The Systematic Question: What Remains After 1968?
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
From Balance Sheet to Task
The threefold reaction to 1968 - conservative, theoretical, terroristic - and the one-sidedness of all three readings of Hegel (Chapter 17.4) left an open question: who develops the correct reading? Who systematically continues to think Hegel as a “thinker of mediated transformation”?
The Frankfurt School could not do it. Adorno’s negative dialectics offered no perspective for action; Horkheimer’s cultural pessimism even less so. Marcuse’s “Great Refusal” had inspired the students, but found no institutional form. The old Critical Theory was exhausted.
The Basic Problem: Action and System
The unresolved problem running through all reactions to 1968 was the relationship between action and system. The spontaneists emphasized action - but ignored systemic constraints. The conservatives emphasized the system - but ignored the possibility of critical practice. The terrorists wanted to destroy the system through action - and failed catastrophically.
The Habermas-Luhmann debate of 1971 (-> Chapters 4.4, 7.4) had put this problem into a concept: action theory or systems theory? Communicative understanding or function? But the debate ended without resolution - both sides were right, both were one-sided.
Two Systematic Alternatives
In the 1970s two attempts arose to solve this basic problem:
The first alternative came from an outsider: Johannes Heinrichs, a Jesuit and philosopher, who in 1976 presented a systematic solution with Reflexion als soziales System (Reflection as a Social System). His reflection-systems theory mediated action and system through the logic of reflection: systems are institutionalized reflection, actions are enactments of reflection - each side implies the other. This was precisely the “mediated transformation” that Hegel had conceived, but that none of the reactions to 1968 had managed to think through.
The second alternative came from the center of academic philosophy: Jürgen Habermas, who in 1981 presented his main work, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (The Theory of Communicative Action). His attempt to distinguish system and lifeworld was a different approach to a solution - but, as we shall see, a dichotomous one that shifted the problem rather than solving it.
The irony of history: Heinrichs’ more systematic solution went unreceived, while Habermas’ less systematic solution became the reigning doctrine. The following two chapters examine both alternatives - and ask why German philosophy ignored the better solution.
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The following Chapters 17a and 17b treat these two systematic alternatives: first Heinrichs’ reflection-systems theory (1976), then Habermas’ theory of communicative action (1981). They belong together chronologically and substantively: both react to the same problems, both seek systematic solutions - but with different success and different influence.