Habermas came to accept limited rule-breaking as legitimate for politicizing the public sphere

Evidence

After a year of experience with a nationwide protest movement, and a semester as a visiting professor in the USA during the winter of 1967-8, Habermas confirmed that the student opposition had opened up a serious new perspective on how to achieve radical change in deep-seated social structures. As in Hanover, he observed that the immediate goal of the protest movement was the politicization of the public sphere: in returning to public discussion questions that might have immense practical consequences, and in reversing the process of depoliticization that had made technocratic pretensions possible. What was new was that Habermas now recognized that provocationist techniques of limited rule-breaking were a legitimate and necessary means of forcing through discussion in areas where it was being refused. New, above all, was that he now had an idea of how to explain the students’ and school pupils’ protest movement, and that he no longer immediately classifiedand rejectedneo-anarchist views and direct action as a form of fascism. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2649

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines what ‘politicization of the public sphere’ meant practically for the protest movement: returning consequential questions to public discussion and reversing technocratic depoliticization.
• XREF: Connects to Habermas’s core concept of the public sphere, central to the Frankfurt School’s later reception in communication theory. — connects to: Habermas conceived revolution as gradual repoliticization of a dried-up public sphere — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2656; Habermas abandoned labeling direct action as a form of fascism — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2649; Habermas condemned student protest tactics as ritualized blackmail and delusional — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2653