Description
Robert Cox outlined puzzles still relevant for developing critique in general. He suggested non-positivism, relativism, and that theory emerges from a time-bound context and changes with ever-changing reality. Social change is largely accidental and results from struggles. Nevertheless, Cox’s critical theory develops a distance from current ideologies, a normative meta-perspective guiding change. Contra postmodernists, history is only meaningful if we establish some commonalities with past perspectives. The ‘unique’ is intelligible only acknowledging a ‘general’/‘cumulative’/theoretical element. Richard Devetak insists ‘critical’ requires an even more contextualist historical approach than Cox’s. Such contextualism is trendy. However, I show why Cox’s second, less relativist line deserves development. While critique is often – unfortunately – divorced from rationality, I connect the two. Contemporary philosophy, despite stereotypes, offers numerous conceptions of rationality that overcome ideological rationalisations/rationalisms. Rationality is essentially (self-)critical. It accommodates historical difference. Yet, rationality also avoids relativist traps. Contextualism logically imprisons us - including, ironically, the critical scholar herself - in a particular context/practice, obscuring ways how deliberation/learning-related (beyond accidental/power-related) change is possible. However finite at every moment, rationality is our indispensable non-arbitrary guide to unavoidably normative future choices. It protects critique from degenerating into its very opposite – arbitrarily replacing one non-rational hegemony with another.
