Conclusion

To try to summarize this chapter: we have discussed the notion of the rational as a critical standard, as a form of permanent criticism, of permanent dialogue, and as a way to developing a consensus on truth and morality.

For Habermas, the negative is not so important, and he has been accused of wanting the world to be like a seminar. One response is that a seminar is preferable to a concentration camp, but in his social theory and in his interpretation of psychoanalysis Habermas can be criticized for an over-rational view of humans and society. He loses the insight present in the work of the earlier Frankfurt thinkers that irrationality - the mythical - can also be a form of liberation, and underestimates Freud's insistence on the power of the irrational.

Overall in these three chapters we have moved from a focus on the rational as a way of understanding individual actions in the world to a way of understanding and analysing different cultures, and then on to a way of making critical judgements about the nature of the social and comparing ethical systems in the world. People working at one end of this movement - say, the cognitive psychologist, the social psychologist, the Weberian sociologist or the marginalist economist - would be likely to be bemused by Adorno or Habermas, yet the philosophical assumptions of the practising social scientist lead back to the wider issues of hermeneutics and critical theory.

We find in Habermas's work the integration of a hermeneutic and a structuralist approach, although in the end he seems to come down on the former side of the divide.

In the following chapter we will be looking at an approach which tries to combine both. But what we would want to keep from Habermas is the importance of argument, even if agreement always remains on the horizon. In the context of this book, the important arguments are between and within the different conceptions of science and their philosophical foundations.