Continental and Analytic lenses in relation to the communicative action paradigm: Reconstructive thoughts

Reinterpreting the exemplary scene of communicative action

The Frankfurt School of critical theory is usually identified as a social theory that embodies a ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’. It is suspicious of power operating in modern society in ways that allow it to unobtrusively accompany the surface appearance of progress and justice. This thesis constitutes a variant of that malignancy Continentalists see as implicit within the promise of modernity. I choose the term ‘malignancy’ carefully. Its broad range of meaning can be easily lost, because we tend today to collapse it into a very specific medical sense; that is, into the idea of a cancerous growth that cannot be arrested. Now, I do want to draw upon some of the connotations associated with this current usage, such as the fact that a malignancy of this sort is systematically invasive, not directly willed by anyone, and may be lethal to its host. But it is also important to recognise that the concept ‘malignant’ does not refer exclusively to the realm of medicine. In the Oxford English Dictionary, the first meaning listed does not involve pathology, but rather something that threatens authority, both political and spiritual. Thus, when I say Continental thought postulates a malignancy in modern life, I mean that it identifies some logic that undermines or compromises, in deep and systematic ways, the authoritative, positive promises embedded in this mode of life. ³

In the CAP, this hermeneutic of suspicion is accompanied by what one might call a ‘hermeneutic of affirmation’ built up from the core concepts of communicative action and reason. It is here that critics have seen an Analytic lens being brought to bear that, over time, has been allowed to displace the Continental one. The contrast with some earlier Frankfurt theorists, especially Theodor Adorno, is stark. He always allowed the Continental lens of malignancy to dominate and remained deeply elusive about any basis for affirmative commitments. Ultimately, I want to argue that the adequacy of a paradigm is going to be partially dependent on its being able to deploy in a fruitful array both a hermeneutic of suspicion and one of affirmation. The latter here refers to the obligation to articulate something like the ethical ‘core’ or ‘exemplary ontological scene’ that animates the specific normative character of your paradigm. ⁴

The indictment of Habermas is that he has relinquished too radically the former and embraced too uncritically the latter. Exhibit one in the indictment is his infamous ‘ideal speech situation’ that seems to promise a procedure that could be plugged into any dispute and would yield a just resolution to it. Although Habermas long ago made clear that the ideal speech situation was not meant as an achievable goal, but rather as a critical standard, that has not stopped critics from continually pointing to that ideal as the driver of an engine of consensus. But if critics can be faulted for ignoring Habermas's comments, they do still have a point insofar as he has continued to maintain a stance on the nature of language that most find to be a clear instance of strong foundationalism underlying the ideal of consensus. At issue is his claim that language has an essence: its purpose just is reaching an understanding (Habermas, 1984: 287). Hence a slant towards consensus – and, thus, affirmation – is built into the very structure of the world.

I would argue here, however, that the basic commitments of the CAP can be understood in a fashion that is non-foundationalist, yet still allows the paradigm to retain its incisiveness. This involves reinterpreting the status of the ‘exemplary ontological scene’ of communicative action, before then revising its characteristics by viewing the scene under a particular Continental lens. I use this language of ‘scene’ to refer to the constellation of entities and their relationships that is at the core of his idea of linguistic interaction. This is the picture Habermas offers of ongoing communicative action in which subjects are interacting on the basis of taken-for-valid claims carried within the utterances they continually exchange with one another. It is a picture of the bonding force of communicative reason that is always implicit in ongoing interaction. This force is always potentially open to contestation, whenever the validity of some specific claim (to truth, rightness or sincerity) is questioned by a given speaker.

As it operates in Habermas, this scene tends to feel as though it contains a set of stock figures who exist merely as placeholders to set in motion the linguistic validity claims that carry that always implicit momentum of consensus. But if the scene is deprived of its strong ontological anchor, we can begin to perceive the actors and their relationships as embodying, at best, what we take to be admirable (even if now contestable) values in the moral–political heritage of Western modernity; more specifically, values associated with expectations of reasonableness and a responsiveness to the moral equality of each speaker. There is, however, now no longer any built-in momentum towards consensual agreement implied in this scene.

If we further re-envision the exemplary scene with the help of a Continental lens, one begins also to notice aspects of it that imply a greater role for contestation than appears in the orthodox interpretation. Since I have laid out this general argument in detail elsewhere, here I only want to attend to a few of its key claims (White and Farr, 2012, 2013). Critics have continually charged that the Habermasian paradigm is, in effect, tone deaf to the ways in which political life resists being deliberatively broken down and progressively ground into consensus. This is especially true of conflicts that involve identity, a matter about which Habermas' interpretation of the CAP has been almost entirely silent. In light of this line of criticism, I want to suggest that the paradigm's exemplary scene can be reinterpreted, with the aid of a Continental lens, as embodying a protean moment of contestation that is just as basic as the orientation to consensus. My argument is that, within this scene – once it has been deprived of its strong ontological anchor – a central status of dissensus begins to become apparent. Moreover, source of this dissensus is crucially linked with the dynamic of identity/difference that can now be seen as in play between subjects within the exemplary scene.

Most readers of Habermas will interpret what I have just said about dissensus as referring to the moment in which a participant in ongoing communicative action takes up a discursive attitude and contests some explicit argument offered by another participant in ‘practical discourse.’ In short, ‘no-saying’ in the paradigm is all about the formal, discursive contestation of normative claims. What I suggest, however, is that this no-saying within ‘practical discourse’ is actually constitutively tied to a prior no-saying within ongoing communicative action. If we focus attention on the latter figuration in the exemplary scene, then the Habermasian perspective becomes less easily imagined as a pure consensus machine.

In ongoing communicative action, subjects are always already acting within a normative context whose validity is dependent upon its being reaffirmed, as actors’ speech acts implicitly reproduce its consensual bonds. The emergence of a ‘no’ constitutes a challenge to some aspect of this lifeworld context. At this point in the interaction, Habermas wants to direct attention to how actors drop their performatively engaged attitude and adopt a discursive one in the context of which argumentation can ensue and consensus might emerge once again (Habermas, 1996: 20). But if we allow our attention to linger more at the point of the initial, pre-discursive ‘no-saying’ that breaks the bond of ongoing communicative action, other phenomena of interaction begin to emerge as important. Here I am interested in the lived reality of this emergence of contestation within a regnant normative order. The emergence of a ‘no’ here may be a long process involving changes in an actor's aesthetic-expressive bent – e.g. beginning to imagine herself differently or developing the courage to no longer simply go along – and in the conceptualisation of exactly what is at issue. It is useful here to think of Judith Butler's (1997: 28) perceptive reflections on how we ‘turn’ against an order into which we are ‘thrown’. This involves things like changing self-conceptions, developing courage and discounting how ‘irrational’ a challenge might seem if viewed purely in terms of the strategic-rational likelihood of its success.

The character of this negativity is not adequately grasped if we restrict our focus merely to that one moment when a hearer attempts to defeat a speaker's normative validity claim by locating it within an objectivating, discursive frame and marshalling explicit arguments. This cognitive moment of discursive negativity becomes an emergent possibility only on the basis of a prior negativity that tears apart the implicit bonding material of ongoing communicative action. This initial ‘no-saying’ has a more diffuse, aesthetic-affective, existential quality, rather than the exclusively cognitive one Habermas gives it. And, when we comprehend the contestation involved in the former, we can begin to see as well where the dynamics of identity/difference can come into play (more on that in a moment).

If one focuses on this initial ‘no-saying’ in the exemplary scene of communicative action, it makes the entire paradigm look significantly more interesting than it does if one follows Habermas’ somewhat tunnel-like vision – guided purely by an Analytic lens – directly to discursive conditions of consensus. My revised line of interpretation also sensitises one to look for other places in Habermas’ work where we might discover additional significant dimensions of ‘no-saying.’ His discussion of civil disobedience constitutes just such a case. What he has had to say here is quite striking and does not really make sense unless we accord ‘no-saying’ the kind of more prominent role that I am arguing it deserves. Habermas (1985: 95, 105) describes civil disobedience as the ‘guardian of legitimacy’ and as a ‘litmus test’ or ‘touchstone’ (Prüfstein) for the ‘maturity’ of a democratic order. Why does he accord this extraordinary status to civil disobedience? This would not be the case if such disobedience were to be understood as merely a kind of embodied argument or ‘argument by other means’, through which we take just one more step towards the full coincidence of rational legitimacy and the rule of law in a fully consensual democracy.

I would argue that civil disobedience is accorded such a status, because it represents the moment at which a mature democracy admits that it always remains imperfect. One may always hope that such a democracy can progressively narrow the gap, but there always arise new claims, new identities and new settings that disturb existing notions of the legitimacy of the law. If the ‘no-saying’ I identified in the exemplary scene is the first one highlighted in a revised CAP, then civil disobedience is the last, and it highlights the failure of law in a deliberative democracy to ever reach full legitimacy. ⁵

Colonisation of the lifeworld: A malignancy thesis

In the history of Continental thought, malignancy has been portrayed in different ways and cashed out in terms of quite different phenomena. The trajectory of such phenomena has been imagined by some thinkers to have a negative outcome; by others a positive one and still others proffer an ambivalent outcome. In Hegel, the modern idea of freedom without institutional form constitutes a malignancy that brings the Terror of 1793; but he later sees the emerging reality of the modern state as bringing to life an institutionally embodied form of freedom that essentially dissolves all of its dangerous elements. Diametrically opposed to this happy outcome is Heidegger's conception of the malignancy of the Gestell or ‘enframing’ of modern thinking that he sees as locking us into an almost certain, bleak destiny. Other Continental thinkers embrace more ambivalent visions. Although Foucault, for example, may seem at first as though he sees us locked in the growing construction of a totally disciplinary society, he also expresses ideas that make one think that his portrayal of bleakness has a definite, hyperbolic quality. ⁶

My interest is drawn most to this last sort of portrayal of malignancy, namely ones that are ambivalent. They challenge us deeply, but also highlight the value of radical self-reflection on the fundamentals of modernity and the possibilities of mitigation through sustained political action. This is the kind of account that, I suggest, we get from the CAP. At its core are conceptions of rationality and justice, as well as a notion of the malignancy of late-modern social life that threatens to undermine those values. In Habermas, malignancy is conceived primarily as a ‘colonization of the lifeworld’, the analysis of which first appeared in his Theory of Communicative Action in 1981 (English translation 1984, 1987). This thesis was much discussed for about a decade, but its prominence has since faded. There seem to be two main reasons for this. The first involves what appears to be a lack of continuing attention to colonisation analysis on the part of Habermas himself in recent years. The second (perhaps related) reason has to do with what has been accepted by many as the mortally trenchant criticism of the idea of colonisation.

The important thing in the present context is to consider whether this crucial Continental lens of colonisation still provides valuable insight into processes of power and critical subjectivity; or whether it is, as critics suggest, basically useless. If it is useless, then that means the CAP no longer incorporates a persuasive conception of malignancy and thus looks pretty thin in terms of its Continental components.

Regarding Habermas' apparent inattention to the colonisation theme, it is true that he has, since the early 1990s, focused primarily on issues related to discourse theory, justice, deliberative democracy and the challenges of globalisation. And most of this discussion could plausibly be seen as proceeding pretty much exclusively from a perspective provided by an Analytic lens. Despite this relative lack of explicit attention to the colonisation problematic, it would be wrong to think that he has abandoned the idea altogether. He still refers to it, even though he has not offered much further elucidation. ⁷

If we turn to the lack of continued discussion by others, a likely explanation for this phenomenon involves the powerful critique that was offered some years ago by Thomas McCarthy (1991). Not only is he the translator of Theory of Communicative Action and other works, but he has also been the most philosophically astute, and generally sympathetic interpreter of Habermas in any language for more than three decades. Hence, when he offered his wholesale critique of the colonisation framework, it was likely taken by many to be definitive.

But might the colonisation thesis be interpreted in a fashion that does not collapse under the weight of critique but rather allows a reanimation of its potential for generating distinctive insight? Habermas famously asserts that two ‘subsystems’ of late-modern society, the capitalist economy and the administrative state, drive forward a systemic rationalisation of social life that he refers to as a colonisation process. This is a phenomenon by which existing, tradition- or deliberation-guided normative orientations are supplanted by ones guided by market imperatives or the directives of administrative power (Habermas, 1987: 186, 196, 305–404). The sense of colonisation that Habermas wants to borrow with his term, ‘colonization of the lifeworld,’ refers to the forced displacement of a familiar logic for the assessment of economic, social and political norms by a less familiar, seemingly illegitimate one; in short, it is an invasive process that threatens to progressively degrade freedom and justice. The term ‘lifeworld’ refers to the unconscious background of commitments, knowledge and attitudes upon which we rely and from which we draw in everyday life. Habermas's conception of a colonisation of the lifeworld is intended to emphasise the alien and intrusive character of having decisions made now by markets and administrators in domains of life where they were/are being made by citizens according to traditional norms or norms generated from practices that have at least a somewhat deliberative character. ‘Colonisation’ thus involves the association of something unfamiliar or foreign with something threatening to my well-being and desire to be self-governing.

The idea of colonisation of the lifeworld is intended – in good critical theory fashion – to highlight social sites that could become the terrain for robust democratic contestation on the part of left-leaning political groups. The struggle Habermas envisions involves pushback against the invasive power of capital and state dictates through the formation of critical publics and deliberative practices, as well as occasional civil disobedience.

Habermas' attraction to systems theory seems to have been rooted in a general desire to appropriate both Marxian and Weberian insights regarding the malignancy of modernity in a fashion that is more convincing. But, more specifically, he also wanted to respond critically to Niklas Luhmann's prominent elaboration of systems theory in German sociology beginning in the 1970s. ⁸ Habermas' prodigious attempt to comprehend systems theory in a way that can be both deployed but also criticised in social theory contributed significantly to the mammoth size of Theory of Communicative Action.

McCarthy's (1991) cogent criticism targeted this volume's heavy reliance on systems theory. In the present context, one does not have to get far into this debate, because what is of value in Habermas’ colonisation analysis can be divorced from any strong claims about systems theory. The systems perspective can be embraced in a less than full sense; that is, merely as a modest, but significant, heuristic frame that helps us to practically anticipate the possible emergence of conflict in certain social spaces and to normatively evaluate its potential in terms of the enhancement or deterioration of the deliberative democratic health of a given political order. ⁹ In regard to the expansion of the systems rationality of a capitalist economy, many contemporary critics on the left speak in a comparable sense of the expansion of ‘neo-liberal’ rationality. That captures, at least partially, the phenomenon to which Habermas is referring with the colonisation concept, but the CAP's comprehension has significant advantages. References to neo-liberalism typically imply that it is an orientation that enhances injustice in a society; but the question of exactly what the normative perspective is from whose affirmative vantage point that injustice is perceived is often not made very clear. In Habermas, the expansion of capitalist imperatives is criticised from the counter-perspective of communicative rationality. If nothing else, this at least brings to the forefront the criteria in relation to which one is casting neo-liberal processes in a negative light. Scholars who prefer the concept of neo-liberalism will likely object at this point that perhaps it is better to have, as they do, no clear notion of normative reason than it is to have what they see as such an obviously flawed one as communicative rationality. But if my arguments above are correct, then some of those flaws may not be as inextricably attached to the CAP as critics contend.

If there is thus some sense in speaking of economic imperatives in rough systems terms, is the same true of talking in terms of a colonisation of the lifeworld being generated by the activities of the late-modern, liberal democratic state? I think that there is. We can relinquish strict adherence to systems theory and look simply to the contemporary state and its entities as large organisations that attempt methodically, in a strategic-rational sense, to increase their power and the pliability of the citizenry whom they seek to manage, all with the presumed goal of implementing law that has been passed in accordance with formal, constitutional procedures.

In order to capture the sense of colonisation that Habermas seeks to comprehend, one must be able to point to significant aspects of the interface between citizens and the administrative state that are experienced by the former as something like colonisation; that is, as processes in which citizens feel that their intentions are being methodically ignored, displaced, pre-empted or defeated by agendas that seem alien. There are a host of reasons why this sense of alienness may occur with increasing frequency today. Two are particularly worthy of mention. The first arises from processes of globalisation. While these can be understood as a strong force that, in effect, turbocharges the power and effects of the logic of capital, the flows of people, money and products have less clear-cut and uni-directional effects in relation to the power of nation-states. For example, whether it is an influx of illegal immigrants or cheap foreign-made products that cause an outflow of jobs, globalisation processes often tend to make the state look weak, incompetent and even in collusion with invasive foreign centres of power.

Such processes also occur today against the background of ever-denser networks of new communication technologies. As experts began to predict 25 years ago, such technologies are most easily and effectively taken up by citizens who already share some interest or grievance and can use the new modes of communication to further focus their existing views and increase their political throw-weight. When that tendency is joined with the political rule of thumb that negative reactions of complaint and outrage tend to be easier to organise than complex, considered, more positive orientations to political life, it is not surprising that substantial portions of the middle segments of affluent, late-modern societies feel themselves to be unjustifiably under assault and consequently react with intense – and increasingly effective – resentment. And, in an era of a continual global ‘war on terror’, citizens rightly come to feel that states themselves are methodically and effectively using such new technologies to invade privacy in previously unimagined ways. Thus, the state, considered in sum, lurches between incompetence that intensifies unintended sorts of colonisation (e.g. by illegal immigrants) and dangerous authoritarian expansion into the lives of citizens.

My point is that one can plausibly conceive such phenomena as part of a colonisation process without having to have recourse to full-blown systems theory in regard to actions by the state. The colonisation frame simply lends practical and mild theoretical weight to efforts to comprehend the lived reality of dissatisfaction that many groups claim to be experiencing today. Although I will be discussing primarily the distinctive ways in which the colonisation thesis allows for a perceptive analysis of power and middle-class conflict, this should not be taken to imply that this frame of analysis ignores the least advantaged sectors of such societies. For example, Habermas (1987: 322) refers to welfare recipients as a ‘model case’ of colonisation in relation to state bureaucracies.

The phenomenon of new social movements

When Habermas first articulated the notion of colonisation, one of the most interesting aspects of it was the way in which it located critical political subjectivity. By this I mean how it identified segments of the population that might be expected to resist the ‘colonial’ expansion of capitalism and invasive forms of state action. Famously, he pointed towards ‘new social movements’, by which he meant ones that were not arrayed exclusively around the traditional logic of capital and labour. He argued that we should focus more attention on groups who express a different ‘grammar’ of opposition that is not adequately comprehended within that logic of social conflict. And he pointed to radical environmental groups, like the anti-nuclear protesters in the 1980s, as well as women's groups, as examples of movements that are resisting the tide of colonisation (Habermas, 1987: 391–396).

In addition to identifying these sites of critical subjectivity, Habermas (1987: 396) also noted that colonisation could incite as well modes of ‘defensive’ subjectivity. On the basis of these remarks, one might have pointed to a group like the Amish in the US as a plausible example of the phenomenon towards which he was directing our attention. The idea here is that such groups see themselves as resisting the dissolution of traditional forms of life as state and markets exert increasing pressure on them.

Although I would not simply reject Habermas's division of groups into defensive and offensive, I think that one can reconfigure it in a fashion that more adequately reflects the full range of concerns that emerge from the CAP. What I would suggest is a division that more robustly reflects the hermeneutic of affirmation embodied in his idea of communicative rationality and manifested in his conception of deliberative democracy. In short, I think it makes more sense to differentiate groups in a fashion that combines resistance to colonisation with their attitude towards the enhancement or neglect of inclusive, deliberative democratic processes. With this in mind, one might recast Habermas's categories as follows. On the one hand, there are movements that resist colonisation on the basis of a vision of republican self-protection; on the other hand, there are movements that resist colonisation on the basis of a vision of inclusive, self-governing. ¹⁰ In these terms, the women's movement, seeking greater political and economic inclusion of women, would obviously fall into the second category. Radical environmental movements, such as anti-nuclear groups, would fit there as well in the sense that concerns about future generations weigh heavily in their thinking. In short, movements of the second type could be affirmed for embodying openness towards enhancing deliberative democratic practices, and movements of the first type could be criticised for ignoring or impeding such a tack for public life.

In what follows, I want to suggest that the foregoing, revised Habermasian criteria for picking out social movements that react in ‘self-protecting’ or ‘defensive’ ways to colonisation processes may be quite helpful in recognising the significance of an emerging type of political movement that is far more democratically disturbing than small, voluntarily self-segregating groups like the Amish. Here I want to turn attention to the phenomenon of the Tea Party and similar groups within the middle classes in the US. The identification of oneself with this famous episode of the American Revolution involves a sense of opposition to the force of a colonial master. The notion of colonisation of the lifeworld affords us a perspective from which we can comprehend both the Tea Party members’ lived reality of feeling colonised, and yet do so without automatically accepting either their particular interpretation of the character of the pressure they experience or their modes of resistance to it.

This group sees a world in which colonisation functions almost exclusively through the logic of state action, not through the logic of capital. Its members see the former logic unfolding both as a direct threat, in the sense of driving forward some sorts of colonising activity, and as an indirect one in the sense of failing to protect citizens from the colonisation threat presented by the enhancement of foreign influence and the inflow of undocumented aliens. This critical stance towards the state alone allows such groups to don the mantle of populism while also remaining quite attractive to powerful economic elites who are a crucial source of funding.

The feeling of being colonised is connected both with a sense of being assaulted and of having one's identity threatened. Earlier I indicated that the latter dimension can be effectively comprehended within the communicative paradigm only after we have reinterpreted it. When we have better conceived the place of ‘no-saying’, we can plausibly encompass identity conflicts as one of the most intractable sites of human contestation. If my revisions of our understanding of the exemplary ontological scene of the CAP thus clears conceptual space in which it makes sense to see identity dynamics unfold, this does not yet provide any clear sense of how those dynamics might play out. Here one must turn for insight to a source outside of the CAP. In the great outpouring of work on the topic of identity in recent years, what distinguishes William Connolly's contribution is that it is complex enough to allow one to see interconnections between several dimensions of identity: the ontological, social–psychological and political.

His account roots itself in an ontological understanding of identity in the sense that identity is conceptually understood as always coming to be only in relation to difference; in short, identity and difference are mutually constitutive. And thus identity is unavoidably dependent on difference. The ontological relation of identity/difference installs a dimension of existential threat in the very experience of human subjectivity, in the sense that the security and stability of my identity seem always at risk of slipping out of my hands. This existential insecurity often gives rise to attempts to ‘fix’ or ‘quarantine’ the other within established criteria and mark him as alien, marginal, dangerous; in short, as an ‘other’ who is kept at arm's length from me, and who thus cannot threaten my sense of a secure identity. How intensely this insecurity is felt varies historically and culturally; but it never disappears, because it is entangled with the social ontology of the human (Connolly, 2002: 1–15). In the late-modern West, one recurrent form of insecurity blossoms into resentment felt at the gap that opens up between that society's promise of an identity embodying individual autonomy or sovereignty, on the one hand, and middle class individuals’ feeling of being assaulted by the effects of a host of ongoing processes that seem to continually threaten their sense of secure and unobstructed freedom, on the other. As the flows of people and capital across boundaries and the ‘pluralisation’ of identities within state borders increase, individuals in the middle of host societies are highly susceptible to an increased sense of insecurity and resentfulness. ¹¹

Whether in the US or Europe, it is important to the success of these contemporary self-protecting groups that complaints gathered under the feeling of being colonised by ‘foreign’ others not be tied too overtly to the sorts of racist attitudes that have traditionally been expressed by fascists and other movements on the political right. That framing of identity is likely to lead quickly today to a loss of legitimacy for such groups in the eyes of the general population within democratic states. But when that potent appeal is strategically dropped or nudged into the background, what sort of affective incitement might substitute as fertile ground for political animation among potential, middle-class supporters? It is here that the Tea Party is exemplary, because it has found a rather powerful mix of ingredients that can continually stoke the fires of resentment and self-righteousness, while both avoiding a more explicitly racist orientation and embracing the rule of law by defending the sanctity of the republic's borders. ¹²

In sum, contemporary movements of the middle class like the Tea Party can appear to be admirable actors in a liberal democracy, while, in fact, when examined through the lens of colonisation analysis, they rather take the form of facilitating partners in promoting at least those aspects of a malignancy that flow from a submerged preference for outcomes in public life that answer to the demands of the logic of capital rather than those of more democratic processes. Unpacking the character of such social groups in this fashion helps to highlight the deeper significance they have in the life of a late-modern society, a significance less likely to appear if one were operating with a pure Analytic philosophical lens and straightforward empirical analysis of political behaviour.

Conclusion

An attentive reader may by this point have noticed something that threatens to put my entire project in doubt. My effort to show how both Continental and Analytics lenses can be fruitfully deployed within a given research paradigm begs a question that I laid aside at the start of this essay, and this concerns philosophical starting points. Is my recourse to research paradigms itself a strategy conceived initially within the field of vision generated by a Continental or an Analytic lens? Those with sympathy for Continental thought might here accuse me of rigging my whole project from the start through a surreptitious installation of an underlying Analytic frame. After all, the idea of a paradigm seems to imply a philosophic–scientific ideal of consistent progress towards better grasping some field of social life and potentially better managing the entities within it.

This is a certainly an appropriate concern with which to confront my project. What exactly is the perspective from which my project starts and does it inappropriately privilege the Analytic lens? My answer is that the perspective privileges neither the Analytic nor the Continental lens, but rather submits them both to eventual pragmatist, deliberative-democratic evaluation. I mean by this that the Continental–Analytic debate is one between theorists or philosophers; and the ultimate question of how the two lenses should be related in political theory research cannot be divorced from the constitution of the problems that research aims to address. Of course, theorists and philosophers hold forth continually about what they take to be the most important social problems, and what might constitute a progressive resolution of them. But those efforts at defining what are the most significant problems cannot be evaluated conclusively without raising a further question: what are taken to be the weightiest problems by deliberative democratic publics? In good pragmatist terms, we need to admit that the community of inquirers extends beyond philosophers and theorists to citizens.

Analytic and Continental lenses each have some distinctive appeal from within this larger perspective. The former helps democratic publics get a clearer grasp of specific topics, and it allows them to better sort policy alternatives within relatively familiar parameters. The latter lens helps them see how hegemonic forces may constitute parameters and problems in ways that need to be critically leavened, in the sense of not being taken at face value. A paradigm can have this effect only if embodies a conceptualisation of malignancy and a moment of agonism. The Frankfurt School in its early days and Habermas today have worked within the frame of a paradigm or research tradition that satisfies the first criterion; I have tried to show the additional sense of embracing the second as well. In neither case does it seem to me that merely starting with the idea of a methodical research programme automatically forfeits the contest to the Analytical frame.

My appeal to a paradigm with a particular mix of Continental and Analytic lenses privileges neither perspective finally. It aims rather to array them in a fashion that opens itself to democratic publics with the hope that it can critically inform the processes by which they constitute and address significant problems. The paradigm I have been supporting in this essay provides a hermeneutic of suspicion (rooted in accounts of power and agonism) brought to view by a Continental lens and a hermeneutic of affirmation (rooted in accounts of practical reason and sources of ethical–political agreement) brought to view by an Analytical one.