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SYMPOSIUM ON CRITICAL THEORY BY DAVID HOY AND THOMAS McCARTHY
Author(s) -
Rorty Richard
Publication year - 1996
Publication title -
constellations
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1467-8675
pISSN - 1351-0487
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-8675.1996.tb00044.x
Subject(s) - ambiguity , citation , rationality , epistemology , sociology , philosophy , library science , computer science , linguistics
It is tempting to describe Critical Theory as an American version of the Habermas-vs.-Foucault debate, a debate which has agitated Europe in the ten years since the publication of Habermas’s The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. It is also tempting to read it as a contribution to the debate over postmodernism which is presently agitating the American academy. But neither description is quite right. Although McCarthy is a reasonably orthodox Habermasian, Hoy’s allegiance is more to Gadamer than to Foucault. Nobody has, as far as I know, described Gadamer as a post-modern. Further, Hoy has no wish to defend Foucault against the most important criticism which Habermas made of him: namely that nobody would guess from Foucault’s books that human freedom, and the chances of human happiness, increased considerably as a result of the Enlightenment. Hoy’s defense of Foucault against Habermas is largely a defense of Foucault’s refusal to offer a general theory of rationality, something Gadamer too refuses to do. As Hoy says, “The question . . . is whether his [Foucault’s] substantive genealogical histories need to be supplemented by an abstract, universal and procedural conception of reason that is validated solely by philosophical arguments (for instance, transcendental ones) instead of by historiographical and sociological data” (148). In his rejoinder to Hoy, Thomas McCarthy agrees that we need Foucauldian “critical histories of contingent regimes of rationality.” But he disagrees with Hoy on the question of “whether there is anything universal at all to say about reason, truth, objectivity, and the like, or rather anything that would not be too ‘thin’ to be of any use” (223). McCarthy thus lays out what I take to be the central issue of the book: namely, whether these traditional topics of philosophical debate are relevant to socio-political deliberation. I doubt that they are. So I am on Hoy’s side of the argument. I agree with him when he says that McCarthy’s ideal of a “validity that could be rationally acknowledged by all competent judges under ideal epistemic conditions” (268) is too thin to help us change our minds about anything,