A well-known newspaper caricature, printed some twenty years ago, pictures the Frankfurt School as a closely knit group with Horkheimer as a large father figure watching over the other members of the school, among them Theodor W. Adorno andJiirgen Habermas. This view of the relationship between the members of the Frankfurt School was quite common in Germany at that time: Habermas was seen not only as a member uf the School but more specifically-as a disciple of the older generation, someone who had started out from the position of Critical Theory, as it was developed in the 1940s and 1950s by Horkheimer, Marcuse and Adorno. Although this interpretation cannot account for all of Habermas' early work, notably not for his Strukturwandel der Offentlichkeit (1962) (Structural Change of the Public Sphere), it was plausible enough to find wide acceptance. Yet it was no accident that Habermas' first major study, which traces the evolution of the public sphere from the 18th to the 20th century and stresses the need for an enlightened and rational reconsideration of the public sphere under advanced capitalism, never found Adorno's and Horkheimer's complete acceptance. Their own critique of the process of enlightenment differed so markedly from the position which Habermas outlined that there could be no full consensus. In a certain way, I would argue, the later differences, especially those between Adorno and Habermas, were. already foreshadowed in Strukturwandel, although Habermas, when describing the decline of the liberal public sphere under organized capitalism, made use of the critique of mass culture formulated by the older generation and certainly did not indicate that he was in disagreement with the analysis offered in Dialectic ofEnlightenment. On the whole, however, conventional wisdom, treating Habermas as ajunior member of the Frankfurt School, was justified for the 1960s when Habermas, for instance, defended the position of the Frankfurt Institute in the Positivism Dispute against Karl Popper and his allies of the Cologne School. While Adorno and Popper in their addresses to the German Soziologentag of 1961 decided to suppress rather than highlight their theoretical and methodological differences, the younger generation, represented by Habermas and Hans Albert,