The Nature of Political Theory

282 The Nature of Political Theory

interests (see Habermas 1971: 308). The sciences are thus premised on human
cognitive interests, but the interests differ and are equally valid. The empirical–
analytic category embodies essentially the claims of positivist reason, controlled
observation, predictive knowledge, and technical manipulation. The historical–
hermeneutic understanding embodies the claims of literature, aesthetics, history,
and textual studies. This is the area where Habermas admires Gadamer’s theoretical
contribution. The critically orientated social sciences are concerned with cognitive
emancipatory interests. Habermas identifies this sphere with the social sciences of eco-
nomics, political science and sociology.^9 This is also the area, which resonates with
Habermas’s concern with ‘ideological criticism’. He considers both the empirical–
analytic and historical–hermeneutic dimensions as incapable of dealing with issues
of power, ideology, distortion of ideas, and thus genuine emancipatory concerns.
All the above knowledge dimensions are required for human existence. They are all
implicit, as Habermas would put it, in the human lifeworld. In this sense, Habermas’s
reading of positivism is not to undermine it, or to rest its case on negative dialectics,
but rather to suggest that notions of reason and science are more complex and varie-
gated, and that we should rather try to, first,showthis variegation within the various
knowledge-constitutive interests. Science—regardless of how it perceives itself—isa
social interest and it cannot be grasped outside of this sociality. Second, it is import-
ant to situate the more positivistic mentality within a broader cognitive framework.
In this sense, much of what has gone on under the rubric of positivism can now be
situated under the empirical–analytic (or analytic–instrumental) category. It follows
that although positivist reason is now intellectually situated, as a valuable human
cognitive interest, it is not a perspective that should be allowed to colonize the whole
human lifeworld. Symbolic interaction and communication, for example, are not
about technical control. Communicative interaction, in the practical sphere, should
not therefore be reduced to the analytic–empirical category. To rationalize and control
is neither to communicate effectively nor emancipate humans. Despite dealing with
‘transitory things and opinions’, the historical–hermeneutic category still embodies
‘scientistic’ concerns. However, although embodying a ‘scientistic consciousness’, the
hermeneutic category isnotconcerned with general laws. Yet as Habermas com-
ments, the cultural sciences still describe ‘a structured reality within the horizon of a
theoretical attitude’ (see Habermas 1971: 303).

The Critique of Foundationalism and the Subject

For Habermas the problem of the ‘subject’ is something that arises in modernity. In
point, the human subject is thekeyfact of modernity. The idea of the subject determ-
ines the character of modern culture (Habermas 1998: 18). He sees the philosophy of
the subject developing in a range of philosophers from Descartes through to Kant and
Hegel. In the earlier tradition, it still had an emancipatory dimension. For Haber-
mas, Kant’s transcendental arguments on the crucial role of the subject in knowledge,
eventuates in Hegel’s formal method for directing consciousness dialectically back