WP 1: Zwischen Integration und Unterbrechung Ein Nachruf als Theorieentwurf

This working paper examines the deaths of Jürgen Habermas and Rolf Hepp as marking the loss of two distinct approaches within social scientific thought. Habermas is associated with an integrative paradigm focused on understanding, rationality, and discursive connectivity, whereas Hepp is identified with a disruptive mode of thought that resists integration and exposes fissures within symbolic orders.
Expanding on the distinction between integration, complicity, and disruption, this paper contends that criticism emerges not primarily from contradictions within existing orders, but from the disruption of implicit forms of participation that stabilize socially accepted norms. Contradiction frequently manifests as an integrated form of criticism, while interruption exposes the contingency and constructed character of social order. By drawing on key examples from the history of critical theory (including Foucault/Baudrillard, Sartre/Derrida, Adorno/Krahl), this tension is reconstructed as a structural element of social scientific knowledge. The analysis posits that integration and interruption should be regarded not as opposites, but as a necessary dual movement within critical theory. In the absence of integration, knowledge risks fragmentation; without interruption, it risks becoming ideology. Rather than serving as a final eulogy, this text offers a programmatic call for a social science attuned to power relations and capable of provoking disruption.