The Nature of Political Theory

14 The Nature of Political Theory

is an odd and at times deeply-self-contradictory logic within this radical postmodern
setting, which will be explored. The committed postmodern or poststructural critic
aims to search out foundationalism in all the remote and hidden corners of political
theory. However, their own use of critical theorizing becomes continually suspect
through their own arguments.
Part Five again has two chapters. Overall, this Part deals with an alternative to the
postmodern movement, which appeared in the mid-twentieth century and developed
in parallel with it to the end of the century. The alternative is focused on later forms
of critical theory and hermeneutics, dating originally from the 1960s and 1970s. Both
see themselves as post-conventional and post-foundational. Both encompass a wide
range of thinkers—however, for the sake of brevity, the focus of the chapters is on
the work of Jürgen Habermas and Hans-Georg Gadamer, and their mutually crit-
ical relationship. The linking element underpinning these discussions is the focus on
language and dialogue as the central facets of political theory. Both thinkers, in my
view, successfully utilize the notions of language and dialogue to develop a viable
perspective on political theory that does not succumb to postmodern or convention-
alist claims and yet still employs foundationalism as an immanent format. The first
chapter, entitled ‘Dialogic Foundations’, deals briefly with the intellectual context of
both Habermas and Gadamer, and then examines Habermas’s theory in detail. The
second chapter, entitled ‘Circular Foundations’, deals with Gadamer’s hermeneut-
ical contribution to political theory and the critical debate between Gadamer and
Habermas. It also indicates that Gadamer’s approach offers some profound insights
into how we might conceive of political theory in the future. The conclusion to the
book gives a brief restatement of the arguments and suggests a shift in the manner
in which we think about and practise political theory towards a more hermeneutic
perspective.

Notes

1. There may be very deep reasons for this in terms of the way philosophy has been conceived
   in the Western tradition (see Hadot 1995). Philosophy, for Hadot, was conceived originally
   in Greek and Roman periods as a ‘spiritual exercise’ initiating the person into a higher
   reality.


2. For Peirce, the reason for the negative view of metaphysics is that it has been historically
   too dominated by theologians, who are unfit for the more rigorous task of metaphysics. He
   remarks that you might as well get ‘Wall Street Brokers to write metaphysics’ (Peirce 1940:
   311, 314).


3. As Chantal Mouffe notes, the so-called revival of political theory in Rawls et al. ‘is in fact
   a mere extension of moral philosophy; it is moral reasoning applied to the treatment of
   political institutions. This is manifest in the absence in current liberal theorizing of a proper
   distinction between moral discourse and political discourse’ (Mouffe 1993: 147).


4. As Hans Georg Gadamer comments, ‘We are [now] said to “construct” a theory. This
   already implies that one theory succeeds another, and each commands, from the outset,
   only conditional validity, namely insofar as further experience does not make us change