Critical Theory has a narrow and a broad meaning in philosophy and inthe history of the social sciences. “Critical Theory” inthe narrow sense designates several generations of German philosophersand social theorists in the Western European Marxist tradition knownas the Frankfurt School. According to these theorists, a“critical” theory may be distinguished from a“traditional” theory according to a specific practicalpurpose: a theory is critical to the extent that it seeks human“emancipation from slavery”, acts as a “liberating… influence”, and works “to create a world whichsatisfies the needs and powers of” human beings (Horkheimer1972b [1992, 246]). Because such theories aim to explain andtransformall the circumstances that enslave human beings,many “critical theories” in the broader sense have beendeveloped. They have emerged in connection with the many socialmovements that identify varied dimensions of the domination of humanbeings in modern societies. In both the broad and the narrow senses,however, a critical theory provides the descriptive and normativebases for social inquiry aimed at decreasing domination and increasingfreedom in all their forms.

Critical Theory in the narrow sense has had many different aspects andquite distinct historical phases that cross several generations, fromthe effective start of the Institute for Social Research in the years1929–1930, which saw the arrival of the Frankfurt Schoolphilosophers and an inaugural lecture by Horkheimer, to thepresent. Its distinctiveness as a philosophical approach that extendsto ethics, political philosophy, and the philosophy of history is mostapparent when considered in light of the history of the philosophy ofthe social sciences. Critical Theorists have long sought todistinguish their aims, methods, theories, and forms of explanationfrom standard understandings in both the natural and the socialsciences. Instead, they have claimed that social inquiry ought tocombine rather than separate the poles of philosophy and the socialsciences: explanation and understanding, structure and agency,regularity and normativity. Such an approach, Critical Theoristsargue, permits their enterprise to bepractical in adistinctively moral (rather than instrumental) sense. They do notmerely seek to provide the means to achieve some independent goal, butrather (as in Horkheimer’s famous definition mentioned above) seek“human emancipation” in circumstances of domination andoppression. This normative task cannot be accomplished apart from theinterplay between philosophy and social science throughinterdisciplinary empirical social research (Horkheimer 1993). WhileCritical Theory is often thought of narrowly as referring to theFrankfurt School that begins with Horkheimer and Adorno and stretchesto Marcuse and Habermas, any philosophical approach with similarpractical aims could be called a “critical theory,”including feminism, critical race theory, and some forms ofpost-colonial criticism. In the following, Critical Theory whencapitalized refers only to the Frankfurt School. All other uses of theterm are meant in the broader sense and thus not capitalized. Whenused in the singular, “a critical theory” is notcapitalized, even when the theory is developed by members of theFrankfurt School in the context of their overall project of CriticalTheory.

It follows from Horkheimer’s definition that a critical theoryis adequate only if it meets three criteria: it must be explanatory,practical, and normative, all at the same time. That is, it mustexplain what is wrong with current social reality, identify the actorsto change it, and provide both clear norms for criticism andachievable practical goals for social transformation. Any trulycritical theory of society, as Horkheimer further defined it in hiswritings as Director of the Frankfurt School’s Institute forSocial Research, “has for its object [human beings] as producersof their own historical form of life” (Horkeimer 1972b [1992,244]). In light of thepractical goal of identifying and overcoming all the circumstancesthat limit human freedom, the explanatory goal could be furthered onlythrough interdisciplinary research that includes psychological,cultural, and social dimensions, as well as institutional forms ofdomination. Given the emphasis among the first generation of CriticalTheory on human beings as the self-creating producers of their ownhistory, a unique practical aim of social inquiry suggests itself: totransform contemporary capitalism into a consensual form of sociallife. For Horkheimer a capitalist society could be transformed only bybecoming more democratic, to make it such that all conditions ofsocial life that are controllable by human beings depend on realconsensus in a rational society (Horkheimer 1972b [1992, 250]). Thenormative orientation of Critical Theory, at least in its form ofcritical social inquiry, is therefore towards the transformation ofcapitalism into a “real democracy” in which such controlcould be exercised (Horkheimer 1972b [1992, 250]). In suchformulations, there are striking similarities between Critical Theoryand American pragmatism.

The focus on democracy as the location for cooperative, practical andtransformative activity continues today in the work of JürgenHabermas, as does the attempt to determine the nature and limits of“real democracy” in complex, pluralistic, and globalizingsocieties.

As might be expected from such an ambitious philosophical project andform of inquiry, Critical Theory is rife with tensions. In whatfollows I will develop the arguments within Critical Theory thatsurround its overall philosophical project. First, I explore its basicphilosophical orientation or metaphilosophy. In its efforts to combineempirical social inquiry and normative philosophical argumentation,Critical Theory presents a viable alternative for social and politicalphilosophy today. Second, I will consider its core normativetheory—its relation to its transformation of a Kantian ethics ofautonomy into a conception of freedom and justice in which democracyand democratic ideals play a central role (Horkheimer 1993, 22;Horkheimer 1972b [1992, 203]). As a member of the second generation ofCritical Theory, Habermas in particular has developed this dimensionof normative political theory into a competitor to Rawlsianconstructivism, which attempts to bring our pretheoretical intuitionsinto reflective equilibrium. In the third section, I will consider itsempirical orientation in practical social theory and practical socialinquiry that aims at promoting democratic norms. A fundamental tensionemerges between a comprehensive social theory that provides atheoretical basis for social criticism and a more pluralist andpractical orientation that does not see any particular theory ormethodology as distinctive of Critical Theory as such. In this way,the unresolved tension between the empirical and normative aspects ofthe project of a critical theory oriented to the realization of humanfreedom is manifest in each of its main contributions to philosophyinformed by social science. Finally, I examine the contribution ofCritical Theory to debates about globalization, in which the potentialtransformation of both democratic ideals and institutions is atstake.

• 1. Critical Theory as Metaphilosophy: Philosophy, Ideology and Truth
• 2. Democracy as a Practical Goal of Critique: From Ideology to Social Facts
  • 2.1 Critique of Liberalism to the Dialectic of Enlightenment
  • 2.2 The Structural Transformation of Democracy: Habermas on Politics and Discursive Rationality
• 3. Critical Theory, Pragmatic Epistemology and the Social Sciences
  • 3.1 Critics, Observers, and Participants: Two Forms of Critical Theory
  • 3.2 Social Inquiry as Practical Knowledge
  • 3.3 Pluralism and Critical Theory
  • 3.4 Reflexivity, Perspective Taking and Practical Verification
• 4. A Critical Theory of Globalization: Democratic Inquiry, Transnational Critical Theory
  • 4.1 Social Facts, Normative Ideals and Multiperspectival Theory
  • 4.2 The Fact of Globalization and the Possibility of Democracy
• 5. The Emerging Ideal of a Multiperspectival Democracy: The European Union
  • 5.1 The Multiperspectival Public Sphere: The Critical and Innovative Potential of Transnational Interaction
• 6. Conclusion: Critical Theory and Normative Inquiry
• Bibliography
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

1. Critical Theory as Metaphilosophy: Philosophy, Ideology and Truth

The best way to show how Critical Theory offers a distinctivephilosophical approach is to locate it historically in German Idealismand its aftermath. For Marx and his generation, Hegel was the last inthe grand tradition of philosophical thought able to give us secureknowledge of humanity and history on its own. The issue for LeftHegelians and Marx was then somehow to overcome Hegelian“theoretical” philosophy, and Marx argues that it can doso only by making philosophy “practical,” in the sense ofchanging practices by which societies realize their ideals. Oncereason was thoroughly socialized and made historical, historicistskepticism emerged at the same time, attempting to relativizephilosophical claims about norms and reason to historically andculturally variable forms of life. Critical Theory developed anonskeptical version of this conception, linking philosophy closely tothe human and social sciences. In so doing, it can link empirical andinterpretive social science to normative claims of truth, morality andjustice, traditionally the purview of philosophy. While it defends theemphasis on normativity and universalist ambitions found in thephilosophical tradition, it does so within the context of particularsorts of empirical social research, with which it has to cooperate ifit is to understand such normative claims within the currenthistorical context. After presenting the two main versions of thisconception of philosophy, I turn to an illuminating example of howthis cooperative relation between philosophy and the social sciencesworks from the point of view of the main figures in Critical Theorywho sought to develop it: the critique of ideology, a form ofcriticism which if generalized threatens to undermine the criticalstance itself as one more ideology. Even if Critical Theorists areunited in a common philosophical project, this example shows the largedifferences between the first and second generation concerning thenormative justification of social criticism.

In the modern era, philosophy defines its distinctive role in relationto the sciences. While for Locke philosophy was a mere“underlaborer,” for Kant it had a loftier status. As Rortyand others have put it, transcendental philosophy has two distinctroles: first, as the tribunal of Reason, the ultimate court of appealbefore which disciplines stand and must justify themselves andsecondly, as the domain for normative questions left out ofnaturalistic inquiry. In light of this ability to judge the results ofthe sciences, philosophy can also organize knowledge, assigning toeach of them their proper sphere and scope. The Kantian solutiondenies the need for direct cooperation with the sciences on issuesrelated to normativity, since these were determined independentlythrough transcendental analysis of the universal and necessaryconditions for reason in its theoretical and practicalemployment. Echoes of the subsequent post-Hegelian criticisms ofKantian transcendental philosophy are found in the early work ofHorkheimer and Marcuse. Indeed, Horkheimer criticizes“traditional theory” in light of the rejection of itsrepresentational view of knowledge and its nonhistorical subject.Echoing Marx inThe German Ideology, Horkheimer insists thatfor a critical theory the world and subjectivity in all its forms havedeveloped with the life processes of society (Horkheimer 1972b [1992,245]). Much like certain naturalists today, he argued that“materialism requires the unification of philosophy andscience,” thus denying any substantive distinction betweenscience and philosophy (Horkheimer 1993, 34). As Horkheimer understoodthe task of Critical Theory, philosophical problems are preserved bytaking a role in defining problems for research, and philosophicalreflection retains a privileged role in organizing the results ofempirical research into a unified whole.

This understanding of the relation of philosophy and the sciencesremains broadly Kantian. Even while rejecting the role of philosophy astranscendental judge, he still endorses its normative role, to theextent that it still has the capacity to organize the claims ofempirical forms of knowledge and to assign each a role in the normativeenterprise of reflection on historically and socially contextualizedreason. This unstable mixture of naturalism with a normativephilosophical orientation informed much of the critical social scienceof the Frankfurt School in the 1930s.

According to this conception of materialism, Critical Theory couldoperate with a theoretical division of labor in which philosophy’snormative stance could criticize the embodiments of reason andmorality according to their internal criteria. At least for modernsocieties, such an enterprise of “immanent critique” waspossible (see, for example, Horkheimer 1993, 39). However, Horkheimerand Marcuse saw the skeptical and relativist stance of the emergingsociology of knowledge, particularly that of Karl Mannheim, asprecisely opposed to that of Critical Theory. As Marcuse puts it,“sociology that is only interested in the dependent and limitednature of consciousness has nothing to do with truth. While useful inmany ways it has falsified the interest and goal of any criticaltheory” (Marcuse 1969 152). As opposed to merely debunkingcriticism, “a critical theory is concerned with preventing theloss of truth that past knowledge has labored to attain.” GivenCritical Theory’s orientation to human emancipation, it seeks tocontextualize philosophical claims to truth and moral universalitywithout reducing them to social and historical conditions. Horkheimerformulates this skeptical fallacy that informed much of thesociologically informed relativism of his time in this way:“That all our thoughts, true or false, depend on conditions thatcan change in no way affects the validity of science. It is not clearwhy the conditioned character of thought should affect the truth of ajudgment—why shouldn’t insight be just as conditioned aserror?” (Horkheimer 1993, 141). The core claim here is thatfallibilism is different from relativism, suggesting that it ispossible to distinguish between truth and the context of justificationof claims to truth.

Faced with a sociological naturalism that relativized claims totruth and justice are necessary for social criticism, the challengecould be answered by detranscendentalizing truth without losing itsnormativity (Horkheimer 1993, 6; McCarthy, in McCarthy and Hoy 1994,10). Indeed it is relativism that depends on an implausible andahistorical form of detachment and impartiality, especially expressedin its methodological commitments to “reverential empathy anddescription.” The skepticism offered by historicism and the sociologyof knowledge is ultimately merely theoretical, the skepticism of anobserver who takes the disengaged view from nowhere. Once the skeptichas to take up the practical stance, alternatives to such paper doubtbecome inevitable. Indeed, the critic must identify just whosepractical stance best reveals these possibilities as agents for socialtransformation of current circumstances. As I point out in the nextsection, the Frankfurt School most often applied ideology critique toliberal individualism, pointing out its contextual limitations thatlead to reductionist and pernicious interpretations of democraticideals.

Despite the force of these antirelativist and antiskepticalarguments, two problems emerge in claims made by Horkheimer and Marcuseto underwrite some “emphatic” conception of truth or justice.First, philosophy is given the task of organizing social research andproviding its practical aims even in the absence of the justificationof its superior capacities. A more modest and thoroughly empiricalapproach would be more appropriate and defensible. Second, the sourceof this confidence seems to be practical, that critics must immanentlydiscover those transformative agents whose struggles take up thesenormative contents of philosophy and attempt to realize them. But oncethis practical possibility no longer seems feasible, then this approachwould either be purely philosophical or it would turn against thepotentialities of the present. Indeed, during the rise of fascism inthe Second World War and the commodified culture afterwards, theFrankfurt School became skeptical of the possibility of agency, as thesubjective conditions for social transformation were on their viewundermined.

It is clear that inDialectic of Enlightenment Horkheimerand Adorno abandoned this interdisciplinary materialist approach withits emphasis on cooperation with the social sciences (1982, xi). Adornoand Horkheimer did not to deny the achievements of the Enlightenment,but rather wanted to show that it had “self-destructivetendencies,” that its specific social, cultural and conceptual formsrealized in modern Europe “contained its own possibility of areversal that is universally apparent today” (Adorno and Horkheimer1982, xiii). Since Adorno and Horkheimer planned to offer a positiveway out of the dialectic of Enlightenment at the time they wrote thesewords, this reversal is by no means inevitable. Even if their specifichistorical story of the emergence of Enlightenment reason out of mythis no longer so convincing, it is not enough to say with Habermas thatThe Dialectic of Enlightenment did not “do justice tothe rational content of cultural modernity” (Habermas 1987, 103). Forthe positive task of avoiding the reversal of Enlightenment,reconstructing the rational content of modernity is not enough, sincethe issue is not to affirm its universalism, but its self-critical andemancipatory capacity. If the issue is the self-correcting capacity ofthe Enlightenment, two questions emerge: how is it undermined? Where dowe locate the exercise of this capacity? This is the“Enlightenment problem,” the solution to which is twofold: toreconstruct those human capacities that have such reflexivity builtinto them and to tie the operation of Enlightenment institutions to theconditions of their successful exercise.

Against this skeptical predicament of the first generation of CriticalTheory, it could be said without exaggeration that Habermas’s basicphilosophical endeavor fromKnowledge and Human IntereststoThe Theory of Communicative Action has been to develop amore modest, fallibilist, empirical account of the philosophical claimto universality and rationality. This more modest approach ridsCritical Theory of its vestiges of transcendental philosophy, pushingit in a naturalistic direction. Such naturalism identifies morespecific forms of social scientific knowledge that help in developingan analysis of the general conditions of rationality manifested invarious human capacities and powers. Thus, Habermas’s alternative seespractical knowledge, or reason in the robust sense, as it is“embodied in cognition, speech and action” (Habermas 1984,10). Habermas’s calls for particular “reconstructivesciences,” whose aim it is to render theoretically explicit theintuitive, pretheoretical know-how underlying such basic humancompetences as speaking and understanding, judging, and acting. UnlikeKant’s transcendental analysis of the conditions of rationality, suchsciences yield knowledge that is not necessary but hypothetical, not apriori but empirical, not certain but fallible. They are neverthelessdirected to universal structures and conditions and raise universal,but defeasible claims to an account of practical reason. In this way,Habermas undermines both of the traditional Kantian roles forphilosophy and brings them into a fully cooperative relation to thesocial sciences. This can be seen in the clear differences between hisaccount of the critique of ideology, which is at once contextualistand antirelativist but also underwrites its own normativity in waysthat Horkheimer and Marcuse’s more nearly transcendental account couldnot, given the inevitable tension between philosophical ideals and thehistorical conditions of current societies and their practices.

Like many other such theories, the theory of communicative actionoffers its own distinctive definition of rationality. In goodpragmatist fashion, Habermas’s definition is epistemic, practical, andintersubjective. For Habermas, rationality consists not so much in thepossession of knowledge and thus primarily concerned with theconsistency and content of one’s beliefs, but rather in “howspeaking and acting subjects acquire and use knowledge” (Habermas,1984, 11). Such a broad definition suggests that the theory could bedeveloped through explicating the general and formal conditions ofvalidity in knowing and reaching understanding through language, andthis task falls primarily on “formal pragmatics.” As one amongmany different “reconstructive sciences,” such a reconstructionof speech is inherently normative, in the sense that it is one of thedisciplines that reconstructs a common domain: “the know-how ofsubjects who are capable of speech and action, who are attributed thecapacity to produce valid utterances, and who consider themselvescapable of distinguishing (at least intuitively) between valid andinvalid expressions” (Habermas 1990, 31). The positive goal of such atheory is not only to provide an account of rationality based on thisknow-how that is rich enough to grasp uses of reason in all theirvariety, yet also normative enough to be able to clarify the necessaryconditions for its practical employment as well as a critical analysisof the “pathologies” that occur when these conditions fail toobtain.

More than just reconstructing an implicitly normative know-how,Habermas is clear that such reconstructive sciences have a“quasi-transcendental” status by specifying very generaland formal conditions of successful communication. In this way, theirconcern with normativity and with the abilities needed for rationalityin Habermas’s practical and social sense permits them to acquire acritical role. Certainly, the goal of the reconstructive sciences istheoretical knowledge: they make such practical know-how explicit. Butinsofar as they are capable of explicating the conditions for valid orcorrect utterances, they also explain why some utterances are invalid,some speech acts unsuccessful, and some argumentationinadequate. Thus, such sciences “also explain deviant cases andthrough this indirect authority acquire acritical functionas well” (Habermas, 1990, 32). This authority then permits thetheory of rationality to underwrite critical claims about social andpolitical practices, to show how their functioning violates not onlythe espoused rules but also the conditions of rationality.

Such an approach can be applied to normative features of democraticpractices. Rather than only providing a set of explicit principles ofjustification and institutional decision rules,democracy isalso a particular structure of free and open communication.Ideology restricts or limits such processes of communicationand undermines the conditions of success within them. Ideology asdistorted communication affects both the social conditions in whichdemocratic discussion takes place and the processes of communicationthat go on within them. The theory of ideology, therefore, analyzes theways in which linguistic-symbolic meanings are used to encode, produce,and reproduce relations of power and domination, even withininstitutional spheres of communication and interaction governed bynorms that make democratic ideals explicit in normative procedures andconstraints. As a reconstruction of the potentially correct insightsbehind Marx’s exaggerated rejection of liberalism, the theory ofdistorted communication is therefore especially suited to the ways inwhich meanings are used to reproduce power even under explicit rules ofequality and freedom. This is not to say that explicit rules areunimportant: they make it possible for overt forms of coercion andpower to be constrained, the illegitimacy of which requires no appealto norms implicit in practices.

Democratic norms of freedom can be made explicit in various rights,including civil rights of participation and free expression. Such normsare often violated explicitly in exercises of power for various ends,such as wealth, security, or cultural survival. Besides these explicitrights, such coercion also violates the communicative freedom expressedin ignoring the need to pass decisions through the taking of yes/noattitudes by participants in communication. Habermas calls such speechthat is not dependent on these conditions of communicative rationality“distorted communication.” For example, powerful economic groupshave historically been able to attain their agency goals withoutexplicitly excluding topics from democratic discussion but by impliedthreats and other nondeliberative means (Przworski and Wallerstein1988, 12–29; Bohman 1997, 338–339). Threats of declining investmentsblock redistributive schemes, so that credible threats circumvent theneed to convince others of the reasons for such policies or to put someissue under democratic control. Similarly, biases in agenda settingwithin organizations and institutions limit scope of deliberation andrestrict political communication by defining those topics that can besuccessfully become the subject of public agreement (Bohman 1990). Inthis way, it is easy to see how such a reconstructive approach connectsdirectly to social scientific analyses of the consistency of democraticnorms with actual political behavior.

This theory of ideology as distorted communication opens up thepossibility of a different relation of theoretical and practicalknowledge than Habermas has suggested so far. His approach uses formalpragmatics philosophically to reflect upon norms and practices that arealready explicit in justifications in various sorts of argumentation orsecond-order communication. Such reflection has genuine practicalsignificance in yielding explicit rules governing discursivecommunication (such as rules of argumentation), which in turn can beused for the purpose of designing and reforming deliberative anddiscursive institutions (Habermas 1996, 230). It is easily overlookedthat such rules are only part of the story; they make explicit andinstitutionalize norms that are already operative in correct languageuse. Such implicit norms of well-formed and communicatively successfulutterances are not identical with the explicit rules ofargumentation.

These claims about norms raise two difficulties. First, there is apotential regress of rules, that is, that explicit rules requiresfurther rules to apply them, and so on. Second, this approach cannotcapture how norms are often only implicit in practices rather thanexplicitly expressed (Brandom 1994, 18–30). Here Habermas sides withPettit in seeing the central function of explicit norms as creating acommons that can serve as the basis for institutionalizing norms, aspace in which the content of norms and concepts can be put up forrational reflection and revision (Pettit 1992, Habermas 1990). Makingsuch implicit norms explicit is thus also the main task of theinterpretive social scientist and is a potential source of socialcriticism; it is then the task of the participant-critic in thedemocratic public sphere to change them. There is one more possiblerole for the philosophically informed social critic. As we have seenin the case of ideological speech, the reconstructive sciences“also explain deviant cases and through this indirect authorityacquire acritical function as well” (Habermas, 1990,32).

In this section, I have discussed claims that are distinctive of themetaphilosophy of Critical Theorists of both generations of theFrankfurt School and illustrated the ways in which critical normativitycan be exercised in their differing models of the critique of ideology.Critical Theorists attempt to fulfill potentially two desiderata at thesame time: first, they want to maintain the normativity ofphilosophical conceptions such as truth or justice, while at the sametime they want to examine the contexts in which they have developed andmay best be promoted practically. I argued that the first generationtheorists avoided the relativism of sociologies of knowledge such asMannheim’s only to fall into a practical skepticism about thefeasibility of agents acting upon such norms in current contexts.Habermas’s conception of the cooperation between philosophy and thesocial sciences in rational reconstruction of practical knowledgeallows him to articulate a normative conception of “realdemocracy” more fully and to develop a social scientifically informedconception of democracy that is an alternative to current liberalpractices. This project shifts the goal of critical social inquiry fromhuman emancipation as such, to the primary concern with democraticinstitutions as the location for the realization of ideals of freedomand equality. The limits on any such realization may prove to be notmerely ideological: Critical Theory is also interested in those socialfacts and circumstances that constrain the realization of the idealdemocracy and force us to reconsider its normative content. While suchan account of the relation between facts and norms answers thesociological skepticism of Weber and others about the future ofdemocracy, it may be based on an overly limited account of socialfacts.

2. Democracy as a Practical Goal of Critique: From Ideology to Social Facts

In its initial phases Critical Theory attempted to develop a normativenotion of “real democracy” that was contrasted with actualpolitical forms in liberal societies. A democratic society would berational, because in it individuals could gain “consciouscontrol” over social processes that affect them and their lifechances. To the extent that such an aim is possible at all, itrequired that human beings become “producers of their [sociallife] in its totality” (Horkheimer 1972b [1992, 244]). Such asociety then becomes a “true” or expressive totality,overcoming the current “false totality,” an antagonisticwhole in which the genuine social needs and interests cannot beexpressed or developed (Jay 1984). Such a positive, expressivistideal of a social whole is not, however, antiliberal, since it shareswith liberalism the commitment to rationalism and universalism. Thenext phase in the development of Critical Theory took up the questionof antidemocratic trends. This development of the Frankfurt Schoolinterpretation of the limits on democracy as an ideal of human freedomwas greatly influenced by the emergence of fascism in the 1930s, oneof the primary objects of their social research. Much of this researchwas concerned with antidemocratic trends, including increasinglytighter connections between states and the market in advancedcapitalist societies, the emergence of the fascist state and theauthoritarian personality. Horkheimer came to see that theseantidemocratic trends gradually undermined the realization of anexpressive whole, with the consequence that “the situation ofthe individual is hopeless,” that the subjective conditions forexercising freedom and achieving solidarity were being eroded by anincreasingly totalizing social reification.

As first generation Critical Theorists saw it in the 1940s, thisprocess of reification occurs at two different levels. First, itconcerned a sophisticated analysis of the contrary psychologicalconditions underlying democracy and authoritarianism; second, thisanalysis was linked to a social theory that produced an account ofobjective, large-scale, and long-term historical processes ofreification. If these facts and trends are true, then the idea of a“true totality” is a plausible critical category. However, thisconcept is ill suited for democratic theory due to a lack of claritywith regard to the underlying positive political ideal of CriticalTheory. Finally, in reaction to these normative failures, Habermasseeks to develop an intermediate level of analysis and a new normativeconception in the historical analysis of the emergence of the“public sphere” (Öffentlichkeit). As his later andmore fully developed normative theory of democracy based onmacrosociological social facts about modern societies shows, Habermasoffers a modest and liberal democratic ideal based on the public use ofreason within the empirical constraints of modern complexity anddifferentiation. This social theory may make it difficult for him tomaintain some aspects of radical democracy as an expressive andrational ideal that first generation critical theorists saw as agenuine alternative to liberalism.

2.1 Critique of Liberalism to the Dialectic of Enlightenment

Except for passages on “real democracy” as the achievementof a rational society, many of the Frankfurt School’s writings ondemocracy are concerned with developing a critique of liberal ideologyreminiscent of “The Jewish Question.” Horkheimer puts hiscriticism of bourgeois negative liberty in these terms: “Thelimited freedom of the bourgeois individual puts on the illusory formof perfect freedom and autonomy” (Horkheimer 1972b [1992,211]). Horkheimer criticizes the modern philosophical and legal subjectas abstract, detached, and ahistorical; whatever freedom and autonomyactors have, they are best understood as “definiteindividuals” whose freedom is exercised in relation others andin historically specific societies. The freedom of real individualscan only be thought of in a holistic way, “in the resultant webof relationships with the social totality and with nature.” Likeall good ideology critiques, then, this criticism of liberalism isimmanent, using the liberal norms and values against their historicalrealization in specific institutions. Nonetheless, this ideologycritique recognized that liberalism was still, as Marcuse put it, a“rationalist theory of society.” Whatever its successor,the new form would have to pass the normative tests that fascism andother emerging forms of antiliberalism do not: this new unity“would have to prove itself before the tribunal of individuals,to show that their needs and potentialities are realized withinit” (Marcuse 1968, 7). Using Hegelian terminology, CriticalTheorists came to regard advanced capitalist societies as a“totality,” in which the tight integration of states andmarkets threatened to eliminate the space for freedom. While theemergence of fascism is possible evidence for this fact, it is also anobvious instance in which reliance on the internal criticism ofliberalism is no longer adequate.

The shift in the Frankfurt School to such external forms ofcriticism from 1940 onwards is not confined to the fascist state. Withthe development of capitalism in its monopoly form, the liberalheritage loses its rational potential as the political sphereincreasingly functionalized to the market and its reified socialrelationships. In this way the critique of liberalism shifts away fromthe normative underpinnings of current democratic practices to the waysin which the objective conditions of reification undermine thepsychological and cultural presuppositions of democratic change andopposition. Such a society is now a “wholly false totality.” Thework of Adorno and Horkheimer in this period shows the philosophicalconsequences of this shift, especially inDialectic ofEnlightenment (1944) and TheEclipse of Reason(1947).

One of the central claims ofDialectic of Enlightenmentconcerns the “entwinement of myth and Enlightenment,” asproviding a deep historical treatment of the genesis of modern reasonand freedom and how they turn into their opposites. Rather than beingliberating and progressive, reason has become dominating andcontrolling with the spread of instrumental reason. Liberalinstitutions do not escape this process and are indeed part of it withtheir institutionalization of self-interest and self-preservation,tending toward a “totally administered society.” InEclipseof Reason Horkheimer turns this critique of instrumental reasonagainst liberal democracy. He argues that the liberal tradition thatMarcuse argued needed to be preserved only retained its normative forceon the metaphysical foundation of “objective reason.” Howevergrounded, liberalism depended on subjectivizing reason and objectivemoral principles; subjects are proclaimed “autonomous” all thewhile they sink into the heteronomy of market relations. The“inevitable” tendency of liberalism to collapse into fascism“can be derived, apart from any economic causes, from the innercontradiction between the subjectivist principle of self-interest andthe idea of reason that it is supposed to express” (Horkheimer 1987,21). Shorn of its objective content, democracy is reduced to meremajority rule and public opinion to some measurable quantity. Theargument here is primarily genealogical (thus based on a story ofhistorical origin and development) and not grounded in social science;it is a reconstruction of the history of Western reason or ofliberalism in which calculative, instrumental reason drives out theutopian content of universal solidarity. Some nondominating,alternative conception is exhibited in Horkheimer’s religiouslyinfluenced ideal of identification with all suffering creatures orAdorno’s idea of mimetic reconciliation with the other found primarilyin art (Horkheimer 1972a; Adorno 1973). These analyses were alsocomplemented by an analysis of the emergence of state capitalism and ofthe culture industry that replaces the need for consent and even thepseudo-consent of ideology.

Some of the more interesting social scientific analyses of fascismthat the Frankfurt School produced in this period were relativelyindependent of such a genealogy of reason. The first is the analysis ofpolitical economy of advanced, administered capitalist societies, withFranz Neumann providing a dissenting view that no state can completelycontrol social and economic processes in the ways that might be moreconsistent with Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of instrumentalreason. Especially interesting were empirical investigations into the“authoritarian” and “democratic” personalities, whichprovided a microsociology of democratic and antidemocratic charactertraits (Adorno et al. 1953). Perhaps one of more striking results ofthis study is that the core of the democratic personality is aparticular emotional or affective organization: “if fear anddestructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, erosbelongs mainly to democracy” (Adorno et al 1953, 480). Thus, long-termhistorical cultural development and macro- and micro-sociologicaltrends work against the democratic ideal. The sources of resistance tothese trends are increasingly found at the level of what Foucault wouldcall “micropolitics.”

Whatever the merits of such general historical frameworks for criticalinterpretations of the present, the internal difficulty for a criticaltheory is that “real democracy,” the goal of emancipatorycriticism, demands a richer set of practical and theoreticalresources, including institutional possibilities. What was needed wasan alternative conception of rationality that is not exhausted by thedecline of objective reason into subjective self-interest. This basicproblem of first generation Critical Theory has been the life-longtheme of the work of Jürgen Habermas, for whom the publicity andmore generally the public sphere (Öffentlichkeit),occupies precisely the right conceptual space. Habermas also replacesthe expressive totality of a fully democratic society with the idealof “undamaged intersubjectivity” and of universalsolidarity established through “communication free fromdomination.” On the social theoretical side, totality isreplaced by a conception of social complexity, which is notnecessarily false or reifying. These shifts permit a more positivereassessment of the liberal tradition and its existing politicalinstitutions and open up the possibility of a critical sociology ofthe legitimation problems of the modern state. On the whole, Habermasmarked the return to normative theory united with a broader use ofempirical, reconstructive and interpretive social science. Above all,this version of Critical Theory required fully developing thealternative to instrumental reason, only sketched by Adorno orHorkheimer in religious and aesthetic form; for Habermas criticism isinstead grounded in everyday communicative action. Indeed, he cam toargue that the social theory of the first generation, with itscommitments to holism, could no long be reconciled with the historicalstory at the core of Critical Theory: the possible emergence of a morerobust and genuine form of democracy

2.2 The Structural Transformation of Democracy: Habermas on Politics and Discursive Rationality

Habermas’s rejection of the explanatory holism of the first generationof the Frankfurt School has both explanatory and normativeimplications. First, he brings categories of meaning and agency backinto critical social theory, both of which were absent in themacro-sociological and depth psychological approaches that werefavored in the post war period. This brings democratic potentials backinto view, since democracy makes sense only within specific forms ofinteraction and association, from the public forum to variouspolitical institutions. Indeed, Habermas’s first and perhaps mostenduring work,The Structural Transformation of the PublicSphere (Habermas 1989/1961), traced the historical emergence ofnew forms of public interaction from the intimate sphere of thefamily, to coffee houses, salons, and finally to parliamentarydebates. While linked ultimately to a narrative of its declinethrough the market and the administrative state, the core of suchinteraction and the critical and egalitarian potential of being partof a public whose members address one another as equals had forHabermas a nonideological, even “utopian” core (Habermas1989, 88). Second, Habermas also developed an alternative sociology ofmodernity, in which social differentiation and pluralization are notpathological but positive features of modern societies (Habermas 1982,1986). Indeed, the positive conception of complexity permits ananalysis of the ways in which modern societies and their functionaldifferentiation opens up democratic forms of self-organizationindependently of some possible expressively integrated totality. Suchan ideal of an expressive totality and conscious self control over theproduction of the conditions of social life is replaced with publicityand mutual recognition within feasible discursive institutions.

This emphasis on the normative potential of modernity does not meanthat modern political forms such as the state are not to be criticized.InLegitimation Crisis (1969), for example, Habermas arguesnot only that the demands of advanced capitalism restrict the scope andsignificance of democracy, but also that the state is “crisisridden” and unable to solve structural problems of unemployment,economic growth, and environmental destruction. These crisis tendenciesopen up a space for contestation and deliberation by citizens and theirinvolvement in new social movements. This criticism of the contemporarystate is put in the context of a larger account of the relation betweendemocracy and rationality. Contrary to “formal” democracyunderstood as majority rule, Habermas opposes “substantivedemocracy,” which emphasizes the “genuine participation ofcitizens in political will formation” (Habermas 1975, 32). Therelevant notion of rationality that can be applied to such a process isprocedural and discursive; it is developed in terms of the proceduralproperties of communication necessary to make public will formationrational and thus for it to issue in a genuine rather than merely defacto consensus.

With such an expansion of Kantian practical reason, democracy is nowgrounded in the intersubjective structure of communication exhibitedin the special form of reflective and reciprocal communication andpublic testing of claims to validity that Habermas calls“discourse.” As communication about communication,discourse emerges in problematic situations in which new solutionsmust be sought in order to continue social cooperation. Democraticinstitutions have the proper reflexive structure and are thusdiscursive in this sense. In them, citizens deliberate as free andequal persons, for whom the legitimacy of the decision is related tothe achievement of a “rational consensus.” That is, aconsensus is rational to the extent that it is based on a norm thatcould under ideal conditions be justified to all those who areaffected by a decision. Early on Habermas called the full list ofthese counterfactual conditions “the ideal speechsituation,” although later it is clear that it is meant toprovide a principled basis by which to assess the quality ofagreements reached discursively.

One philosophical purpose of such a procedural conception ofrationality is to refute value skeptics, who reduce politics to whatWeber called the struggle between “gods and demons” (Weber 1949).Its purpose in social theory is to provide the basis for an account ofcultural rationalization and learning in modernity. In normative theoryproper, Habermas has from the start been suspicious of attempts toapply this fundamentally epistemological criterion of rationalitydirectly to the structure of political institutions. As early asTheory and Practice (1966), Habermas distanced himself fromRousseau’s claim that the general will can only be achieved in adirect, republican form of democracy. By failing to see that the idealagreement of the social contract specifies only a certain proceduraland reflexive level of justification, Rousseau confused “theintroduction of a new principle of legitimacy with proposals forinstitutionalizing just rule” (Habermas 1979, 186). Indeed democraticprinciples need not be applied everywhere in the same way (Habermas1973, 32–40). Instead, the realization of such norms has to take intoaccount various social facts, including facts of pluralism andcomplexity (Habermas 1996, 474). For Habermas, no normative conceptionof democracy or law could be developed independently of a descriptivelyadequate model of contemporary society, lest it become a mere ought.Without this empirical and descriptive component, democratic normsbecome merely empty ideals and not the reconstruction of therationality inherent in actual practices. I shall return to theproblematic relation of social facts to democratic ideals in the nextsection in discussing Habermas’s account of the philosophy of criticalsocial science.

Another way in which this point about democratic legitimacy can bemade is to distinguish the various uses to which practical reason maybe put in various forms of discourse. Contrary to the account oflegitimacy offered inLegitimation Crisis, Habermas laterexplicitly abandons the analogy between the justification of moralnorms and democratic decision-making. Moral discourses are clearlyrestricted to questions of justice that can be settled impartiallythrough a procedure of universalization (Habermas 1990, 43ff). Themoral point of view abstracts from the particular identities ofpersons, including their political identities, and encompasses anideally universal audience of all humanity. Although politics and lawinclude moral concerns within their scope, such as issues of basichuman rights, the scope of justification in such practices can berestricted to the specific community of associated citizens and thusmay appeal to culturally specific values shared by theparticipants.

There are at least three aspects of practical reason relevant todemocratic deliberation: pragmatic, ethical, and moral uses of reasonare employed with different objects (pragmatic ends, the interpretationof common values, and the just resolution of conflicts) and thus alsodifferent forms of validity (Habermas 1993, 1–18). Because of thisvariety, democratic discourses are often mixed and complex, oftenincluding various asymmetries of knowledge and information. Democraticdeliberation is thus not a special case of moral judgment with all ofits idealizing assumptions, but a complex discursive network withvarious sorts of argumentation, bargaining, and compromise (Habermas1996, 286). What regulates their use is a principle at a differentlevel: the public use of practical reason is self-referential andrecursive in examining the conditions of its own employment. Given thesocial circumstances of large-scale and pluralistic modern societies,distinctively democratic deliberation requires the “medium oflaw,” so that the results of deliberation must be expressed throughlaw.

Habermas expresses the relevant differences among the uses ofpractical reason in morality and politics as sub-principles of thesame principle of discursive justification, which he calls“D.”D simply names a discursive procedure:“just those norms of action are valid if all persons affectedcould agree as participants in rational discourse” (Habermas1996, 107). The moral principle “U” specifies that therule of argumentation for moral discourse is univeralizability(Habermas 1990, 65–66). The more specific principle of democracystates that “only those laws may claim legitimacy that can meetwith the agreement of all citizens in a discursive lawmaking procedurethat is itself legally constituted” (Habermas 1996, 110). Heargues that such a principle is at a different level than the moralprinciple, to the extent that its aim is primarily to establish adiscursive procedure of legitimate law making and is a much weakerstandard of agreement.

Nonetheless, even this democratic principle may still be toodemanding, to the extent that it requires the agreement of all citizens(counterfactually) as a criterion of legitimacy. Habermas admits thatin the case of cultural values we need not expect such agreement, andhe even introduces compromise as a possible discursive outcome ofdemocratic procedures. One way to genuinely weaken the principle wouldbe to substitute cooperation for consensus and the outcome of theprocedure: “a law then would be legitimate only if it could beagreed to in a fair and open deliberative process in which all citizensmay freely continue to participate whatever the outcome” (Bohman 1996,89). In this way, what is crucial is not the agreement as such, but howcitizens reason together within a common public sphere. The democraticprinciple in this form expresses an ideal of citizenship rather than astandard of liberal legitimacy .

The internal complexity of democratic discourse does not overcomethe problem of the application of the democratic principle tocontemporary social circumstances. As Habermas puts it,“unavoidable social complexity makes it necessary to apply thecriteria of democracy in a differentiated way” (Habermas 1996, 486).Such complexity restricts the application of fully democraticjustification for a number of reasons: first, it is not possible forthe sovereign will of the people by their democratic decision-makingpowers to constitute the whole of society; and, second, a societyformed by merely associative and communicative means of coordinationand cooperation is no longer possible. This objection to radicaldemocracy is thus directed to those theories that do not figure out howsuch principles can be institutionally mediated given current socialfacts. Indeed, institutional mediation can overcome deficits incommunicative self-organization, in so far as they compensate for“the cognitive indeterminacy, motivational insecurity, and thelimiting coordinating power of moral norms and informal norms of actionin general” (Habermas 1996, 323).

This approach to law has important consequences for a critical theory,since it changes how we appeal to democratic norms in criticizingcurrent institutions: it is not clear exactly what the difference isbetween a radical and a liberal democracy, since some of thelimitations on participation are due to the constraints of socialfacts and not to power asymmetries. By insisting upon popularsovereignty as the outcome of the generation of “communicativepower” in the public sphere, Habermas tries to save thesubstance of radical democracy. The unresolved difficulty is that in acomplex society, as Habermas asserts, “public opinion does notrule” but rather points administrative power in particulardirections; or, as he puts it, it does not “steer” but“countersteers” institutional complexity (Habermas 1996,chapter 8). That is, members of the public do not control socialprocesses; qua members of a public, they may exercise influencethrough particular institutionalized mechanisms and channels ofcommunication.

The open question for current Critical Theory (although not allcritical theories) is then whether or not “real democracy” isstill the goal of social criticism given these putatively“unavoidable” facts about the structure of modern society. Evengiven the limits of social complexity, there is still room forjudgments of greater or lesser democracy, particularly with regard tothe democratic value of freedom from domination. For example, acritical theory of globalization could show that the democraticpotential of modern societies is being undermined by neoliberalglobalization and denationalization of economic policy. Such a theorysees the solution here to be the achievement of more democracy at theinternational level. It is also possible that the critical use ofdemocratic concepts may require reconceptualizing the democratic theorythat has informed much of Enlightenment criticism in Europeansocieties. Here critical theorists are then simply one sort ofparticipant in the ongoing internal work of redefining the democraticideal, not simply in showing the lack of its full realization.

Either way, radical democracy may no longer be the only means tosocial transformation, and indeed we may, with Marcuse, think thatpreserving the truths of the past, such as democratic constitutionalachievements, to be as important as imagining a new future. Given thenew situation, Critical Theory could now return to empirical socialinquiry to discover new potentials for improving democracy, especiallyin understanding how it may increase the scope and effectiveness ofpublic deliberation. In these various roles, critical theorists areparticipants in the democratic public sphere. One of the maincontinuing legacies of Critical Theory has been to see that democracyis “the unfinished project of modernity” (Habermas 1986, xi) andits further realization and transformation a genuine goal even incomplex and globalizing societies. To do so would entail a different,perhaps more reflexive notion of critical social inquiry, in whichdemocracy is not only the object of study but is itself understood as aform of social inquiry. Critical Theory would then have to change itsconception of what makes it practical and democratic.

In the next two sections, I will discuss two aspects of thistransformed conception of Critical Theory. First, I turn to the role ofsocial theory in this more pragmatic account of critical socialinquiry. Contrary to its origins in Marxian theoretical realism, Iargue for methodological and theoretical pluralism as the best form ofpractical social science aimed at human emancipation. Second, Iillustrate this conception in developing the outlines of a criticaltheory of globalization, in which greater democracy and nondominationare its goals. This theory also has a normative side, which is inquiryinto democracy itself outside of its familiar social container of thenation state. In this sense, it attempts not just to show constraintsbut also open possibilities. Critical Theorists have failed not only totake up the challenge of such new social circumstances but also therebyto reformulate democratic ideals in novel ways. I shift first to theunderstanding of the philosophy of social science that would help inthis rearticulation of Critical Theory as critical social inquiry as apractical and normative enterprise.

3. Critical Theory, Pragmatic Epistemology and the Social Sciences

Such a practical account of social inquiry has much in common withpragmatism, old and new (Bohman 1999a, 1999b). As with pragmatism,Critical Theory came gradually to reject the demand for a scientific orobjective basis of criticism grounded in a grand theory. This demandproved hard to square with the demands of social criticism directed toparticular audiences at particular times with their own distinctdemands and needs for liberation or emancipation. The first step was tomove the critical social scientist away from seeking a single unifyingtheory to employing many theories in diverse historical situations.Rather, it is better to start with agents’ own pretheoretical knowledgeand self-understandings. The issue for critical social inquiry is notonly how to relate pretheoretical and theoretical knowledge of thesocial world, but also how to move among different irreducibleperspectives. The second step is to show that such a practicalalternative not only provides the basis for robust social criticism,but also that it better accounts for and makes use of the pluralisminherent in various methods and theories of social inquiry. While it isfar from clear that all critical theorists understand themselves inthis way, most agree that only a practical form of critical inquiry canmeet the epistemic and normative challenges of social criticism andthus provide an adequate philosophical basis fulfilling the goals of acritical theory.

3.1 Critics, Observers, and Participants: Two Forms of Critical Theory

The philosophical problem that emerges in critical social inquiry isto identify precisely those features of its theories, methods, andnorms that are sufficient to underwrite social criticism. A closerexamination of paradigmatic works across the whole tradition fromMarx’sCapital (1871) to the Frankfurt School’sStudies inAuthority and the Family (1939) and Habermas’sTheory ofCommunicative Action (1982) reveals neither some distinctive formof explanation nor a special methodology that provides the necessaryand sufficient conditions for such inquiry. Rather, the best such worksemploy a variety of methods and styles of explanation and are ofteninterdisciplinary in their mode of research. What then gives them theircommon orientation and makes them all works of critical socialscience?

There are two common, general answers to the question of whatdefines these distinctive features of critical social inquiry: onepractical and the other theoretical. The latter claims that criticalsocial inquiry ought to employ a distinctive theory that unifies suchdiverse approaches and explanations. On this view, Critical Theoryconstitutes a comprehensive social theory that will unify the socialsciences and underwrite the superiority of the critic. The firstgeneration of Frankfurt School Critical Theory sought such a theory invain before dropping claims to social science as central to theirprogram in the late 1940s (Wiggershaus 1994). By contrast, according tothe practical approach, theories are distinguished by the form ofpolitics in which they can be embedded and the method of verificationthat this politics entails. But to claim that critical social scienceis best unified practically and politically rather than theoreticallyor epistemically is not to reduce it simply to democratic politics. Itbecomes rather the mode of inquiry that participants may adopt in theirsocial relations to others. The latter approach has been developed byHabermas and is now favored by Critical Theorists.

Before turning to such a practical interpretation of critical socialinquiry, it is first necessary to consider why the theoretical approachwas favored for so long and by so many Critical Theorists. First, ithas been long held that only a comprehensive social theory could unifycritical social science and thus underwrite a “scientific” basisfor criticism that goes beyond the limits of lay knowledge. Second, notonly must the epistemic basis of criticism be independent of agents’practical knowledge, but it might also be claimed that the correctnessof any explanation is independent of its desirable or undesirablepolitical effects on a specific audience. So conceived, socialcriticism is then a two-stage affair: first, inquirers independentlydiscover the best explanation using the available comprehensive theory;then, second, they persuasively communicate its critical consequencesto participants who may have false beliefs about their practices.

Starting with Marx’s historical materialism, large-scalemacrosociological and historical theories have long been held to be themost appropriate explanatory basis for critical social science.However, one problem is that comprehensiveness does not ensureexplanatory power. Indeed, there are many such large-scale theories,each with its own distinctive and exemplary social phenomena that guidean attempt at unification. A second problem is that a close examinationof standard critical explanations, such as the theory of ideology,shows that they typically appeal to a variety of different socialtheories (Bohman 1999b). Habermas’s actual employment of criticalexplanations bears this out. His criticism of modern societies turns onthe explanation of the relationship between two very differenttheoretical terms: a micro-theory of rationality based on communicativecoordination and a macro-theory of the systemic integration of modernsocieties in such mechanisms as the market (Habermas 1987).

Not only does the idea of a comprehensive theory presuppose that thereis one preferred mode of critical explanation, it also presupposesthat there is one preferred goal of social criticism, a socialistsociety that fulfills the norm of human emancipation. Only with such agoal in the background does the two-step process of employinghistorical materialism to establish an epistemically and normativelyindependent stance make sense. The validity of social criticism doesnot merely depend on its being accepted or rejected by those to whomit is addressed. Pluralistic inquiry suggests a different norm ofcorrectness: that criticism must be verified by those participating inthe practice and that this demand for practical verification is partof the process of inquiry itself.

Despite his ambivalence between theoretical and practical pluralism,Habermas has given good reasons to accept the practical and pluralistapproach. Just as in the analysis of modes of inquiry tied to distinctknowledge-constitutive interests, Habermas accepts that varioustheories and methods each have “a relative legitimacy.” Indeed,like Dewey he goes so far as to argue that the logic of socialexplanation is pluralistic and elides the “apparatus of generaltheories.” In the absence of any such general theories, the mostfruitful approach to social scientific knowledge is to bring all thevarious methods and theories into relation to each other:“Whereas the natural and the cultural or hermeneutic sciences arecapable of living in mutually indifferent, albeit more hostile thanpeaceful coexistence, the social sciences must bear the tension ofdivergent approaches under one roof …” (Habermas 1988, 3). InThe Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas casts criticalsocial theory in a similar pluralistic, yet unifying way. In discussingvarious accounts of societal modernization, for example, Habermasargues that the main existing theories have their own “particularlegitimacy” as developed lines of empirical research, and that CriticalTheory takes on the task of critically unifying the various theoriesand their heterogeneous methods and presuppositions. “CriticalTheory does not relate to established lines of research as acompetitor; rather, starting from its concept of the rise of modernsocieties, it attempts to explain the specific limitations and relativerights of those approaches” (Habermas 1987, 375).

This tension between unity and plurality leads in two differentdirections, one practical and the other theoretical. What might becalled the “Kantian” approach proceeds case by case, seeing theway in which these theories run up against their limits in trying toextend beyond the core phenomena of their domain of validity (Bohman1991, chapter 2). This approach is not theoretical in orientation, butmore akin to “social science with a practical intent” to useHabermas’s older vocabulary (Habermas 1971). The “Kantian” answeris given sharpest formulation by Weber in his philosophy of socialscience. While recognizing the hybrid nature of social science ascausal and interpretive, he sought explanations of particular phenomenathat united both dimensions. For example, in hisProtestant Ethicand the Spirit of Capitalism he brought the macroanalysis ofinstitutional structures together with the micro-analysis of economicrationality and religious belief (Weber 1958). According to thiscontrasting approach, “the relative rights and specificlimitations” of each theory and method are recognized by assigning themto their own particular (and hence limited) empirical domain ratherthan establishing these judgments of scope and domain through a morecomprehensive theory that encompasses all others.

The second approach may be termed “Hegelian.” Here theoristsseek to unify social scientific knowledge in broad comprehensivetheories that produce a general history of modern societies. Butgeneral theories provide “general interpretive frameworks” onwhich it is possible to construct “critical histories of thepresent” (McCarthy in Hoy and McCarthy 1994, 229–230). Even thisaccount of a comprehensive theory hardly eliminates competing historiesthat bring together different theories and methods. Rather than aimingat a single best history, “Hegelian” theories of this sort areseen as practical proposals whose critical purchase is seen in offeringa comprehensive interpretation of the present situation. They do notrely on the criteria of a theory of rationality often appealed to inthe Kantian approach, but still seem to justify particular moralclaims, such as claims concerning justice and injustice.

Habermas wants to straddle the divide between the Kantian and theHegelian approaches in his social theory of modernity. Why not seeHabermas’s theory of rationality as providing both a theoretical andpractical basis for Critical Theory? Certainly, this is how Habermassees the purpose of such a theory (Habermas 1984, chapter 1). Yet evenif this theory of rationality has to be understood in this way, itwould still have to avoid what Rorty calls “the ambiguity ofrationality,” between its statuses as “a cognitive faculty and amoral virtue.” For this reason, Rorty keeps them distinct. “Theepistemological notion of rationality concerns our relation tosomething nonhuman, whereas the moral notion concerns our relations toour fellow human beings” (Rorty 1996, 74). In a way similar to recentarguments in Putnam, Habermas now more strongly distinguishes betweenclaims to truth and the context of justification in which they aremade, even as he also wants to reject moral realism.

The problem for the practical conception of critical social inquiryis then to escape the horns of a dilemma: it should be neither purelyepistemic and thus overly cognitivist, nor purely moralistic. Neitherprovides sufficient critical purchase. In the case of the observer,there is too much distance, so much so that it is hard to see how thetheory can motivate criticism; in the case of the pure participantperspective, there is too little distance to motivate or justify anycriticism at all. It is also the same general theoretical andmethodological dilemma that characterizes the debates betweennaturalist and anti-naturalist approaches. While the former sees termssuch as rationality as explanans to explain away such phenomena asnorms, the latter argues that normative terms are not so reducible andthus figure in both explanans and explanandum. The best practicalaccount here reconciles Rorty’s ambiguity by putting theepistemological component in the social world, in our various cognitiveperspectives towards it that include the normative perspectives ofothers. The ambiguity is then the practical problem of adoptingdifferent points of view, something that reflective participants inself-critical practices must already be able to do by virtue of theircompetence.

Social Inquiry as Practical Knowledge

This shift to “perspective taking” is already implicit in thereflexivity of practical forms of Critical Theory. Rather than look forthe universal and necessary features of social scientific knowledge,Critical Theory has instead focused on the social relationships betweeninquirers and other actors in the social sciences. Such relationshipscan be specified epistemically in terms of the perspective taken by theinquirer on the actors who figure in their explanations orinterpretations. Seen in this way, the two dominant and opposedapproaches to social science adopt quite different perspectives. On theone hand, naturalism gives priority to the third-person or explanatoryperspective; on the other hand, the anti-reductionism of interpretivesocial science argues for the priority of first- and second-personunderstanding and so for an essential methodological dualism. CriticalTheory since Horkheimer has long attempted to offer an alternative toboth views.

Habermas and other Critical Theorists rightly call“technocratic” any social inquiry that only develops optimalproblem-solving strategies in light of purely third-person knowledge ofthe impersonal consequences of all available courses of action.Pragmatists from Mead to Dewey offer similar criticisms (Habermas 1971,1973; Dewey 1927b). This conception of practical knowledge would modelthe role of the social scientist in politics on the engineer, whomasterfully chooses the optimal solution to a problem of design. Forthe social scientistqua an ideally rational and informedactor, “the range of permissible solutions is clearly delimited,the relevant probabilities and utilities precisely specified, and eventhe criteria of rationality to be employed (e.g., maximization ofexpected utilities) is clearly stated” (Hempel 1965, 481). Thistechnocratic model of the social scientist as detached observer (ratherthan reflective participant) always needs to be contextualized in thesocial relationships it constitutes as a form of socially distributedpractical knowledge.

By contrast with the engineering model, interpretive social sciencetakes up the first-person perspective in making explicit themeaningfulness of an action or expression. Interpretations as practicalknowledge are not based on some general theory (no matter how helpfulor explanatory these may be when interpretation is difficult), butreconstruct agent’s own reasons, or at least how these reasons mightseem to be good ones from a first-person perspective. This leaves aninterpreter in a peculiar epistemic predicament: what started as theenterprise of seeing things from others’ points of view can at bestprovide the best interpretationfor us of how things arefor them. As a matter of interpretive responsibility, thereis no getting around the fact that ethnography or history is ourattempt “to see another form of life in the categories of ourown” (Geertz 1971, 16–17; Bohman 1991, 132). The only way out ofthis problem is to see that there is more than one form of practicalknowledge.

Naturalistic and hermeneutic approaches see the relationship of thesubject and object of inquiry as forcing the social scientist to takeeither the third-person or first-person perspective. However, criticalsocial science necessarily requires complex perspective taking and thecoordination of various points of view, minimally that of socialscientists with the subjects under study. The “second-personperspective” differs from both third-person observer and thefirst-person participant perspectives in its specific form of practicalknowledge. It employs the know-how of a participant in dialogue orcommunication (Bohman 2000). This perspective provides the alternativeto opposing perspectives especially when our first-person knowledge orthird-person theories get it wrong. When faced with interpretingothers’ behavior we quickly run into the limits of first-personknowledgesimpliciter. Third-person accounts face the same“gerrymandering problem” as made clear in the private languageargument (Brandom 1994, 28ff). Neither the interpreter’s nor theobserver’s perspectives are sufficient to specify these opaqueintentional contexts for others. For social scientists as well asparticipants in practices more generally, the adjudication of suchconflicts requires mutual perspective taking, which is its own mode ofpractical reasoning.

Theories of many different sorts locate interpretation as apractice, that is, in acts and processes of ongoing communication.Communication is seen from this perspective as the exercise of adistinctive form of practical rationality. A critical theory ofcommunicative action offers its own distinctive definition ofrationality, one that is epistemic, practical, and intersubjective. ForHabermas, for example, rationality consists not so much in thepossession of particular knowledge, but rather in “how speakingand acting subjects acquire and use knowledge” (Habermas 1984, 11). Anysuch account is “pragmatic” because it shares a number ofdistinctive features with other views that see interpreters ascompetent and knowledgeable agents. Most importantly, a pragmaticapproach develops an account of practical knowledge in the“performative attitude,” that is, from the point of view of acompetent speaker. A theory of rationality can be a reconstruction ofthe practical knowledge necessary for establishing socialrelationships. This reconstruction is essential to understanding thecommitments of the reflective participant, including the critic.

There are two general arguments for a theory that assumes theirreducibility of such a perspective. The first is that interpreting isnot merely describing something. Rather, it establishes commitments andentitlements between the interpreter and the one interpreted. Second,in doing so the interpreter takes up particularnormativeattitudes. These “normative attitudes” must be those of theinterpreted. In interpreting one is not just reporting, but ratherexpressing and establishing one’s attitude toward a claim, such as whenthe interpreter takes the interpreted to say something to be true, orto perform an act that is appropriate according to social norms. Somesuch attitudes are essentially two-person attitudes: the interpreterdoes not just express an attitude in the first-person perspectivealone, but rather incurs a commitment or obligation to others byinterpreting what others are doing (Brandom 1994, 79). To offer aninterpretation that is accepted is to make explicit the operativesocial norms and thus to establish the normative terms of a socialrelationship.

The critical attitude shares with the interpretive stance astructure derived from the second-person perspective. Here an agent’sbeliefs, attitudes, and practices cannot only be interpreted asmeaningful or not, but must also be assessed as correct, incorrect, orinconclusive. Nonetheless, the second-person perspective is not yetsufficient for criticism. In order for an act of criticism itself to beassessed as correct or incorrect, it must often resort to tests fromthe first- and third-person perspectives as well. The reflectiveparticipant must take up all stances; she assumes no single normativeattitude as proper for all critical inquiry. Only such an“interperspectival” stance is fully dialogical, giving theinquirer and agent equal standing. If indeed all cooperative socialactivities “involve a moment of inquiry” (Putnam 1994, 174), thenthey also need a moment of self-reflection on the assumptions of suchinquiry itself. It is this type of reflection that calls for adistinctively practical form of critical perspective taking. Ifcritical social inquiry is inquiry into the basis of cooperativepractices as such, it takes practical inquiry one reflective stepfurther. The inquirer does not carry out this step alone, but ratherwith the public whom the inquirer addresses. As in Kuhn’s distinctionbetween normal and revolutionary science, second-order criticalreflection considers whether or not the framework for cooperationitself needs to be changed, thus whether new terms of cooperation arenecessary to solve problems.

Various perspectives for inquiry are appropriate in differentcritical situations. If it is to identify all the problems withcooperative practices of inquiry, it must be able to occupy and accountfor a variety of perspectives. Only then will it enable publicreflection among free and equal participants. Such problems haveemerged for example in the practices of inquiry surrounding thetreatment of AIDS. The continued spread of the epidemic and lack ofeffective treatments brought about a crisis in expert authority, an“existential problematic situation” in Dewey’s sense (Dewey 1938,492). By defining expert activity through its social consequences andby making explicit the terms of social cooperation between researchersand patients, lay participants reshape the practices of gaining medicalknowledge and authority (Epstein 1996, Part II). The affected publicchanged the normative terms of cooperation and inquiry in this area inorder that institutions could engage in acceptable first-order problemsolving. If expertise is to be brought under democratic control,reflective inquiry into scientific practices and their operative normsis necessary (Bohman 1999a). This public challenge to the norms onwhich expert authority is based may be generalized to all forms ofresearch in cooperative activity. It suggests the transformation ofsome of the epistemological problems of the social sciences into thepractical question of how to make their forms of inquiry and researchopen to public testing and public accountability. This demand alsomeans that some sort of “practical verification” of criticalsocial inquiry is necessary.

3.3 Pluralism and Critical Inquiry

A practical approach to Critical Theory responds to pluralism in thesocial sciences in two ways, once again embracing and reconciling bothsides of the traditional opposition between epistemic (explanatory) andnon-epistemic (interpretive) approaches to normative claims. On the onehand, it affirms the need for general theories, while weakening thestrong epistemic claims made for them in underwriting criticism. On theother hand, it situates the critical inquirer in the pragmaticsituation of communication, seeing the critic as making a strong claimfor the truth or rightness of his critical analysis. This is apresupposition of the critic’s discourse, without which it would makeno sense to engage in criticism of others.

A good test case for the practical and pluralist conception ofCritical Theory based on perspective taking would be to give a moreprecise account of the role of general theories and social scientificmethods in social criticism, including moral theories or theories ofnorms. Rather than serving a justifying role in criticisms for theirtransperspectival comprehensiveness, theories are better seen asinterpretations that are validated by the extent to which they open upnew possibilities of action that are themselves to be verified indemocratic inquiry. Not only that, but every such theory is itselfformulated from within a particular perspective. General theories arethen best seen as practical proposals whose critical purchase is notmoral and epistemic independence but practical and public testingaccording to criteria of interpretive adequacy. This means that it isnot the theoretical or interpretive framework that is decisive, but thepractical ability in employing such frameworks to cross variousperspectives in acts of social criticism. In the above example, it isaccomplished in taking the patients’ perspectives seriously in alteringpractices of medical inquiry into AIDS.

Why is this practical dimension decisive for democratizingscientific authority? There seems to be an indefinite number ofperspectives from which to formulate possible general histories of thepresent. Merely to identify a number of different methods and a numberof different theories connected with a variety of different purposesand interests leaves the social scientist in a rather hopelessepistemological dilemma.Either the choice among theories,methods, and interests seems utterly arbitrary,or theCritical Theorist has some special epistemic claim to survey the domainand make the proper choice for the right reason. The skeptical horn ofthe dilemma is embraced by “new pragmatists” like Richard Rorty(Rorty 1991) and Max Weber (1949) alike, who see all such knowledge aspurpose-relative. The latter, perhaps Hegelian horn demands objectivistclaims for social science generally and for the epistemic superiorityof the Critical Theorist in particular--claims that Habermas and otherCritical Theorists have been at pains to reject (Weber 1949; Habermas1973, 38). Is there any way out of the epistemic dilemma of pluralismthat would preserve the possibility of criticism without endorsingepistemic superiority?

The way out of this dilemma has already been indicated by areflexive emphasis on the social context of critical inquiry and thepractical character of social knowledge it employs. It addresses thesubjects of inquiry as equal reflective participants, as knowledgeablesocial agents. In this way, the asymmetries of the context of technicalcontrol are suspended; this means that critical social inquiry must bejudged by a different set of practical consequences, appealing to anincrease in the “reflective knowledge” that agents alreadypossess to a greater or lesser degree. As agents in the social worldthemselves, social scientists participate in the creation of thecontexts in which their theories are publicly verified. The goal ofcritical inquiry is then not to control social processes or even toinfluence the decisions that agents might make in any determinate sortof way. Instead, its goal is to initiate public processes ofself-reflection (Habermas, 1971, 40–41). Such a process of deliberationis not guaranteed success in virtue of some comprehensive theory.Rather, the critic seeks to promote just those conditions of democracythat make it the best available process upon the adequate reflection ofall those affected. This would include reflection of the democraticprocess itself. When understood as solely dependent upon thesuperiority of theoretical knowledge, the critic has no foothold in thesocial world and no way to choose among the many competing approachesand methods. The publicity of a process of practical verificationentails its own particular standards of critical success or failurethat are related to social criticism as an act of interpretationaddressed to those who are being criticized. An account of suchstandards then has to be developed in terms of the sort of abilitiesand competences that successful critics exhibit in their criticism.Once more this reveals a dimension of pluralism in the social sciences:the pluralism of social perspectives. As addressed to others in apublic by a speaker as a reflective participant in a practice,criticism certainly entails the ability to take up the normativeattitudes of multiple pragmatic perspectives in the communication inwhich acts of criticism are embedded.

3.4 Reflexivity, Perspective Taking and Practical Verification

If the argument of the last section is correct, a pragmatic accountis inevitably methodologically, theoretically, and perspectivallypluralistic. Any kind of social scientific method orexplanation-producing theory can be potentially critical. There are nospecific or definitive social scientific methods of criticism ortheories that uniquely justify the critical perspective. One reason forthis is that there is no unique critical perspective, nor should therebe one for a reflexive theory that provides a social scientific accountof acts of social criticism and their conditions of pragmaticsuccess.

The standard ideas of ideology critique exhibit the problems with asolely third-person model of criticism dependent on some idea of thetheorists being able to discern the “real interests” ofparticipants (Geuss 1981). Rather than claiming objectivity in atransperspectival sense, most practically oriented Critical Theoristshave always insisted that their form of social inquiry takes a“dual perspective” (Habermas 1996, chapter 1; Bohman 1991,chapter 4). This dual perspective has been expressed in many differentways. Critical Theorists have always insisted that critical approacheshave dual methods and aims: they are both explanatory and normative atthe same time, adequate both as empirical descriptions of the socialcontext and as practical proposals for social change. This dualperspective has been consistently maintained by Critical Theorists intheir debates about social scientific knowledge, whether it is withregard to the positivism dispute, universal hermeneutics, or micro- ormacro-sociological explanations.

In the dispute about positivist social science, Critical Theoristsrejected all forms of reductionism and insisted on the explanatory roleof practical reason. In disputes about interpretation, CriticalTheorists have insisted that social science not make a forced choicebetween explanation and understanding. Even if social scientists canonly gain epistemic access to social reality through interpretation,they cannot merely repeat what agents know practically in their“explanatory understanding.” Here we might think of explanationsthat create micro- and macro linkages, as between intentional actionspursued by actors for their own purposes and their unintended effectsdue to interdependencies of various sorts. Such dual perspectiveexplanations and criticism both allow the reflective distance ofcriticism and the possibility of mediating the epistemic gap betweenthe participants’ more internal and the critics’ more external point ofview. Given the rich diversity of possible explanations and stances,contemporary social science has developed a variety of possible ways toenhance critical perspective taking.

Such a dual perspective provides a more modest conception ofobjectivity: it is neither transperspectival objectivity nor atheoretical metaperspective, but always operates across the range ofpossible practical perspectives that knowledgeable and reflectivesocial agents are capable of taking up and employing practically intheir social activity. It is achieved in various combinations ofavailable explanations and interpretive stances. With respect todiverse social phenomena at many different levels, critical socialinquiry has employed various explanations and explanatory strategies.Marx’s historical social theory permitted him to relate functionalexplanations of the instability of profit-maximizing capitalism to thefirst-person experiences of workers. In detailed historical analyses,feminist and ethnomethodological studies of the history of science havebeen able to show the contingency of normative practices (Epstein 1996;Longino 1990). They have also adopted various interpretive stances.Feminists have shown how supposedly neutral or impartial norms havebuilt-in biases that limit their putatively universal character withrespect to race, gender, and disability (Mills 1997; Minnow 1990, Young2002). In all these cases, claims to scientific objectivity or moralneutrality are exposed by showing how they fail to pass the test ofpublic verification by showing how the contours of their experiences donot fit the self-understanding of institutional standards of justice(Mills 1997; Mansbridge 1991). Such criticism requires holding bothone’s own experience and the normative self-understanding of thetradition or institution together at the same time, in order to exposebias or cognitive dissonance. It uses expressions of vivid first-personexperiences to bring about cross-perspectival insights in actors whocould not otherwise see the limits of their cognitive and communicativeactivities.

In these cases, why is it so important to cross perspectives? Herethe second-person perspective has a special and self-reflexive statusfor criticism. Consider the act of crossing from the first-personplural or “we perspective” to the second-person perspective intwo reflexive practices: science and democracy. In the case of sciencethe community of experts operates according to the norm of objectivity,the purpose of which is to guide scientific inquiry and justify itsclaims to communal epistemic authority. The biases inherent in theseoperative norms have been unmasked in various critical science studiesand by many social movements. For Longino, such criticism suggests theneed for a better norm of objectivity, “measured against thecognitive needs of a genuinely democratic community” (Longino 1990,236). This connection can be quite direct, as when empirical studiesshow that existing forms of participation are highly correlated withhigh status and income, that lower income and status citizens wereoften unwilling to participate in a public forum for fear of publichumiliation (Verba, et al 1995, Mansbridge 1991, Kelly 2000). Adoptingthe second-person perspective of those who cannot effectivelyparticipate does not simply unmask egalitarian or meritocratic claimsabout political participation, but rather also suggests why criticalinquiry ought to seek new forums and modes of public expression (Young2002, Bohman 1996).

The practical alternative offers a solution to this problem bytaking critical social theory in the direction of a pragmaticreinterpretation of the verification of critical inquiry that turnsseemingly intractable epistemic problems into practical ones. The roleof critical social science is to supply methods for making explicitjust the sort of self-examination necessary for on-going normativeregulation of social life. This practical regulation includes thegoverning norms of critical social science itself. Here the relation oftheory to practice is a different one than among the originalpragmatists: more than simply clarifying the relation of means and endsfor decisions on particular issues, these social sciences demandreflection upon institutionalized practices and their norms ofcooperation. Reflective practices cannot remain so without criticalsocial inquiry, and critical social inquiry can only be tested in suchpractices. One possible epistemic improvement is the transformation ofsocial relations of power and authority into contexts of democraticaccountability among political equals (Bohman 1999a; Epstein 1996).

Properly reconstructed, critical social inquiry is the basis for abetter understanding of the social sciences as the distinctive form ofpractical knowledge in modern societies. Their capacity to initiatecriticism not only makes them the democratic moment in modern practicesof inquiry; that is, the social are democratic to the extent that theyare sufficiently reflexive and can initiate discussion of the socialbasis of inquiry within a variety of institutional contexts. Normativecriticism is thus not only based on the moral and cognitive distancecreated by relating and crossing various perspectives; it also has apractical goal. It seeks to expand each normative perspective indialogical reflection and in this way make human beings more aware ofthe circumstances that restrict their freedom and inhibit the full,public use of their practical knowledge. One such salient circumstanceis the long-term historical process of globalization. What is adistinctively critical theory of globalization that aims at such a formof practical knowledge? How might such a theory contribute to wishesand struggles of the age, now that such problematic situations aretransnational and even global? What normative standards can criticsappeal to, if not those immanent in liberalism? While in the nextsection I will certainly talk about critical theorists, I will alsoattempt to do critical social inquiry that combines normative andempirical perspectives with the aim of realizing greater and perhapsnovel forms of democracy where none presently exist.

4. A Critical Theory of Globalization: Democratic Inquiry, Transnational Critical Theory

While the standard theories of globalization deal with large scale andmacrosociological processes, the social fact of globalization is notuniform; differently situated actors experience it differently. Thismakes it exemplary for pluralist and multiperspectival socialinquiry. It is also exemplary in another sense. As a social fact thatis not uniform in its consequences, globalization cannot bereconstructed from the internal perspective of any single democraticpolitical community, it requires a certain kind of practicallyoriented knowledge about the possibilities of realising norms andideals inpraxis and is thus a theory of democratization, ofcreating a political space where none now exists. We may call thispractical theory of praxis a “praxeology” (Linklater 2001,38). Though the use of the term “praxeology” can betraced back to the work of Ludwig von Mises and even earlier to AlfredEspinas, Linklater’s use derives from the way the term is employed inRaymond Aron’s work (Aron 2003, 577). The purpose of praxeology, inthis sense, is inquiry into the “knowing how” of practicalnormative knowledge, that is, how it is that norms are ongoinglyinterpreted, realized, and enacted under particular social andhistorical circumstances. A critical and praxeological theory ofglobalization must therefore solve two pressing internal problems:first, how to organize social inquiry within and among transnationalinstitutions more democratically; and, second, it must show thesalient differences between national and transnational institutionsand public spheres so that the democratic influence over globalizationbecomes a more tractable problem with feasible solutions.

Current theories of globalization are primarily macro-sociologicaland focus primarily on globalization as imposing constraints ondemocratic institutions. While not denying that globalization is such afact, its explanations can become more critical and practical by alsoshowing how globalizing processes open up new institutionalpossibilities and new forms of publicity (Bohman 2003). In order totest these possibilities, this theory must make itself a more open andmultiperspectival practice; it must become a global critical theory. Itis in this context that we can press the questions of the normativeadequacy of the democratic ideal that has been inherited from modernliberalism. Indeed, many critical theorists who defend a“cosmopolitan” conception of democracy have a surprisinglystandard conception of how democracy is best organized discursively anddeliberatively. For this reason, they have not asked the questionwhether such practices are able to sustain a sufficiently robust andcooperative form of inquiry under the new global circumstances ofpolitical interdependence.

4.1 Social Facts, Normative Ideals and Multiperspectival Theory

In what respect can it be said that this novel sort of practical andcritical social science should be concerned with social facts? A socialscientific praxeology understands facts in relation to human agencyrather than independent of it. Pragmatic social science is concernednot merely with elaborating an ideal in convincing normative arguments,but also with its realizability and its feasibility. In this regard,any political ideal must take into account general social facts if itis to be feasible; but it must also be able to respond to a series ofsocial facts that ground skeptical challenges suggesting thatcircumstances make such an ideal impossible. With respect to democracy,these facts include, expertise and the division of labor, culturalpluralism and conflict, social complexity and differentiation, andglobalization and increasing social interdependence, to name a few. Incases where “facts” challenge the very institutional basis ofmodern political integration, normative practical inquiry must seek toextend the scope of political possibilities rather than simply acceptthe facts as fixing the limits of political possibilities once and forall. For this reason, social science is practical to the extent that itis able to show how political ideals that have informed theseinstitutions in question are not only still possible, but also feasibleunder current conditions or modification of those conditions. As I havebeen arguing, the ideal in question for pragmatism and recent criticalsocial theory inspired by pragmatism is a robust and deliberative formof self-rule—also a key aspect of Critical Theory’s widerhistorical ideal of human emancipation and freedom from domination.

The issue of realizability has to do with a variety of constraints.On the one hand, democracy requires voluntary constraints on action,such as commitments to basic rights and to constitutional limits onpolitical power. Social facts, on the other hand, are non-voluntaryconstraints, or within our problematic, constraints that condition thescope of the application of democratic principles. Taken up in apractical social theory oriented to suggesting actions that mightrealize the ideal of democracy in modern society, social facts nolonger operate simply as constraints. For Rawls, “the fact ofpluralism” (or the diversity of moral doctrines in modern societies) isjust one such permanent feature of modern society that is directlyrelevant to political order, because its conditions “profoundlyaffect the requirements of a workable conception of justice” (Rawls1999, 424).

This is not yet a complete story. Social facts such as pluralismhave become “permanent” only to the extent that moderninstitutions and ideals developed after the Wars of Religion, includingconstitutional democracy and freedom of expression, promote rather thaninhibit their development. This fact of pluralism thus alters how weare to think of thefeasibility of a political ideal, but doesnot touch on its realizability or possibility. Similarly, the“fact of coercion,” understood as the fact that any politicalorder created around a single doctrine would require oppressive use ofstate power, concerns not the realizability or possibility of aparticular ideal, but its feasibility as “a stable and unifiedorder,” under the conditions of pluralism (Rawls 1999, 225). Thus, forRawls, regardless of whether they<unclear referent> areconsidered in terms of possibility or feasibility, they are onlyconsidered asconstraints—as restricting what ispolitically possible or what can be brought about by political actionand power. In keeping with the nature and scope of entrenchedpluralism, not all actors and groups experience the constraints ofpluralism in the same way: from the perspective of some groups,pluralism enables their flourishing; for others, it may be anobstacle.

If this were the only role of putative “facts” in Rawls’political theory of modernity, then it would not be a full practicaltheory in the sense that I am using the term here. Rawls’ contributionis that social facts differ in kind, so that some, such as the fact ofpluralism, are “permanent” and not merely to be considered innarrow terms of functional stability. Social facts related to stabilitymay indeed constrain feasibility without being limits on thepossibility or realizability of an ideal as such; in the case ofpluralism, for example, democratic political ideals other thanliberalism might be possible. Without locating a necessary connectionbetween its relations to feasibility and possibility, describing asocial fact as “permanent” is not entirely accurate. It is betterinstead to think of such facts as “institutional facts” that aredeeply entrenched in some historically contingent, specific socialorder rather than as universal normative constraints on democraticinstitutions.

This approach allows us to see the “facts” of modern societiesas practical: they are precisely those determinations that are embeddedin relatively long-term social processes, whose consequences cannot bereversed in a short period of time—such as a generation— bypolitical action. Practical theories thus have to consider the ways inwhich such facts become part of a constructive process that might becalled “generative entrenchment” (Wimstatt 1974, 67–86). By“entrenchment of social facts,” I mean that the relevantdemocratic institutions promote the very conditions that make theinstitutional social fact possible in assuming those conditions fortheir own possibility. When the processes at work in the social factthen begin to outstrip particular institutional feedback mechanismsthat maintain it within the institution, then the institution must betransformed if it is to stand in the appropriate relation to the factsthat make it feasible and realizable. All institutions, includingdemocratic ones, entrench some social facts in realizing theirconditions of possibility.

Consider Habermas’ similar use of social facts with respect toinstitutions. As with Rawls, for Habermas pluralism and the need forcoercive political power make the constitutional state necessary, sothat the democratic process of law making is governed by a system ofpersonal, social, and civil rights. However, Habermas introduces a morefundamental social fact for the possibility and feasibility ofdemocracy: the structural fact of social complexity. Complex societiesare “polycentric,” with a variety of forms of order, some ofwhich, such as non-intentional market coordination, do not necessarilyhave to answer to the ideals of democracy. This fact of complexitylimits political participation and changes the nature of ourunderstanding of democratic institutions. Indeed, this fact makes itsuch that the principles of democratic self-rule and the criteria ofpublic agreement cannot be asserted simply as the proper norms for allsocial and political institutions, and this seems ideally suited tounderstanding how globalization limits the capacity of democracy toentrench itself. As Habermas puts it, “unavoidable socialcomplexity makes it impossible to apply the criteria [of democraticlegitimacy] in an undifferentiated way” (Habermas 1996, 305). This factmakes a certain kind of structure ineluctable; since complexity meansthat democracy can “no longer control the conditions under whichit is realized.” In this case, the social fact has become“unavoidable,” and certain institutions are necessary for thesocial integration to which there is “no feasible alternative” (Habermas 2001 122).

While plausible, this claim lacks empirical evidence. Habermas hereoverestimates the constraining character of this “fact,” whichdoes little to restrict a whole range of indirect, institutionallymediated institutional designs. These mediated forms of democracy wouldin turn affect the conditions that produce social complexity itself andthus stand in a feedback relation to them. The consequences of the“fact” of social complexity is thus not the same across allfeasible, self-entrenching institutional realizations of democracy, andsome ideals of democracy may rightly encourage the preservation ofaspects of complexity, such as the ways in which the epistemic divisionof labour may promote wider and more collaborative problem solving anddeliberation on ends. How might this alternative conception of socialfacts guide a critical and praxeological theory of globalization?

When seen in light of the requirements of practical social science andthe entrenchment of facts and conditions by institutions,constructivists are right to emphasise how agents produce and maintainsocial realities, even if not under conditions of their own making. Inthis context an important contribution of pragmatism is precisely itsinterpretation of the practical status of social facts. Thus, Deweysees social facts as always related to “problematicsituations,” even if these are more felt or suffered than fullyrecognised as such. The way to avoid turning problematic situationsinto empirical-normative dilemmas is, as Dewey suggests, to see evenfacts practically: “facts are such in a logical sense only asthey serve to delimit a problem in a way that affords indication andtest of proposed solutions” (Dewey 1938, 499). They may servethis practical role only if they are seen in interaction with ourunderstanding of the ideals that guide the practices in which suchproblems emerge, thus where neither fact nor ideal is fixed andneither is given justificatory or theoretical priority.

The debate between Dewey and Lippmann about the public sphere andits role in democracy is precisely praxeological in the sense that Idefined the term earlier. In response to Lippmann’s insistence on thepreeminence of expertise, Dewey criticised “existing politicalpractice” for the reason that it largely ignored “occupationalgroups and the organized knowledge and purposes that are involved inthe existence of such groups, manifests a dependence upon a summationof individuals quantitatively” (Dewey 1927a, 50–51). At the same time,he recognised that existing institutions were obstacles to theemergence of such a form of participatory democracy in an era when“the machine age has enormously expanded, multiplied,intensified, and complicated the scope of indirect consequences” ofcollective action and where the collectives—affected by actionsof such a scope—are so large and diverse “that theresultant public cannot identify and distinguish itself” (Dewey 1927b,314). Dewey saw the solution in a transformation both of what it is tobe a public and of the institutions with which the public interacts.Such interaction will provide the basis for determining how thefunctions of the new form of political organization will be limited andexpanded, the scope of which is “something to be critically andexperimentally determined” in democracy as a mode of practical inquiry(Dewey 1927b, 281). The question is not just one of current politicalfeasibility, but also of possibility, given that we want to remaincommitted in some broad sense to democratic principles of self-ruleeven if not to the set of possibilities provided by currentinstitutions. How do we identify such fundamentally unsettling facts? Iturn next to the discussion of a specific social fact, the “factof globalization” and interpret it not as a uniform and aggregativeprocess but as a problematic situation that is experienced in differentand even contradictory ways at different locations and from a varietyof perspectives, and is differently assessed with respect to differentnormative ideals of democracy. Since this is a relatively recent andunsettled debate, through this example we can see Critical Theory inthe making.

4.2 The Fact of Globalization and the Possibility of Democracy

For some critical theorists, the relatively “new” fact ofglobalization permits a direct inference to the need for new and morecosmopolitan forms of democracy and citizenship. Whatever the specificform these assume in future institutions, the usual arguments forpolitical cosmopolitanism are relatively simple despite the fact thatthe social scientific analyses employed in them are highly complex andempirically differentiated in their factual claims. In discussions oftheories of globalization, the fact of global interdependence refers tothe unprecedented extent, intensity, and speed of social interactionsacross borders, encompassing diverse dimensions of human conduct fromtrade and cultural exchange to migration (Held, et al 1999). Theinference from these facts of interdependence is that existing forms ofdemocracy within the nation-state must be transformed and thatinstitutions ought to be established that solve problems that transcendnational boundaries (Held 1995, 98–101). Thus, globalization is takento be a macro-sociological, aggregative fact that constrains therealization of democracy so long as the proper congruence betweendecision makers and decision takers is lacking. Globalization is thustaken as a constraint on democracy as it is realized in existingliberal representative systems. The Deweyan alternative is to see thatfacts “have to be determined in their dual function as obstaclesand as resources,” as problems that also hold out the conditions thatmake the transformation of the situation possible (Dewey 1938,399–400). The “mere” fact of the wider scale of interaction isthus inadequate on its own and does not capture what role globalizationmay play as a problematic situation for the emergence of new democraticpossibilities.

A pragmatic interpretation of social facts in this way encourages usto see globalization as Janus-faced, as an obstacle and as a resourcefor the realization of democratic ideals. This sort of theory seesglobalization not as a unitary but rather as a multidimensionalprocess. Even the notion of “complex interdependence” can bemisleading insofar as it falsely suggests the telos of an increasinglyintegrated world or an increasingly homogeneous culture or politicalcommunity (Keohane 2000, 117). A pragmatic analysis is better served bya concept such as “interconnectedness” as opposed tointerdependence to the extent that interdependence suggests convergenceand levels the differences in the ways in which globalization isexperienced. Rather, it is important here, as in the case of the factof pluralism, to see that this process can be experienced in differentways by different peoples or political communities, given that it is amultifaceted and multidimensional process producing “differentialinterconnectedness in different domains” (Held et al 1999, 27). In somedomains such as global financial markets, globalization is profoundlyuneven and deeply stratified reinforcing hierarchies and distributiveinequalities. Inequalities of access to and control over aspects ofglobalizing processes may reflect older patterns of subordination andorder, even while the process produces new ones by excluding somecommunities from financial markets and by making others more vulnerableto its increased volatility (Hurrell and Woods 1999).

If these descriptions are correct, the fact of globalization is anew sort of social fact whose structure of enablement and constraint isnot easily captured at the aggregative level. It is even experienced incontradictory ways looking at its consequences and impacts that differacross various domains and at various locations. Institutions can onlymanage the problems of globalization in ways that consider theinterests of everyone by having mechanisms that ensure that the fullrange of perspectives is available for inquiry. This requires thatinternational financial institutions extent their forms of inquiry toinclude issues such as the social disintegration and dominationproduced by their policies (Rodrik 1994, Woods 2001).

One further question about the fact of globalization must be raisedin order to understand the inherent possibilities for democracy in it.Is globalization a “permanent” fact for democracy as Rawlsdescribed the fact of pluralism for liberalism in that it is deeplyembedded in its possible realizations? As many social theorists haveargued, globalization is part of interlocking and long-term socialprocesses beginning in early modernity; as Anthony Giddens put it,“modernity is inherently globalizing” (Giddens 1990, 63). Even ifreversing such processes were possible, it is not feasible in any shorttime span and under the democratic constraints. As with Rawls’ fact ofpluralism, so long as “globalizing” societies are democratic, wecan expect such processes to continue. This is not to say thatglobalization in its current form is somehow permanent or unalterableif we want to realize democratic ideals. Indeed, just how globalizationwill continue, and under what legitimate normative constraints, becomethe proper questions for democratic politics, as citizens and publicvigorously interact with those institutions that make globalization adeeply entrenched and temporally stable social fact. Howeverentrenched, the social fact of globalization still remains open todemocratic reconstruction, should creative reinterpretation ofdemocracy come about. In the next section, I examine recent debatesamong Critical Theorists about the significance of the European Unionas a model for a genuine transformation of democracy.

5. The Emerging Ideal of a Multiperspectival Democracy: The European Union

The analysis thus far has taken a robust ideal of democracy forgranted consisting of self-rule by the public deliberation of free andequal citizens—the ideal of deliberative democracy that informsboth pragmatism and Critical Theory (Bohman 2004). Given the uneven andpotentially contradictory consequences of globalization, it seems clearthat current democratic institutions themselves cannot be responsive toall the dimensions of domination and subordination that are possibleconsidering the scale and intensity of interconnectedness. What are thealternatives? It is not just a matter of exercising an institutionalimagination within broadly understood democratic norms and ideals.Informed by democratic ideals of non-domination, the practicalknowledge needed to promote the democratising of uneven andhierarchical social relations requires an empirical analysis of currenttransformations and its embedded possibilities. The democratic ideal ofautonomy leads David Held and others to emphasise the emergingstructures of international law that produce a kind of binding power ofcollective decisions. Others look to ways of reforming the structuresof representation of current international institutions (Pogge 1997,Habermas 2001). Still others look to the emergence of variousinstitutions in the European Union (EU) to discuss the trend towardinternational constitutionalism or supranational deliberation.

According to the sort of plurality of perspectives endorsed by apragmatist philosophy of social science, a historical account of theemergence of single and multiple institutions would be helpful. InGerald Ruggie’s masterful analysis of the development of a globalorder beyond the nation-state, he shows that the modern sovereignstate and the social empowerment of citizens emerged within the sameepistemic era as the single point perspective in painting,cartography, or optics. “The concept of sovereignty thenrepresented merely the doctrinal counterpart of the application ofsingle point perspective to the organization of political space”(Ruggie, 2000, 186). Unbundling sovereignty would lead to newpolitical possibilities, including the re-articulation ofinternational political space in a new way that cannot be anticipatedin dominant theories of international relations. Focusing on theshifts in the authority of states and the development of the EuropeanUnion, Ruggie sees the “EU as the first multiperspectival polityto emerge in the modern era” and thus the emergence of a newpolitical form. The concept of “the multiperspectivalform” does seem to offer “a lens through which to viewother possible instances of international transformation today”(Ruggie 2000, 196). Such an account also applies to the theory ofpractical knowledge that might inform reflection on the possibilitiesof democracy in an era of uneven globalization.

If the political authority that now promotes globalization is toanswer to democratic will formation, the institutions in which suchpublic deliberation takes place must seek to become explicitlymultiperspectival in Ruggie’s sense. The positive conditions for suchan extension of current political possibilities already exist in thefact of interdependence—the emergence of greater socialinteraction among citizens who participate in vibrant interactionacross transnational civil society and within emerging global publicspheres. In order to develop the framework for such anormative-practical praxeology for emerging multiperspectivalinstitutions, pragmatism and Critical Theory once again suggestthemselves: here Dewey’s testable claim that it is the interaction ofpublic and institutions that promotes democracy and democratic inquiry.However important giving greater powers to the European Parliament maybe, parliamentary politics at best serves a mediating role amongtransnational and national institutions and is not the sole means todemocratisation (Habermas 2001). Given that such institutions cannoteasily be scaled up and retain their full democratic character, it isnecessary to look to a different institutional level: to thepossibility of new forms of social inquiry that may be developing inthe problem-solving mechanisms of the European Union.

5.1 The Multiperspectival Public Sphere: The Critical and Innovative Potential of Transnational Interaction

How might new forms of inquiry emerge that are able to accommodate agreater number of perspectives and also remain democratic? Here we needagain to distinguish between first- and second-order forms ofdeliberation, where the latter develops in order to accommodate anemergent public with new perspectives and interests. Dewey sees thenormal, problem-solving functioning of democratic institutions as basedon robust interaction between publics and institutions within a set ofconstrained alternatives. When the institutional alternativesimplicitly address a different public than is currently constituted byevolving institutional practice and its consequences, the public mayact indirectly and self-referentially by forming a new public withwhich the institutions must interact. This interaction initiates aprocess of democratic renewal in which publics organise and areorganised by new emerging institutions with a different alternative setof political possibilities. Of course, this is a difficult process:“to form itself the public has to break existing political forms;this is hard to do because these forms are themselves the regular meansfor instituting political change” (Dewey 1927b, 255). This sort ofinnovative process describes the emergence of those transnationalpublics that are indirectly affected by the new sorts of authoritativeinstitutions brought about by managing “deregulation” andglobalization. This account of democratic learning and innovation seemsnot to be limited by the scope of the institutions, even as thepotential for domination also increases under current arrangements.

What sort of public sphere could play such a normative role? Indifferentiated modern societies (that is, societies divided intomultiple economic and social spheres such as markets, a state, civilsociety and so on), one role of the distinctive communication that goeson in the public sphere is to raise topics or express concerns that cutacross social spheres: it not only circulates information about thestate and the economy, but it also establishes a forum for criticism inwhich the boundaries of these spheres are crossed, primarily incitizen’s demands for mutual accountability. But the other side of thisgeneralization is a requirement for communication that crosses socialdomains: such a generalization is necessary precisely because thepublic sphere has become less socially and culturally homogeneous andmore internally differentiated than its early modern form (Habermas1989). Instead of appealing to an assumed common norm of“publicity” or a set of culturally specific practices ofcommunication, acosmopolitan public sphere is created when atleast two culturally rooted public spheres begin to overlap andintersect, as when translations and conferences create a cosmopolitanpublic sphere in various academic disciplines. Instead of relying onthe intrinsic features of the medium to expand communicativeinteraction, networks that are global in scope become publics only withthe development and expansion of transnational civil society. Thecreation of such a civil society is a slow and difficult process thatrequires the highly reflexive forms of communication and boundarycrossing and accountability typical of developed public spheres. On thebasis of their common knowledge of violations of publicity, theirmembers will develop the capacities of public reason to cross andnegotiate boundaries and differences between persons, groups, andcultures.

In such boundary-crossing publics, the speed, scale, and intensityof communicative interaction facilitated by networks such as theInternet provides a positive and enabling condition for democraticdeliberation and thus creates a potential space for cosmopolitandemocracy. Such a development hardly demands that the public sphere be“integrated with media systems of matching scale that occupy the samesocial space as that over which economic and political decision willhave an impact” (Garnham 1995, 265). But if the way to do this isthrough disaggregated networks (such as the Internet) rather than massmedia, then we cannot expect that the global public sphere will nolonger exhibit features of the form of the national public sphere.Rather, it will be a public of publics, of disaggregated networksembedded in a variety of institutions rather than an assumed unifiednational public sphere.

The emergence of transnational public spheres is informative for thepractical goals of a critical theory of globalization. Once we examinethe potential ways in which the Internet can expand the features ofcommunicative interaction, whether or not the Internet is a publicsphere is a practical question of possibility rather than a theoreticalquestion about the fact of the matter. It depends not only on whichinstitutions shape its framework but also on how participants contestand change these institutions and on how they interpret the Internet asa public space. It depends on the mediation of agency, not ontechnology. With the proliferation of non-governmental organizations(NGOs) and other forms of transnational civil society organization, itis plausible to expect that two different and interacting levels ofmultiperspectival innovation may emerge: first, new institutions suchas the European Union that are more adapted to multiple jurisdictionsand levels of governance; and, second, a vibrant transnational civilsociety that produces public spheres around various institutions withthe goal of making their forms of inquiry more transparent, accessibleand open to a greater variety of actors and perspectives. This approachdoes not limit the sources of the democratic impulse to transnationalcivil society. Rather, the better alternative is to reject bothbottom-up and top-down approaches in favour of vigorous interactionbetween publics and institutions as the ongoing source ofdemocratization and institutional innovation.

According to a pragmatically inspired democratic experimentalism,attempts at democratisation and reform need not wait for publics toemerge; they can be constructed in various practices. Consultative NGOsmay generally become too intertwined with institutions and thus do notgeneratively entrench their own conditions in this way. This practicaldifficulty is evident in the official civil society organizations ofthe European Union that fail to promote public deliberation. Withoutfurther conceptual and normative clarification, the appeal to various“bottom up” strategies of democratization remains normativelyunderdeveloped (Dryzek 1996, Jaggar, 2004). Even when informed bydemocratic aims, this form of politics cannot capture the complexinterrelationships of civil society, the state and the market,especially given the background of inequalities and asymmetries thatoperate in processes of globalization. Apart from powerful corporateactors in civil society, NGOs from economically advantaged regionspossess significant resources to influence and shape the formation ofcivil society in other contexts. A critical theory of such activityasks about the possibility of a strong connection between their powersin civil society with market forces (Silliman 1998).

Besides the spontaneous emergence of publics out of transnationalassociations, it is also possible to make use of self-consciouslyconstructed publics of relevant stakeholders to act as“mini-publics” that are empowered to deliberate and makedecisions (Fung 2003). Here we can include a variety of experiments,from participatory budgets to citizen boards and juries that have avariety of decision-making powers. Properly empowered andself-consciously constructed, mini-publics offer a strategy to getbeyond the dilemma of insider consultation and outsider contestationthat is a structural feature of civil society activity in currentlyexisting international institutions. Since self-consciously createdminipublics seek to include all relevant stakeholders, they do not relyon representation as the mode of communicating interests, or even theinclusion of well-organized actors as a way of achieving effectiveimplementation. Instead they open up a directly deliberative processwithin the institution that includes as many perspectives as possibleand can be repeated when necessary. The minipublic is then aninstitutionally constructed intermediary, although it could act in sucha way as to become an agent for the creation of a larger public withnormative powers. In this capacity, minipublics may become open andexpandable spaces for democratic experimentation. While many are issueor domain specific, such experiments often become models for democraticgovernance in dispersed and diverse polities. As Cohen and Rogers putit, the more specific and episodic practices aim at mutual benefitsthrough improved coordination, experimental deliberative practices tiedto larger political projects may redistribute power and advantage andin this way secure the conditions of democracy more generally (Cohenand Rogers 2003, 251).

The same point could be made about taking existing democraticinstitutions as the proper model for democratization. To look only atthe constraints of size in relation to a particular form of politicalcommunity begs the question of whether or not there are alternativelinkages between democracy and the public sphere that are not simplyscaled up. Such linkages might be more decentralized and polycentricthan the national community requires. The issue here is the standardof evaluation, not whether some other public sphere or form ofcommunity “is totally or completely democratic, but whether itis adequately democratic given the kind of entity we take it tobe” (McCormick 1996, 345). For a nation state to be democraticit requires a certain sort of public sphere sufficient to create astrong public via its connections to parliamentary debate. Atransnational and thus polycentric and pluralist community, such asthe European Union, requires a different sort of public sphere inorder to promote sufficient democratic deliberation. Once atransnational and post-territorial polity rejects the assumption thatit must be what Rawls calls “a single cooperative scheme inperpetuity,” a more fluid and negotiable order might emerge withplural authority structures along a number of different dimensionsrather than a single location for public authority and power. Withouta single location of public power, a unified public sphere becomes animpediment to democracy rather than an enabling condition for massparticipation in decisions at a single location of authority. Theproblem for an experimental institutional design of directlydeliberative democracy is to create precisely the appropriate feedbackrelation between disaggregated publics and such a polycentric decisionmaking process. The lesson for a critical theory of globalization isto see the extension of political space and the redistribution ofpolitical power not only as a constraint similar to complexity butalso as an open field of opportunities for innovative, distributive,and multiperspectival forms of publicity and democracy.

A critical theory of globalization is a practical or praxeologicallyoriented theory that sees the “fact of globalization” in relationto the goal of realizing the norms of human emancipation and democracy.The central and still open questions for such a practically orientedsocial science are the following: what available forms ofpraxis are able to promote the transformations that could leadto new forms of democracy? What sort of practical knowledge is neededto make this possible and how might this knowledge be stabilised ininstitutionalised forms of democratic inquiry? What are thepossibilities and opportunities for democracy at a higher level ofaggregation that globalization makes possible? How might the publicsphere be realized at the global level? The argument here suggests thatsuch inquiry and institutions must go beyond single perspectiveunderstandings of democracy that dominate national political life aswell as the various administrativetechne that are common inthe international sphere. A critical praxeology of realizing norms inmultiperspectival institutions might add that it is also a reflexivequestion of putting such organization in the larger context of aproject of human emancipation. Such an interactive account of publicsand institutions gives a plausible practical meaning to the extendingof the project of democracy to the global level. It also models in itsown form of social science the mode of inquiry that this and otherpublics may employ in creating and assessing the possibilities forrealizing democracy. A critical theory of globalization does not onlypoint out the deficits of current practices, but shows the potentialfor properly organized publics to create new ones. Since the newpractices need not be modeled on the old ones, it is not a theory ofdemocracy as such, but of democratization.

6. Conclusion: Critical Theory and Normative Inquiry

In facing the challenges of new social facts, Critical Theoryremains a vital philosophical tradition in normative disciplines ofsocial and political philosophy. Furthermore, this vitality is enhancedwhen it considers a range of democratic claims not discussed here, allof which equally challenge the fundamental frameworks of conceptions ofdemocracy, justice, and their interrelationship: these include thestruggles of aboriginal peoples, the disabled, women, and more. Onegreat advantage of the practical account is that it makes it easier tosee why there are many different critical theories in differenthistorical contexts, what Marx called the “wishes and strugglesof the age.” On a practical account, critical inquiry aims at creatingthe reflective conditions necessary for the practical verification ofits inquiry, and these conditions are not confined only to democraticinstitutions, but wherever publics employ critical social theories andmethods as the moment of inquiry of their democratic politics. As newforms of critical theory emerge related to racism, sexism, andcolonialism, reflective social agents have transformed these samedemocratic ideals and practices in the interest of emancipation. Inentrenching new social facts, agents transform the ideals themselves aswell as their institutional form.

This critical and practical orientation gives rise to threedifferent questions about critical social inquiry. First, does CriticalTheory suggest a distinctive form of social inquiry? Second, what sortof knowledge does such inquiry provide in order to provide insight intosocial circumstances and justify social criticism of current ideals andinstitutions? Finally, what sort of verification does critical inquiryrequire? In light of the answers to these questions on the practical,democratic, and multiperspectival interpretation defended here, it islikely that Critical Theory is no longer a unique approach.Methodologically, it becomes more thoroughly pluralistic. Politically,it loses its capital letters as the aims and struggles of the age ofglobalization become more diverse and not automatically connected bythe commitment to any particular holistic social theory. Given its owndemocratic aims, it would be hard to justify any other interpretation.In a period in which philosophy cooperates with empirical sciences anddisciplines, Critical Theory offers an approach to distinctly normativeissues that cooperates with the social sciences in a nonreductive way.Its domain is inquiry into the normative dimension of social activity,in particular how actors employ their practical knowledge and normativeattitudes from complex perspectives in various sorts of contexts. Italso must consider social facts as problematic situations from thepoint of view of variously situated agents.

This kind of normative practical knowledge is thus reflexive andfinds its foothold in those ongoing, self-transforming normativeenterprises such as democracy that are similarly reflexive in practice.By discussing democracy in this way, I have also tried to show just howdeep the connections are between it and critical social science:critical theories are not democratic theories, but their practicalconsequences are assessed and verified in democratic practice andsolved by inquiry into better democratic practice. Perhaps one of themore pernicious forms of ideology now is embodied in the appeal of theclaim that there are no alternatives to present institutions. In thisage of diminishing expectations, one important role that remains forthe social scientifically informed, and normatively oriented democraticcritic is to offer novel alternatives and creative possibilities inplace of the defeatist claim that we are at the end of history. Thatwould not only mean the end of inquiry, but also the end ofdemocracy.

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