Kuhn vs Popper - About James H. Collier

ment of their ideals. By failing to associate theirultimate ends with any secular means – be it achurch, a political party, or the university – Adornoand Popper effectively crossed the imaginary linefrom criticism to nihilism.In the second round of the debate, Popper andAdorno were replaced by members of the youngergeneration – Hans Albert and Jürgen Habermas. Inthis context, Adorno’s friendly criticism of Popperwas magnified into a major ideological dispute.Habermas especially drove home the idea thatPopper’s ‘straight-talking’ approach was politicallyand intellectually naïve, especially during theincreasing social unrest of the late 1960s. It wasafter only this explicit assertion of the superiority ofthe Frankfurt School’s ‘dialectical’ critique thatPopper’s defenders began to demonise Adorno’sfollowers as irrationalists and totalitarians. Soonthereafter came the dissolution of the rationalistleft, a contemporary version of the Fall in whoseaftermath progressive thinkers labour today.Intellectual life has paid a heavy toll from thefailure of the two great modern exponents of therationalist left to offer a new legitimation for theuniversity when it was needed in the 1960s.Consequently, we live in a polarised intellectualuniverse defined by, on the one hand, Habermas(the only person whose reputation truly benefited167