstract notions like style as the source of historical truth, which he sees as a form of escapism that seeks to hide an “antisocial and antihumanitarian catechism in the absolute form.” Moreover, while Habermas admires Benn’s existentialism, he criticizes it for legitimating indifference, rather than caring for others.⁴⁵

The other two reviews Habermas wrote from 1951 to 1953 explore the critical potential of radio theater (Hörspiel). Habermas is particularly taken by this medium’s ability to capture its listeners unawares in their daily lives: “The cry [Appell] from the ether ambushes us in the kitchen and living room. It is an intrusion into the defenseless intimacy of the private sphere.”⁴⁶ This leads him to reflect on the critical potential of this new technology, which “has the advantage of being a necessary forum and not a retrospective afterthought [nachträglicher Schauplatz].”⁴⁷

Taken together, these three publications show Habermas’s appreciation for art as a form of social criticism, a subject Adorno tackles in his Aesthetic Theory (1970).⁴⁸ These reviews also testify to Habermas’s interest in how theater can create a “third place [dritter Ort]” between real life and the stage. Instead of allowing the audience to get away from their real lives into the fictional world of the performance, he argues that techniques that prevent such escape are desirable because they ensure that the audience remains critically engaged, rather than becoming passive objects of entertainment. This understanding of the role of art also explains the rationale behind many of Habermas’s most critical reviews.⁴⁹ Much like Adorno’s argument in the “Culture Industry” chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment, Habermas contends that art is not primarily about entertainment, but critique.⁵⁰

At this time Habermas was working on his doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Ernst Rothacker at the University of Bonn. In December 1953 Habermas used his Doktorvater’s (supervisor’s) lecture at the Munich Academy to reflect on art as a possible source of liberation from an alienating, technologically dominated modernity. He ends his review of Rothacker’s talk by asking his supervisor, “Will the art of finding images not only be able to bring about liberation if these ‘images’ ‘correspond’ to the current situation and even bear the features of their technical origin?”⁵¹ In posing this question, Habermas implies that while art is charged with keeping human intuitions intact by bringing together feelings and images, it can do so only if it both reflects the increasingly technical world and resists it by incorporating a humanist style beyond mere functionality.⁵²

While his interest in aesthetics is clear, it was the question of technology that most occupied Habermas in this early period. For example, in 1953 he reported on a meeting of the Association of German Engineers and an exhibition of industrial design in Stuttgart. Given his strong interest in Heidegger’s work at the time, it is not surprising that Habermas seeks to “unmask the legend of technical expediency” by resisting or rejecting the way that “bare, impersonal, faceless” technical products “make people into strangers in their own world.” Although he does not know “how this dreadful state of affairs regarding technology can be dealt with through artistic design,” his critique of the dominance of technological means over human goals again echoes Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s critiques of instrumental reason, highlighting another thematic concern he shared with the Frankfurt School.

Habermas’s early writings on technology demonstrate the impact that not only Rothacker but also Heidegger had on his thought during this period. This can be seen in his book review of Philosophie der Gegenwart by Ludwig Landgrebe, which appeared under the title “In Light of Heidegger.” Writing in the culture section of the FAZ, Habermas praises Landgrebe for placing the “question of Being” at the center of Western philosophy, for the “brilliant didactics” of his presentation of Heidegger’s work, and for his rejection of French existentialism. Habermas concludes that instead of fighting against technology and seeking to dominate it, “a more original conversion is necessary: humanity has to bring itself into a listening attitude toward things and learn to let them be instead of mastering them.”⁵³ While he was clearly still operating under Heidegger’s influence, Habermas’s conclusion that reason must also set certain limits on what is technically possible and most economically efficient is also compatible with Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s critiques of instrumental reason.

Habermas decisively turned away from Heidegger in 1953, when he reports that his friend, Karl-Otto Apel, “handed me a copy of Heidegger’s An Introduction to Metaphysics fresh from the presses.” Habermas was dismayed that Heidegger had allowed his 1935 lectures to be reproduced without excising or even explaining a passage praising the “inner truth and greatness” of National Socialism. This revelation brought about the collision of Habermas’s “two intellectual universes,” his “left-leaning political convictions,” on the one hand, and “what [he] was learning in philosophy courses” on the other.⁵⁴

Habermas’s attempt to work through this revelation resulted in “Thinking with Heidegger against Heidegger” (“Mit Heidegger gegen Heidegger denken”), the piece that first brought him to the attention of the broader reading public in the FRG.⁵⁵ In the opening lines of his polemic, Habermas observes, “We are concerned here with the philosopher Martin Heidegger not as philosopher, but as a political personality” responsible for “the development of excitable and easily enthused students” like himself. Although it is not fully worked out at this point, Habermas’s framing of his critique shows that he is already thinking about the distinction between philosophy as an academic discipline (theory) and its application to politics (praxis). To the extent that Heidegger “fosters an interpretation of genius that has the consequence of political destruction,” Habermas argues that the “guardians of public criticism rightly may enter the scene.”⁵⁶

In addition to his objections to “the fatal linking of a heroic call to ‘creative violence’ with a cult of sacrifice,” Habermas rejects Heidegger’s devaluation of the German intellectual as a “mandarin who devalued ‘intelligence’ in favor of ‘spirit,’ ‘analysis’ in favor of ‘authentic thought,’ and wanted to reserve the esoteric truth for ‘the few.’”⁵⁷ By contrast, Habermas denies that Nazism was an “inevitable outgrowth of the German tradition.” Instead, he argues that an honest reckoning with the past was necessary to “to explore those dispositions [in the core of the German tradition] which could lead, in a period of decay, to fascism.”⁵⁸ While Habermas is irritated by the attack on the egalitarian spirit of the Enlightenment visible in Heidegger’s praise for the “heroic individual,” “the mighty one . . . who dares his entire essence,” he is truly offended by “the Nazi philosopher’s denial of moral and political responsibility for the consequences of the mass criminality.”⁵⁹

After finishing the text, Habermas sent it to Karl Korn, the editor of the FAZ’s feuilleton. Korn reacted enthusiastically but asked his young author for more information about his identity, since he would have to defend Habermas during the “violent bruhaha [gewaltigen Wirbel]” that inevitably followed the publication of his polemic. As Korn had predicted, the publication of “Thinking with Heidegger against Heidegger” on July 25, 1953, indeed caused quite a stir. As a result, Korn gave Habermas the opportunity to weigh in a month later as part of a full-page broadsheet of reader comments devoted to the “necessary discussion about Heidegger.”

In this response Habermas refutes the accusation that he had made too much of just a single sentence, noting that he would not have done so if Heidegger’s comment about National Socialism did “not follow directly from the lecture itself.” From the context, Habermas concludes that Heidegger must have seen Nazism as a solution to—in his words—the “tragic clash of technology and man.”⁶⁰ In passing, Habermas—who was identified merely as a “student from Bonn” in the author biography that accompanied his text—also let it be known that his teacher was the “esteemed Erich Rothacker.” In this way he indirectly rebutted accusations that he was a Marxist whose attack on Heidegger was politically motivated.

Shortly after this, Rothacker called Habermas into his office. While Habermas assumed that this was a meeting regarding his PhD dissertation, his supervisor used the opportunity to ask his student if he was next on Habermas’s “hit list,” so to speak. While Habermas never publicly attacked Rothacker, his realization that “the intellectual vanguard of the old regime” had “with a few exceptions . . . survived denazification unharmed” left him shaken.⁶¹ As a result, he decided to pursue a career as a freelance journalist after finishing his PhD, even though his thesis, “The Absolute and History: On the Ambiguity in Schelling’s Thought” (1954), received the distinguished mark of opus egregium (glorious work).⁶² In the years that followed, Habermas developed the political and philosophical interests that ultimately drew Adorno’s attention and awakened Habermas’s desire to work at the institute.

Habermas the Freelance Journalist

The texts Habermas wrote during his two-year career as a freelance journalist before joining Adorno in Frankfurt in 1956 are wide-ranging. In addition to continuing his previous interests in technology, in labor and consumption, the politics of memory and the critical potential of art and aesthetics, they also display a growing interest in the state of democracy in the early postwar FRG. This sets the stage for his connection with Adorno not only by giving Habermas the ability to bring his political and philosophical interests together—a fusion that Adorno later encouraged—but also by helping him develop his interests in these areas and realize his desire to bring philosophy together with contemporary sociological and cultural developments.

This first truly political commentary that Habermas produced comes in the form of a letter to the editor published on August 13, 1953, in the newspaper Der Fortschritt. In “Democracy on the Butcher’s Block,” Habermas criticizes many of the key aspects of parliamentary democratic politics, including election by list, vote whipping, and party discipline more generally. He argues that these “extraparliamentary” practices take legislative power away from the people’s representatives, handing it to political parties instead. As a result, he concludes, rather than serving as space for deliberation, as democratic legitimacy requires, “Parliament becomes a cabinet of mirrors, where the members of Parliament straddle each other in oratorical idleness [im rednerischen Leerlauf spreizen].”⁶³

This Madisonian rejection of political parties reflects Habermas’s disillusionment with the political spectrum of the early FRG. Additionally, it testifies to the way he looked to the United States not only as a source of ideas but also as an example of good democratic practice at a time when bipartisan “elastic” and “case-by-case majorities” were still common in Congress. While Habermas accepts that representation is a necessary aspect of democracy in modern societies, where most citizens do not have the leisure necessary to engage with politics full-time, he argues that members of Parliament should be selected through “public contestation [öffentlichen Streitgespräch]” on the basis of “binding rules of speech [im Rahmen verbindlicher Sprachregeln],” rather than “by appointment behind closed doors.”⁶⁴ By stressing the need for open deliberation and the power of argumentation, a number of the core themes that Habermas developed in Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and his later work are already visible in nascent form.

Habermas’s reflections on the democratic deficits of the early FRG echo Adorno’s contention that “democracy has not domesticated itself to the point that people really experience it as their cause, and so consider themselves agents [Subjekte] of the process.”⁶⁵ While this early text foreshadows Habermas’s emphasis on public debate and his prioritization of the legislature over the other branches of government, the concept of a participatory informal public sphere of opinion formation that channels its conclusions into Parliament, which defines his later democratic theory, is not yet present. That said, Habermas’s early journalism demonstrates a growing interest in the political participation of everyday citizens, a subject that he later researched at the institute under Adorno’s direction.

Writing in the German student newspaper in 1955, Habermas furthers his critiques of the ruling parties by linking his generation’s political apathy to the superficial manner in which denazification was carried out. He notes, “It is not dates of birth, but responsiveness which separates the minds.”⁶⁶ Habermas, in this piece, contributes to a broader debate that centered on the slogan “Without me [Ohne mich],” used to mobilize opposition to Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s plan to rearm the FRG, thus enabling it to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

In this article Habermas rejects the widely accepted interpretation of the opposition of the youth as rooted in “the money the communists had spent on propaganda.” He argues instead that the reservations of many students are rooted in a “mentality shaped by the special experiences of the totalitarian system and its collapse.” While this temperament often expressed itself in a retreat into private life that Habermas condemned, it also presents opportunities for those who are willing to dig into the “crumbly soil of a taboo past.” Insofar as it signals a “desire for a new and clean order with the insight into the unique opportunity of 1945,” Habermas sees the “without me” movement as a chance to move into a future in which “nationalism has lost its vigor” and European integration can be based on more than just a reflexive anticommunism dictated by geopolitics and “our commitment to world history.”⁶⁷

In another piece published soon after in the Handelsblatt, a newspaper focused on business and economics from Germany’s industrial heartland, Habermas seeks to rehabilitate the people as a positive political force in the wake of their manipulation by Hitler. He rejects the popular “fallacy” of the masses as “sluggish and cowardly [träge und feige]” in a piece that he published in the Wiesbadener Kurier. Pushing back against the “poison of human contempt,” he argues that the masses could be more than passive objects of technical control and “social facilitation.” After all, “propaganda does not make us into the masses; we belong to the masses because we jump to the propagandistic shepherd’s pipe.”⁶⁸

Recovering a positive conception of the masses as a political force with personal responsibility and initiative requires more focus on “the educational influences on the masses” to filter out any “deformed elements.” Even more important, it needs citizens to identify themselves with this idea: “The masses should not be confused with a mob of raw, rundown fools. The masses—they are not the others; the masses—they are us: solid, well-dressed citizens . . . not at all as uniform as we are said to be.” While many parties and politicians focus on manipulating the masses, Habermas argues that a truly progressive, democratic movement could win power by “focusing less on the organization of machines and more on the organization of people.”⁶⁹ This focus on popular participation anticipates many of the arguments about the communicative nature of politics Habermas makes later, as well as many of the commitments he shared with Adorno, who also sought to organize popular politics in the early FRG as a “nonconformist,” public intellectual.⁷⁰

His growing interest in mass politics is also visible in a report Habermas wrote about an experiment on national stereotypes conducted with students in Berlin. He opens this piece by noting that he breathed “a sigh of relief” when he saw that such “ungrounded conceptions [unbegründete Vorstellungen]” are not as strongly or as widely held as is often thought. However, he is concerned by the negative views many students hold of minorities as well as the prejudices held against “peoples behind the ‘Iron Curtain.’”⁷¹ Habermas addressed similar issues in a piece titled “For and against Testing: Opposing the Spirit of Contempt for Mankind.” Here he comes out strongly against approaches to “human engineering” enabled by tests that measure individuals against standardized scales that cannot “really get at the essence of who the person is.”⁷² These publications demonstrate his interest in the kinds of empirical studies conducted by the Frankfurt School, such as The Authoritarian Personality.⁷³

In a piece he wrote in 1954, Habermas attempts to “take stock” of Germany’s intellectual development since 1945. Although he acknowledges the FRG’s economic success, Habermas notes that it “has no real luster. We live more with the feeling of a missed chance.”⁷⁴ Reflecting on how German intellectuals had failed to confront their past actions, Habermas compares the sterility of postwar Germany to the “explosive and idea-rich [ideenreich] twenties.” He bemoans the enduring “rule [Herrschaft]” of “grand old men” who “confidently preserve the European educational tradition . . . without allowing for any true confrontation.” However, he is also hopeful because this “gerontology” is increasingly being confronted by a younger generation that is ready and able “to resist totalitarianism not only in its consequences but also in its intellectual origins.”⁷⁵

Although he had not yet begun to systematically read Karl Marx, certain Marxist themes are clearly visible in his description of the alienating effect of automation on the labor process. For example, writing in 1954 in the Handelsblatt, Habermas reflects on the negative consequences of “professional redeployment through technology.” While working on a modern assembly line requires workers to be more educated than they were in the past, at the same time, this form of labor dictated by the speed of the conveyor belt robs these employees of the ability to use their “technical skills [fachliches Geschick]” for self-expression. Instead of finding meaning in the fruits of their personal labor, as previous generations of craftsmen could, he points out that modern engineers are tasked only with overseeing the process of production itself and repairing broken machinery when necessary.⁷⁶

Habermas later also wrote a pair of pieces on the state of modern bureaucracy. Expanding his earlier reflections, he argues that, just like blue-collar workers, the work of the white-collar manager is increasingly “tied to the technical nature of the production process.” The manager is the main “instrument” of this transformation and personifies “the impersonal power of the modern bureaucracy,” which has been rapidly expanding at the same time as the number of workers has remained the same. In an important modification of Marx’s theory of capital, Habermas argues that contemporary society is witnessing a “seizure of power [Machtübernahme],” as the owners of the means of production have increasingly ceded control of their capital to managers, on whom they now also depend.

While this phenomenon is most visible in the private realm, similar developments are also visible in public administration, where the ministerial bureaucrat plays a similar “objectivizing, formalizing . . . ethically neutralizing” role to the company manager. Foreshadowing his later critique of the bureaucratized welfare state in Legitimation Crisis (1973)—and echoing concerns about the bureaucratization of politics within the Frankfurt School as well⁷⁷—Habermas is particularly concerned that bureaucratization will lead to “rule [Herrschaft] by experts” at the expense of democratic political control. He concludes that, given the rapidly increasing number and power of bureaucrats and the administrative apparatus, “it will be difficult in the future to control the bureaucracy (both in state administration and in the economic realm).”⁷⁸

In light of this problem, Habermas asks if “the indisputable advantages of rationalization [could] not be isolated from the weaknesses and dangers inherent in it.” In reflecting on how to reassert control over bureaucracies and their managers—both in business and in the state—he focuses on the characteristic that bureaucrats share with workers: the inability to express themselves in forms of labor that are increasingly governed by external rules. In contrast to ethical neutrality and distance, Habermas calls on bureaucrats to develop “an inner distance” or a form of “civil courage [Zivilcourage]” that would allow them to work in the interests of individuals, not the arbitrary system. Concretely, this would require officials to consider not only the internal correctness of their decisions but also their “social effects.” Such a procedure would allow “the expert maneuvers of the bureaucracy, which can hardly be controlled ‘from the outside,’ to gain a corrective ‘from the inside.’”⁷⁹

Habermas’s publications during this period also testify to his continuing interest in music, which he also shared with Adorno. In a piece published in the Handelsblatt in 1954 Habermas addresses how music is deployed at work to combat “fatigue, boredom, weariness and nervousness.” While working to music and labor songs predate industrialization, the difference today is that the rhythm of work “is determined by the beat of machines.” Although attempts to take advantage of the “obvious economic benefits of work music” have spread throughout the economy, “this alienation of work music from work becomes evident where it is intended to stimulate intellectual work, which is by its nature unrhythmic—in offices and at universities.”⁸⁰

Even though Habermas is writing primarily for a business audience, he still criticizes these conformist, instrumental treatments of art. While he observes that employers are becoming increasingly aware of music’s ability to tap new “reserves in modern, technically mediated work,” Habermas also hopes that “sources of power are still hidden in the secret connection [between work and music] today.”⁸¹ Once again, the nature of such functionalist uses of music, which are meant only to distract workers from the tedium of their labor and make them more productive instead of encouraging critique, has clear echoes with the “Culture Industry” chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment.

The connections Habermas draws between the increasing deployment of background music in postwar workplaces and the latent critical potential of art signal certain thematic affinities with the Frankfurt School that predate his arrival at the institute. For example, in 1954 Habermas used a summer road trip in his family’s 1936 Opel—known as Grauchen (little gray)—as an opportunity to reflect on contemporary culture as “something like a humanistic science [Geisteswissenschaft]” that requires “the constant translation of foreign texts, the anticipation of foreign worlds, styles, manners and quirks.”⁸² While he recognizes the advantages in speed and efficiency enabled by driving, he also notes the alienation of this “overdetermined . . . externally regulated” mode of transport, which “turns the ground into a track and the landscape into an area.”

Habermas appreciates the freedom enabled by driving. However, he concludes that it is increasingly turning into “a single purpose instrument.” As a result, Habermas fears that “the car will lose not just the earth underneath but also its grip on the surface; what remains will be the ‘driving lane.’”⁸³ There are striking similarities here not only with some of Adorno’s reflections but also with other members of the first generation, especially Herbert Marcuse, who later became his close friend and also drew on the image of the highway to make a similar point in an article from 1941.⁸⁴

Given his academic background, Habermas also reviewed major publications and produced reports on the debates at major conferences related to his research interests during this period.⁸⁵ From a purely practical perspective, these publications helped him put food on the table after his doctoral stipend ran out. As Habermas points out in his correspondence with an editor, Hans Paeschke, his financial situation meant that “I have to pursue my journalism not only according to my own inclination; it is also subject to economic calculation.”⁸⁶

These book reviews and conference reports also allowed him to maintain a foothold in disciplinary debates and within higher education more generally.⁸⁷ In 1955 Habermas attended a meeting of young sociologists. In his report, “Up-and-Coming Sociologists Introduce Themselves,” Habermas notes an increasing “rationalization of higher education [Rationalisierung der Hochschulpraxis],” whereby outsiders like himself, “formerly the heart of the university, will be ‘allowed in’ only with difficulty,” because the entire system is increasingly organized “as a ladder with rungs . . . according to seniority.”⁸⁸

A few months later Helmut Schelsky, who had organized the meeting mentioned above, invited Habermas to attend a workshop in Wuppertal. The focus of the ninth meeting of “The Association” (Der Bund) was “the consumption of culture and the culture of consumption [Kulturkonsum und Konsumkultur].”⁸⁹ Habermas’s report for the Handelsblatt focuses on the controversy that broke out at the height of the conference between those “who conservatively believed in a stable balance between good and bad and therefore simply attributed the demonstrable damage [of contemporary developments] to the ‘functional mode of industrial society’; on the other side [stood] those who still had enough utopian spark to search for radical methods of healing.”

Habermas’s report on this meeting raises a number of issues related to the Frankfurt School in general and Adorno in particular. That Habermas also delivered a paper at this meeting while reporting on it in his capacity as a freelance journalist indicates that academe still had a certain pull for him, if he could find a way to bring his left-leaning political convictions together with his philosophical interests.⁹⁰ Little did he know that less than a year later he would already be working with Adorno in Frankfurt doing precisely that.

Arrival at the Institute

As indicated, the themes that emerge in the articles Habermas produced as a freelance journalist often echo philosophical issues pursued independently by Adorno. Additionally, many raise the issue of the relationship of theory to praxis, even though Habermas does not yet clearly distinguish his philosophical from political interests in his journalism. That said, Habermas did produce one explicitly theoretical text during this period, which he published in Merkur  under the title “The Dialectics of Rationalization.” The correspondence contained in the Habermas Vorlass demonstrates that this article, alongside Habermas’s 1953 attack on Heidegger, was what caught Adorno’s attention and convinced him that Habermas would be a good candidate to serve as his assistant.

Although Habermas later told Adorno that his arguments regarding “compulsive- and pseudo-consumption” were “only tacitly . . . directed and enriched” by Dialectic of Enlightenment, there are distinct similarities between these two texts beyond their titles.⁹¹ Drawing together and building on ideas from his journalism, this piece represents Habermas’s first substantive engagement with Marx’s critique of capitalism. While he agrees that modern, routinized, increasingly automated forms of production drive the alienation of workers, he argues that Marx’s framework overlooks the crucial role that consumption plays in the process of estrangement. More specifically, Habermas’s thesis is that “the poverty [Pauperismus] of industrial labor is infectious and is carried over to mass consumption.”⁹²

The starting point for his argument is the observation that increases in material prosperity and standards of living are accompanied by ever greater alienation, not only in the workplace but also in the home; workers cannot break the habits they learn at work. Although laborers try to separate these domains with the idea that “‘life’ first begins with free time, begins at home,” this is unsustainable, as the pathologies of production enter their existence outside work through their participation in consumption.⁹³ As workers lose “the proper relation to ‘things,’” coming to see them as “anonymous factors” used merely for benefit and exchange, they also increasingly start to think of each other in the same way: merely as things or tools.⁹⁴

The fact that Habermas uses the term instrumental rationality (Zweckrationalität) not only demonstrates his familiarity with Weber; it also signals certain preexisting affinities to Adorno and the Frankfurt School, which had devoted a lot of attention to this concept after 1941. In a related argument that Habermas could not have been familiar with at this time, his future mentor observes that “human needs are not natural but historical, the products of class rule.”⁹⁵ Adorno also recognized these similarities. Soon after “The Dialectic of Rationalization” was published, Joachim Moras, one of Merkur’s coeditors, wrote to Habermas to let him know that “Mr. Adorno has just told us in a letter that your essay on the dialectic of rationalization has been of great interest to him, and although he does not agree with the basic position, he found that some things happened in an extraordinarily original and productive way.”⁹⁶

Habermas never followed up on Adorno’s inquiry to Moras. However, at the end of 1955 Adolf Frisé, his editor at the Handelsblatt, offered to put him in touch with Adorno, who he thought could direct the young Habermas’s philosophical and political interests. At Frisé’s urging, on December 13, 1955, Habermas writes to Adorno. By this time, it is clear that Habermas was searching for a way back into academe. However, rather than pursue a career in philosophy, “I would prefer to complete my education together with experienced researchers. What I want to do is to make a connection . . . to empirical social research.”⁹⁷ He concludes by asking Adorno for his advice on how to achieve this.

Adorno’s eagerness is visible in the fact that he responds on December 14, 1955, the same day he received Habermas’s letter. He immediately takes up Habermas’s interest in the social sciences by inviting him to the institute in a “vocational placement.” Although no paid position was available, Adorno notes that such a post would allow Habermas to familiarize himself with “empirical social research” with the goal of obtaining full-time employment. Before concluding by once again praising Habermas’s essay on “pseudoconsumption [Scheinkonsum],” Adorno immediately asks Habermas to come and visit him at the institute on Friday, January 6, 1956.⁹⁸

While there is no record of Habermas’s first meeting with Adorno, it apparently went well. Based on the correspondence available, we know that Adorno gave Habermas a manuscript copy of his “On the Problem of the Family,” as Habermas responds to this text in a letter dated January 15.⁹⁹ Habermas opens his commentary by observing that he agrees with Adorno’s argument that “the apparent regeneration of the family conceals an actual regression.” However, he continues by noting that in his opinion the crisis of the family is not just due to the “pressure of the war and its consequences” but also to “reprivatization” of the family, which is no longer “the power center of survival.” That Habermas draws on so many arguments he had made in his various journalistic publications to express “my interest in your work” to Adorno highlights the preexisting affinities in their interests and conclusions that are often overlooked.¹⁰⁰

As this brief overview makes clear, these shared themes touch on issues of technology in labor and consumption (the subject of “The Dialectic of Rationalization”) as well as the politics of memory and art as a source of potential liberation and critique. After exchanging a few more letters, on January 20 Habermas officially agreed to join Adorno at the institute, where he would have to fund his own work by taking on commissions and applying for grants. Adorno already had a few ideas for concrete projects that Habermas could work on, including a review of the recent literature on Friedrich Schelling that would include a Marxist component. Habermas agreed to do so, noting that he was prepared to take on this project, as “over the last six months I have consumed—more than enjoyed—the Marxist primary literature on a great scale.”¹⁰¹ He also highlights his excitement about joining the research team at the institute after the relative isolation of his time as a freelance correspondent: “Even and especially if every now and then you get lost in journalism, you are still basically quite isolated.”¹⁰²

A few days later, on January 26, Adorno replies: “I am happy from the bottom of my heart that you are coming and I sincerely hope that our relationship will be productive and will live up to its full potential. I also informed Mr. Horkheimer of our connection and he is as pleased as I am.”¹⁰³ On February 15, 1956, Habermas arrived at the institute.

Thus began his association with Adorno, which shaped the rest of his career. In contrast to the apolitical education he had received, in Frankfurt, as Habermas later recalled, “suddenly and for the first time philosophical and political matters were being brought together.”¹⁰⁴ Without Adorno’s help and support, it is also unclear that Habermas would have had an academic career at all. It is also unlikely that he would have developed his Nebenberuf as the FRG’s leading public intellectual alongside his philosophical Beruf without the model that Adorno provided him with.

Conclusion

In this article I have drawn on Habermas’s largely unknown—and almost completely untranslated or republished—early journalism to show that Habermas’s political interests both predate and drive many of his mature philosophical commitments. In contrast to his “external” realist critics, who see him as a mainstream liberal, as well as his “internal” opponents within the Frankfurt School, who see Habermas as a quietist, apolitical thinker, these early texts show that politics is at the heart of Habermas’s thought. While the mature Habermas develops a mediated conception of theory and practice that separates the role of the philosopher from that of the public intellectual, in his journalism Habermas freely blends the two.

In his evaluation of these texts, Müller-Doohm concludes, “In his early journalistic work, he was hesitant to draw political conclusions or to make political statements.”¹⁰⁵ However, my detailed engagement with these texts shows that this conclusion is incorrect. On the contrary, as I have stressed, Habermas’s newspaper articles on collective memory, trauma, work, technology, and consumption in the early to mid-1950s frequently contain strong political statements and conclusions. While my argument thus violates the approach to intellectual history developed by the Cambridge School, it does not “foreshorten the past” but instead enriches our understanding of it while increasing our understanding of the present.¹⁰⁶

In addition to demonstrating the important role that Habermas’s political commitments played in his decision to abandon a philosophical career that he felt would not allow him to bring together his theoretical interests with his desire to write “with a sense of the topicality of the urgent problems of the day,” these early texts also highlight why Habermas was drawn to the Frankfurt School. In particular, the tradition of critical theory gave Habermas the tools he needed to think philosophically about the public sphere and its role in modern democratic life, instead of just as a journalist writing for the public sphere. As he later pointed out, “Critical social theory offered me a perspective from which I could embed . . . the repeated failure of attempts to establish democracy in Germany, in the larger context of social modernization.”¹⁰⁷ While it is possible to argue that he is unsuccessful in this project, these early texts clearly show why Habermas should be seen as a rightful heir to the Frankfurt School tradition, contra both his “internal” critics and the argument presented by Yos.

To this end, I have also shown how the themes Habermas takes up in his journalism illuminate his connection to Adorno. This evidence thus helps counter the conclusions of some commentators, who have tried to use the “undiminished defiance” with which Habermas clings “to the liberal heritage of the age of Enlightenment” to argue that his work is “modeled on Horkheimer’s view of critical theory.”¹⁰⁸ This interpretation is mistaken, not only historically, as the director of the institute was opposed to Habermas from the start, but also intellectually. While Horkheimer was relatively apolitical in the postwar period and was uncomfortable with Habermas’s activist ambitions, both in his role as a philosopher and as a public intellectual, Adorno supported Habermas in both areas.¹⁰⁹

Finally, in addition to their intrinsic value for illuminating the early ideas of postwar Europe’s leading philosopher and public intellectual, these texts are also critical for understanding both the continuities and the discontinuities in Habermas’s work. While Habermas’s journalistic writings shed light on certain long-standing features of his thought, including his interest in the politics of memory, his fears of bureaucratic technocracy, and his desire to shield certain areas of life from what he ultimately comes to see as the “colonizing” tendencies of late capitalism, some discontinuities are visible as well.¹¹⁰ This applies particularly to Habermas’s strong interest in art and cultural criticism, which is almost completely absent from his mature work. Perhaps most important, however, these early publications—and Habermas’s decision to pursue a career as a freelance journalist in the first place—testify to his enduring interest in politics and in writing for the broader reading public beyond academe.

I would like to thank Amy Allen, Matthew Specter, Jon Catlin, David Ingram, Javier Burdman, Max Pensky, Alexander Livingston, Verena Ehrlenbusch-Anderson, Kenneth Baynes, and Hille Hacker for their comments on earlier versions of this argument. I could not have written this article without Roman Yos, who provided me with scans of a number of Habermas’s early journalistic articles as well as a number of methodological comments. Earlier versions of this argument were presented in 2022 at the Fourteenth Annual Critical Theory Conference in Rome at the John Felice Rome Center of Loyola University Chicago and online in the Genealogy in the Humanities group organized by Cornell University and Syracuse University. I am grateful to the participants for their helpful comments. The research for this article was conducted with the assistance of a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship in 2019–20.

Notes

References