Postscript
Central to the tradition of critical theory has been a concept of universally valid rational principles for making and justifying knowledge-claims as well as for organizing human social life.
Jurgen Habermas is acknowledged as the most significant thinker in this tradition today. For a more extended discussion of his ideas than was possible in our book, see, for example, White (1988).Recent intellectual fashion has turned against the prospect of universally valid rational principles that might provide a basis for criticism and even transformation of social life. However, one major thinker who has risen to the challenge of re-working the heritage of critical theory as a resource for emancipatory knowledge and practice in the twenty-first century is Axel Honneth. His vision is one of emancipation as cooperative self-realization through mutual recognition. This possibility for human society, and the way the estrangements, instrumental rationality and relations of domination of capitalist society obstruct its realization, still provides an appropriate framework for theoretical and empirical work in sociology and psychoanalysis (see especially Honneth 1996, 2009).
The work of Honneth, Habermas and others influenced by critical theory is included and commented upon in a number of collections, including White (1995); Freundlieb, Hudson and Rundell (2004) and Rundell et al. (2005).
In liberal democracies political discourse has become more polarized and verbally violent, with frequent accusations of ‘fake news, loss of trust in previously authoritative sources of information, and the proliferation of political-epistemic ‘bubbles’, where media-defined groups hear only opinion and ‘information’ that confirms their preexisting prejudices. This near-implosion of the public sphere produces a situation some may see as confirming the normative and cognitive relativism of much post-modernist theory, and, indeed, the two may be closely linked to one another. However, for those of us who retain some aspiration to a public sphere in which rival points of view and different accounts of reality can engage with one another respectfully, with outcomes in the field of policy which reflect egalitarian and informed participation, the Habermasian legacy on the public sphere and the ‘ideal speech situation’ acquire a new relevance.
Questions of truth (and lies!) now central to political discourse pose a challenge to the traditions in philosophy of social science, and the challenge has been taken up in the new field of ‘political epistemology’ (Edenberg and Hannon 2021). Stones (2015) takes up these themes, arguing for a model of current affairs reporting rooted in social theory. Of course, and epistemic or normative approach to the problems of the public sphere would need also to address the grotesque inequalities in media ownership and editorial control, as well as access.In a challenging edited collection (Cruickshank and Sassower 2017) a critical rereading of Popper’s approach to philosophy of science and his advocacy or ‘piecemeal social engineering’ is deployed in favour of a mode of ‘horizontal’ dialogue through which people differently situated can come to identify common problems and eventually to trace them to fundamental features of society (capitalism and the state). This approach eschews both the uncritical appeal to authoritative sources of knowledge, and the (premature?) imposition of definitions and solutions to problems. These ideas were discussed in the journal Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective (see, e.g. Benton 2017; Cruickshank 2017).