Hermeneutics, Political Inquiry, and Practical Reason: An Evolving Challenge to Political Science

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 recognizedIt 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..