Abstract

Anyone who goes beyond procedural questions of a discourse theory of morality and ethics and, in a normative attitude … embarks on a theory of the well-ordered, or even emancipated, society will very quickly run up against the limits of his own historical situation.For some time now, a certain strand of contemporary critical theory has understood its task not as providing a substantive critique of power relations, let alone an alternative normative conception of what social relations might be, but as how to justify critique as such: how to justify those elements which critique owes to its philosophical origins, albeit in a nonfoundationalist manner.1 This focus on—if not obsession with—the theoretical problem of...