Theorizing the Good Society: Hermeneutic, Normative and Empirical Discourses

Abstract: This paper examines two fundamentally different ways that recent philosophical thinkers have theorized the good society and demonstrates that each tradition has engaged in revisionist efforts that brings it toward its rival tradition. Rawls and Habermas represent the of this contemporary effort, establishing neo-Kantian positions in the sixties and seventies that represent an initial effort at theorizing the good society in terms of an historically unsituated, free floating universalism. The contemporary versions of the hermeneutic, communitarian approaches emerge in response, with thinkers like Walzer, Boltanski and Thevenot, Taylor, and Young arguing for the situated self, community based standards, cultural specificity, and relativism. It is demonstrated, however, that within each of these works there is a decisive space that is, or must be, given to some more universalizing sphere of justice. Responding to this possibility, against these communitarian and hermeneutic approaches, there developed internal revisions of the neo-Kantian, externalist approach, beginning with the large shift manifest in the Rawls of Political Liberalism. Similar changes are demonstrated in the works of thinkers like Benhabib, Honneth, and even in Habermas himself. Just as the communitarians move back, with difficulty, toward universalism, so do these universalists seek to move back, with difficulty, to particularism. In the concluding section of this paper, I argue that if we look empirically at the actual nature of the discourses about the good society that circulate in Western societies, we will see both of these discourses, the universalist and the particular, acting side by side. I try to explain how they actual intertwine in a systematic way, as what I call a binary discourse of civil society. Resume: Ce document examine deux manieres fondamentalement differentes que les philosophes d'aujourd'hui utilisent pour elaborer des theories sur la societe ideale. Ce document demontre aussi que chaque tradition a adopte des vues revisionnistes qui la rapproche de sa rivale traditionnelle. Rawls et Habermans representent la base de cet effort contemporain quia jete les assises des positions neo-kantiennes dans les annees soixante et soixante-dix, marquant un premier effort de theories sur la societe ideale dans le cadre d'un universalisme libre et non situe dans l'histoire. Des versions contemporaines de cette demarche hermeneutique et communautarienne surgissent alors avec des penseurs tels que Walzer, Boltanski et Thevenot, de meme que Taylor et Young qui defendent le sol localise, les normes axees sur les collectivites, la specificite culturelle et le relativisme. On prouve par ailleurs que dans chacun de ces travaux, il existe un espace decisif qui doit, ou devrait, etre laisse a une justice plus universelle. Reagissant a cette possibilite, a l'encontre des demarches communautariennes et hermeneutiques, des revisions internes de la demarche externaliste neo-kantienne sont apparues en commencant par le manifeste radical du Everywhere we look today, certainly in philosophy and even in a great deal of social science, we see a decided turn to ethical and moral concerns, not only as an empirical object but as a practical goal towards which empirical and theoretical investigations aim. It has not always been so. In the two decades after World War II, it was widely believed that morality -- value orientation in Weber's influential formulation -- did not need to, and should not be allowed to, play a direct role in social science or even in much of philosophy. In social science, it seemed possible to uphold this position because the moral seemed imminent to the progressively unfolding historical progress that functionalists called modernization and Marxists called socialism or the welfare state. In the decades preceding the Second World War, of course, this optimism would have seemed totally absurd. In the unstable and threatening time between the two world wars, philosophers and sociological theorists struggled to expand their understandings of action and order so that notions of moral responsibility could become more central and the relation of theorizing to political action more concrete. …