Austin Harrington - Hermeneutic Dialogue and Social Science: A Critique of Gadamer and Habermas

The German philosophers Gadamer and Habermas share an idea of the process of understanding as a dialogue between the researchers of other cultures and the subjects whose lives and actions they study. This book offers a new challenge to their central argument. While previous studies of these philosophers have tended to concentrate on the differences between their two standpoints, this work questions the validity of the basic thesis they hold in common by critically re-examining their views of earlier figures in the German hermeneutic tradition. The book includes:

• examinations of the philosophers' responses to theorists from Wilhelm Dilthey to Max Weber and Alfred Schtz
• concise contextual information, including an account of debates over objectivity in social science from the Enlightenment to Durkheim, Weber and the Frankfurt School
• clear, detailed definitions of critical terms, including objectivity, positivism, empathy and verstehen
• a concluding assessment of the scope and limits of the idea of dialogical social science.

Hermeneutics has become an increasingly popular area of study at undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate levels across a variety of related disciplines. This book, aimed primarily at sociologists, provides an in-depth, comprehensive and contextual treatment of this subject, and it will be of interest not only to social scientists but also to those pursuing research in philosophy or the history of ideas.

Austin Harrington is Lecturer at the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Leeds. His work on hermeneutics and social theory in the writings of Gadamer, Habermas, Dilthey, Weber and Schtz has also appeared in the journals Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, Theory and Psychology, Max Weber Studies and Sociology.

A critique of Gadamer and Habermas

Austin Harrington

London and New York

First published 2001

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge

270 Madison Ave, New York NY 10016

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

Transferred to Digital Printing 2005

2001 Austin Harrington

Typeset in Garamond by Curran Publishing Services Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Harrington, Austin 1970

Hermeneutic dialogue and social science: a critique of Gadamer and Habermas / Austin Harrington.

p. cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.