Student protest compensated for failing democratic control mechanisms.

Evidence

Habermas, more cautiously, saw such solidarity as restoring an element of the political public sphere: The student protests, I contend, have a compensatory function, since the control mechanisms that are built into democracy are either not working at all here, or not working properly.' As an example, he cited Vietnam: I well remember the fact that it was the campaign by students, in this case those in Berlin, against false definitions of a war that is a struggle for social liberation, that first made a breach in the official world-picture of our nation and let information from the other side gradually trickle in.’ He reinforced the demand for official encouragement of the critical discussion of political problems within the universities by referring to his conviction that `the self-reflection of science, which is the means of scientific progress, is allied to the rational discussion of practical questions and political decisions by the fact that they share a common form of criticism.’ — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2614

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Habermas’s public sphere theory and the compensatory function thesis; links to the reader’s Critical Theory strand on communicative action and deliberative democracy. — connects to: Extra-parliamentary civil disobedience is justified when bourgeois democracy blocks qualitative change — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2672; Chile’s 2011 student protests won concessions but not structural change; The 2010 student protests expressed discontent with capitalist realism itself — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1527

Broader Connections

• Extra-parliamentary civil disobedience is justified when bourgeois democracy blocks qualitative change #corroborates (0.85) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2672