The Nature of Political Theory

292 The Nature of Political Theory

something, for Habermas, that clearly has to be andcan beacquired. It can there-
fore be part of a process of cognitive and moral learning. To develop morally, for
Habermas, is to learn empirically how to competently interact. This has enormous
moral implications for the whole process of education and national curricula.^23 The
latter empirical, psychological, and evolutionary aspect of Habermas’ work is prob-
ably the most thin and philosophically suspect. Chapter Ten will critically review
Habermas’ project in the context of Gadamer’s hermeneutics.

Notes

1. The other major hermeneutic philosopher is Paul Ricoeur, however the constraints of space
   does not allow a consideration of his work.


2. Not though in terms of any scale of forms. The idea of different knowledge spheres can
   also be found in the work of F. H. Bradley, Michael Oakeshott, Benedetto Croce, and
   R. G. Collingwood.


3. The diverse links between neo-Marxism, Hegelian-Marxism, and forms of Kantianism
   were particularly strong and fruitful in the twentieth century.


4. For Horkheimer ‘By criticism, we mean that intellectual, and eventually practical effort
   which is not satisfied to accept the prevailing ideas, actions, and social conditions unthink-
   ingly and from mere habit; effort which aims to coordinate the individual sides of social life
   with each other and with the general ideas and aims of the epoch’, Horkheimer (1972: 270).


5. Or, in Marcuse’s case, famously, student revolt.


6. Habermas’s own ‘intersubjective paradigm’, which moves around this dilemma, will be
   explored later in the chapter.


7. Indeed, in one of his 1970s works, Habermas explicitly argues for a ‘participatory remodel-
   ling of administrative structures’ on grounds very similar to the later ideal speech situation
   of communicative action, Habermas (1975: 58).


8. As McCarthy comments, ‘For this reason it is of decisive importance for a critical theory
   of society that the different dimensions of social practice be made explicit; only then can
   we comprehend their inter-dependence’, McCarthy (1978: 36).


9. For Habermas this latter category has the same goal ‘as do the empirical–analytic sciences,
   of producing nomological knowledge’, Habermas (1971: 310). However, they also advance
   in a different domain to the empirical–analytic in considering ideological understanding.


10. Nietzsche is in many ways the main agenda permeating the whole of Habermas’s seminal
    workThe Philosophical Discourse of Modernity.


11. ‘In the end, this gives rise to a dilemma: Hegel has ultimately to deny to the self-
    understanding of modernity the possibility of a critique of modernity. The critique of
    a subjectivity puffed up into an absolute power ironically turns into a reproach of the
    philosopher against the limitations of subjects who have not yet understood either him or
    the course of history’, Habermas (1998: 22).


12. Equally, the paradigm of the philosophy of the subject—an isolated atomized being—
    underpinned this domination.


13. In terms of form of life, practices, linguistically mediated interaction, language games,
    conventions, and tradition.