Beyond Dogma and Despair: Toward a Critical Theory of Politics

Fred R. Dallmayr

American Political Science Review, 1976, vol. 70, issue 1, 64-79

Abstract: In contradistinction both to positivist empiricism and to the essentialism of “traditional” political thought, the paper delineates an approach to political study and theory stressing the critical interrogation between inquirer or participant and the experienced world. The approach—which relies chiefly on existential phenomenology and recent writings of the Frankfurt School— is illustrated and explicated in three contexts: those of philosophical anthropology, of epistemology, and of ethics and political action. With regard to the conception of “human nature,” critical theory refuses to equate man either with a reactive mechanism or with pure consciousness, preferring to treat him as an embodied creature concerned (in Heidegger's terms) with the sense of his existence. In the domain of epistemology, the sketched outlook deviates from simple “mirror” doctrines by emphasizing the experiential underpinnings of cognition and the need for continuous symbolic articulation. Concerning ethics, the perspective opposes both cognitivist and noncognitivist formulas in favor of the critical reconstruction of standards implicit in everyday life. The concluding portion of the paper indicates the relevance of such standards for practical politics and contemporary democratic theory.

Date: 1976
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:apsrev:v:70:y:1976:i:01:p:64-79_26

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in American Political Science Review from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().