9 Dialogic Foundations
The upshot of Chapter Eight is that political theory, in its postmodern mode, takes
the conventionalist form of argument to a negative and self-destructive denouement.
The argument is that conventionalism, if pursued, is unremittingly reductionist.
The committed postmodern or poststructural critic aims to destabilize foundational
commitments in all the hidden corners of political theory. Morality and politics are
regarded as wholly contingent human conventions or artefacts, pure and simple, with
nothing to mediate between them. One immediate upshot of this position is that
postmodernism appears to lack any normative resources. However, as suggested, this
‘destabilizing’ critique has been pursued with degrees of rigour. The underpinning for
this judgement lies in a point that there are variousformsof postmodern argument.
My own view is to distinguish between two broad, if overlapping, postmodern
responses. The milder form, in writers such as Rorty or Connolly, utilizes convention-
alist argumentation up to a point, then stops and appeals (often with sentiment rather
than reason) to an existing (multi)culture or ethos. The argument does not claim any
ontological status for the ethos or culture, but simply views it as afait accompli.
The stronger perspectivism of Nietzsche, the younger Foucault and Derrida, and the
differend of the older Lyotard, tends to destabilize even this minimalfait accompli.
Thus, in this latter case, nothing holds. We float without purpose in a sea of conven-
tional signs. The upshot of this for political theory is to undermine all foundations and
emphasize its apparent pointlessness. However, as argued, not all postmodernists stay
with this radical critique. Even the more hard-bitten postmoderns, such as Derrida,
have tried to find a way out of this conundrum. Thus, the older Derrida’s tentative
association of ‘justice’ with ‘deconstruction’ (which has some of the hallmarks of
Mikhail Bakunin’s famous anarchist slogan—the destructive urge is a creative urge)
is the final, somewhat poignant if ironic, epitaph to this faltering perspective.
There is, though, an important alternative to this postmodern movement, which
appeared in the mid-twentieth century and developed in parallel with it to the end of
the century, that is, late forms of critical theory and hermeneutics. Both encompass a
wide range of thinkers, however, for the sake of brevity, the focus of this and Chapter
Ten will be on the work of Jürgen Habermas and Hans-Georg Gadamer. The choice of
these two thinkers is not fortuitous. They represent, in many ways, the apogee of these
philosophical movements in the twentieth century. In my own rendering, the central
theme for these thinkers is a postconventional concept of dialogue. In one reading, this
theme could be seen as a new form of foundation. However, it is important to clarify
this point immediately. The foundationalism articulated by Habermas and Gadamer