Habermas called Dutschke’s voluntarism left-wing fascism, igniting a lasting rift

Evidence

In a tense political situation, in which the first death had just occurred, Habermas now saw there was a serious danger that the person who was precisely the most influential and rhetorically gifted of the student leaders might lose his footing on the narrow tightrope of rational conflict resolution. Habermas had already gone to his car to leave the meeting, but he turned back to repeat in harsher terms the warning against a masochistic challenge to institutionalized power that he had already given twice in a more restrained manner. He described the voluntaristic ideology Dutschke had presented as `left-wing fascism’. He introduced this interpretation in the form of a question thrown out to those presentDutschke had already leftand it was not discussed further, since the conference was already breaking up. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 653

Categorization

• QUESTION: How much did Habermas’s off-the-cuff, undiscussed accusation actually cost him the SDS leadership’s trust, versus indexing a preexisting split?