The Nature of Political Theory

280 The Nature of Political Theory

Enlightenment stance, his conception of both philosophy and political theory is
something which is, at the same time, born out of certain fundamental doubts over
modernity, a critique of reason, serious misgivings over the emphasis on the human
subject and ‘philosophy of consciousness’, and major doubts over the inevitability of
human progress solely through scientific reason.
Another aspect of Habermas’ theory, which accounts partly for his idiosyncratic
approach, is his theoretical need to reconstruct thought. In Hegelian terms, he takes
up the passion of the logic of a long period of occidental thinking. In one sense, he
sees his task as reconstructing the deep underlying patterns of reason present in the
history of occidental philosophical thought. This gives his theory a depth and thor-
oughness, however, it also evinces, at times, a programmatic technical abstractness
and somewhat artificial quality, which is deeply off-putting. One aspect of this recon-
structive process is his attempt to incorporate apparently widely different theoretical
perspectives and to show their inner communicative logic, and, where necessary, to
show where they have gone wrong. This requires him to make sense of both recent
postmodernism and classical metaphysics. His most systematic study of this former
debate is contained in hisPhilosophical Discourses of Modernity.Hiswork,incon-
sequence, is undoubtedly one of the most bold and innovative philosophical projects
at the end of the twentieth century.
His overall aim—which will be returned to—is to provide a comprehensive and
thorough reconstruction of the occidental tradition, showing the profound, diverse,
and expansive roles of human reason. Initially, his idea was to argue that one particular
conception of reason should not dominate. By the 1980s and 1990s, his arguments on
reason became more complex and nuanced, and a singular notion of intersubjective
communicative reason began to figure prominently in the work. In addition, initially,
he wanted to show the relation of this expansive conception of reason to both human
emancipation and to the construction of a rational society. The fundamental intuition
underpinning the latter idea (which is a fairly old political theme) is the ideal of
particular form of community whose legal and moral norms are both freely and
equally accepted and regarded as reasonable by those subject to them. The idea of
rational informed public discussion can therefore be taken as a crucial theme running
through Habermas’ work.

Positivism and Knowledge Spheres

For Habermas, the gist of the problem of positivism and instrumental reason (which
he refers to as the ‘empirical-analytic’ conception) is that this particular conception
had begun to dominate all spheres of human cognition and knowledge, particularly
in the social sciences. Positivistic reason also viewed itself as free from dogmatic
associations and personal interests. If seen as the sole dimension of knowledge and
reason, then, for Habermas, such ‘objectifying descriptions of society migrate into
the lifeworld, [then] we become alienated from ourselves as communicatively acting
subjects’ (see Habermas in Schmidt (ed.) 1996: 419). Empirical, science-based, reason