Hermeneutics, Political Inquiry, and Practical Reason: An Evolving
Challenge to Political Science
Authors: GIBBONS MICHAEL T. 
Published: May 2008

In its evolution over the past century, mainstream political science has
failed to take account of changes in the development of interpretive
approaches to politics. Adherents of the dominant approaches to political
inquiry have misunderstood the nature of meaning of social and political
action and the import of that meaning for the explanation of political life.
Or, to put it more sharply, its understanding of the nature and importance
the meaning of political life and of interpretive political inquiry have
stagnated, not evolved. As a consequence, although conventional empirical
and rationalist modes of explanation capture many aspects of political life,
they misunderstand or ignore other important political phenomena or
important dimensions to politics. Hermeneutic modes of interpretative theory
offer the prospect of a competing and/or complementary perspective on the
explanation of politics. The prospects for a modern version of practical
reason that would allow for a more engaged political science are available
but not widely recognized. It is appropriate here to make several
points concerning terminology. The literal English translation of the
German word “hermeneutics” is interpretation. In the modern world, the
term was first applied in the human sciences in attempts to offer
explanations of ambiguous and allegorical passages of the Bible and the
Torah. In the twentieth century, the term has come to mean something
more than that. The German term has been widely adopted for English use
and refers to a specific approach to understanding and explaining in the
social sciences and humanities. For present purposes, it refers to the
attempt to explain social and political life in terms of the language
and complex meaning of that political action for social and political
actors. I elaborate on the nature of hermeneutic-interpretive
explanation later in this essay. For the remainder of the essay, I use
hermeneutic-interpretation to refer to those modes of interpretation
that see distinctively human behavior and understanding as
linguistically mediated. I use interpretation and interpretive theory in
a more general sense, referring to any form of social science that
emphasizes understanding the meaning that social behavior has for
actors, whether or not that perspective emphasizes the centrality of
language. I hope to make these distinctions clear in my account of the
evolution of this perspective. The term “practical reason” borrows from,
but is not identical with, Aristotle's discussion of
phronesis in Book VI of the
Nicomachean Ethics. There, Aristotle
distinguishes between theoria, knowledge
about those things that are not open to deliberation and human decision
(e.g., the structure of the solar system) and
phronesis, knowledge about those things
that are subject to deliberation and intersubjective agreement, for
example, how ought one to live one's life or what kind of constitution a
society ought to have. In this respect, interpretive accounts, and
hermeneutic interpretation in particular, emphasize the importance of
public engagement with the political life under examination. For an
argument from a somewhat different perspective that political science
needs to become more publicly engaged, see Putnam (2003). The German
term verstehen also found its way into
Anglo-American social science lexicon. It refers to the interpretive
understanding of the intended meaning and significance that an action
has for an actor performing it.