Against criticism: Society and rationality

The starting points of this article are the ?victims? of the violence of social critique and their perceptions of wounds it inflicted. It is found that one could recognize and articulate three theoretical groups of enemy of social critique who, in the name of protecting the values they believe the critique challenges, get up against it: traditionalists, ?uncritically? or ?post-critically?, grooved in this or that unquestionable world; ?Politophiles?, advocating autonomy of the art of politics in front of the superior court of reason; researchers of the ?irrational? who, searching for the truth or accompishment, test the boundaries of rationality. It is concluded, however, that the three strategies of refuting social criticism have no equal theoretical range: only the last formation remains loyal to the gesture of critique even when it turns against the reason as a ground of its own validity and, in this way, rehabilitate both reason and critique. Unlike the other two types of denial of critique that reject it from the standpoint of social undesirability, early German romanticists and heirs of their ?aesthetic? orientation do not abandon rationality, but reconfigurate it. They criticize the rationality with rational means in a clear awareness of its limits: theoretically and socially critical reason consequently turns itself against its own foundations.