Page 119 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

96 Communication and Evolution of Society

a philosophical nature—problems concerning the foundations of
the social sciences—I see a close connection with questions re-
lating to a theory of social evolution. This assertion might appear
somewhat off the track; I would like, therefore, to begin by
recalling the following circumstances:
a. In the theoretical tradition going back to Marx the danger
of slipping into bad philosophy was always especially great when
there was an inclination to suppress philosophical questions in
favor of a scientistic understanding of science. Even in Marx
himself the heritage of the philosophy of history sometimes
came rather unreflectedly into play.’ This historical objectivism
took effect above all in the evolutionary theories of the Second
International—for example, in Kautsky and “Diamat.’’ ? Thus
special care is called for if we are today to take up once again
the basic assumptions of historical materialism in regard to social
evolution. This effort cannot consist in borrowing a list of pro-
hibitions from a methodology developed with physics as the
model, prohibitions that bar the way to social-sctentific theories
of development which pursue a research program suggested by
Freud, Mead, Piaget, and Chomsky.* But care is called for in
the choice of the basic concepts that determine the object domain
of communicative action, for by this step, the kind of knowledge
with which historical materialism may credit itself is decided.
b. From the beginning there was a lack of clarity concerning
the normative foundation of Marxian social theory. This theory
was not meant to renew the ontological claims of classical natural
law, nor to vindicate the descriptive claims of nomological sci-
ences; it was supposed to be “‘critical’’ social theory but only to
the extent that it could avoid the naturalistic fallacies of im-
plicitly evaluative theories. Marx believed he had solved this
problem with a cowp de main, namely, with a declaredly ma-
terialistic appropriation of the Hegelian logic.* Of course, he
did not have to occupy himself especially with this task; for his
practical research purposes he could be content to take at its
word, and to criticize immanently, the normative content of the
ruling bourgeois theories of modern natural law and political
economy—a content that was, moreover, incorporated into the
revolutionary bourgeois constitutions of the time. In the mean-