through the critical enterprise it seemed set to perform for Western social theory. The
point, Thompson argued, is that while post-Wittgensteinian scholarship, in general, has
stressed the "meaningful and social character of human action" it has often effectively
71 Aronowitz, Science as Power: Discourse and Ideology in Modem Society (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), pp.242-243.
"disregarded considerations such as power and repression, history and social change" and has failed to emphasise strongly enough the connection between the "problem of understanding" and "considerations of explanation and critique". The problem, in short, is that "language" based analysis of the Analytical Philosophy variety does not always ground its inquiry strongly or unequivocally enough in the everyday practices of political society.73 As another com m entator has suggested, in much Analytical Philosophy, "theory and criticism, explanation and enlightenment disappear together, and give way to a conservative descriptivism ".74 On the question, therefore, of why Habermas and Foucault are at the forefront of Critical Social Theory in the 1980s and 1990s, and not Analytical Philosophers, the answer perhaps lies the (modemist) conservatism of a "post positivist" claimant which does not emphatically enough connect knowledge to power.
But there is another, more precise, reason for the suspicion about Analytical Philosophy in Critical Social Theory circles. It has to do with its continuing and paradoxical commitments to modernist foundationalism. These com m itm ents were evident in a recent article written by Michael Dummett, which complained about the continuing "scandal" of a modem philosophy "that through most of its history [has] failed to be system atic".75 This "scandal", opined Dum m ett, em anated from a basic misunderstanding of the "real" nature of philosophy, and the "repeated illusions" associated with the post-Kantian attempt to find a foundation for human knowledge. Thus:
Husserl believed passionately that he at last held the key that would unlock every philosophical door; the disciples of Kant ascribed to him the achievem ent of devising a correct philosophical methodology; Spinoza believed that he was doing for philosophy what Euclid had done for
73Thompson, Critical Hermeneutics, pp.4-8.
74Hans Albert, cited in Stockman, Antipositivist Theories of the Sciences, p. 137.
75Dummett, "Can Analytical Philosophy be Systematic, and Ought it to be?", in After Philosophy eds. Baynes, Bohman and McCarthy, p.212. The significance of the article is enhanced by Richard Bernstein's view that Dummett is regarded by some as the leading British philosopher o f the contemporary period, Bevond Objectivism and Relativism, p.5, and by Dummett's own view of the closeness o f British and (North) American thinking on the issues he raised, "Can Analytical Philosophy be Systematic?", pp.193- 194.
geometry; and before him, Descartes supposed that he had uncovered the one and only proper philosophical m eth o d76
So far so good, but in response to these "illusory" enterprises Dummett then spelt out what philosophy really is, and what its systematic method ought to be. This he did in relation to one unequivocal proposition and "three tenets...common to the entire analytical s c h o o l" .11 The proposition was that "Only with Frege was the proper object of philosophy finally established"; the first of the tenets was that "the goal of philosophy is the analysis of the structure of thought"; the second, that the study of thought must be "sharply distinguished from the study of the psychological process of thinking"; and the third, that "the only proper method for analysing thought consists in the analysis of language".78
This was the kind of reasoning that led to Richard Rorty's criticism of Analytical Philosophy in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. In this work Rorty repudiated the proposition that philosophy can only be "real" when it is "logical", or more precisely,when it is reduced to the rigours of the formal mathematised logic associated with Frege. This, for Rorty, was a perfect example of the continuing commitment within Analytical Philosophy to the modemist tradition of Descartes, Locke and Kant, that it ostensibly sought to supersede.79 It was, in Rorty's view, consistent with the:
kind of philosophy which stems from Russell and Frege...[and] classical Husserlian phenomenology [which is] simply one more attempt to put philosophy in the position which Kant wished it to have - that o f judging other areas o f culture on the basis o f its special know ledge o f the "foundations" o f these areas.80
76Ibid, p.215.
77Ibid, emphasis added. 78Ibid.
79See Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), pp.8-9. 80Ibid, p.8.
Consequently, he concluded, Analytical Philosophy, for all its insights, had betrayed any critical potential that scholars such as Quine and Wittgenstein had given it and had become just:
one more variant o f Kantian philosophy, a variant marked principally by thinking of representation as linguistic rather than mental, and of philosophy of language rather than "transcendental critique" or psychology, as the discipline which exhibits the "foundation of knowledge.81
From this perspective, Analytical Philosophy, whose claim to "post-positivism" and "post-foundationalism" is centred on its notion of reality as socio-linguistically produced, is perceived instead as paradoxically committed to the modernist search for a "permanent, neutral framework for inquiry.82 It stands, in this regard, not as a genuine alternative to ahistorical foundationalism, but as an "attempt to escape from history - an attempt to find nonhistorical conditions of any possible historical [and philosophical] development".83
Rorty’s perspective will receive further attention in Chapter Four. It is, however, the final theme he raises here that is of more immediate significance for the present discussion, because the question of history as the locus of philosophical discourse is a theme integral to hermeneutic scholarship and hermeneutic insight has, to one degree or another, informed all of the "post-positivist" perspectives discussed thus far. Something, consequently, needs to be said at this point about hermeneutics, as a "post-positivist" perspective. In the chapter to follow some o f the more critical m anifestations of hermeneutic thought will be discussed (e.g. of Gadamer) and its influences on Critical Theory and post-modernism emphasised. For now my major aim is to connect the broad hermeneutic tradition to its more specific influence on orthodox Anglo-American social theory, evaluate its "post-positivist/post-foundationalist" status and then, via an
81 Ibid. 82 Ibid. 8 3 Ibid, p.9.
introductory discussion of Max Weber's hermeneutic perspective, connect it to the "great texts/great men" Tradition of International Relations.
Bevond Modernism and Positivism? (v):
Hermeneutics - From Von Humboldt to Dilthev and Weber
The hermeneutic approach has a long and distinguished pedigree in Western philosophy. It was integral to both Greek and Roman attempts to "interpret" reality in the ancient world. In the post-Reformation period, in Europe, it was articulated most commonly in philological texts, in jurisprudence, and increasingly, as pan of a German based Protestant reformism, which maintained that the new world of scientific rationality could be understood most profoundly by reference to historical and cultural tradition (e.g. as interpreted through the Christian scriptures) .84 In the full flush of the Enlightenment, however, the gap between the increasingly influential scientific approach and the hermeneutic philosophy of textual interpretation began to widen as logical calculation and empirical analysis gained ascendancy over cultural tradition and scriptural exegesis.
The E nlightenm ent, nevertheless, was the catalyst for a new form of "philosophical hermeneutics" which understood itself as a humanist alternative to "mechanical" modernism. In this period hermeneutic scholars, such as W olff and Chladenius, began to shift their attention away from a primary concern with philology and jurisprudence and toward the construction of a philosophy which rested, not on the certainties of natural science, but on "certain generally applicable rules and
^ S e e the discussion of the development o f hermeneutic theory and practice in Karl Mueller-Vollmer, The Hermeneutics Reader Texts of the German Tradition From The Enlightenment to the Present (New York: Continuum, 1985). Other useful overview works include William Outhwaite, Understanding Social Life (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1975); Fred Dallymar and Thomas McCarthy eds., Understanding Social Inquiry (South Bend, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977); Hekman, Hermeneutics and the Sociology of Knowledge: Hekman, Weber, the Ideal Type and Contemporary Social Theory (South Bend, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983); Giddens, Profiles and Critiques in Social Theory; and David Boucher, Texts in Context (Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1985).