SOURCE: "Social and Political Thought and the Problem of Ideology," in Knowledge and Belief in Politics: The Problem of Ideology, Robert Benewick, R. N. Berki, Bhikhu Parekh, eds., George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1973, pp. 57-87.

[In the following essay, Parekh provides an outline of the place of rationalism in the history of philosophy and examines Mannheim's approach to the "crisis of rationality" that is often identified with the modern era.]

The most influential conception of rationality in Western thought, a conception that is prima facie highly plausible and has a good deal of attraction for intellectuals, goes back to the pre-Socratics and finds its noblest expression in the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. On this, what for convenience I shall call the traditional view of rationality, thinking was essentially a contemplative activity in which the human mind soared above the contingencies of human existence and comprehended its subject matter without being influenced by any extra-rational factors issuing from the thinker's psychological or social background. Thinking, in other words, was regarded as a direct and unmediated encounter between the thinking mind and its objects of thought. The traditional view of rationality also drew a fairly neat distinction between theory and practice. Unlike the world of practice which arose from human wants and desires and thus from a lack of human self-sufficiency, theorizing was regarded as an unconstrained, free, and indeed useless activity in which the human mind was guided by nothing other than the disinterested desire to seek the truth. Aristotle expressed the distinction well when he described practice as an essentially human, and theory as an essentially divine, activity. As God is self-sufficient, he could not want or desire anything and could only be defined as self-thinking thought. Man therefore was believed to be most god-like when he was engaged in theorizing. Aristotle carried the argument to its logical conclusion when he suggested that the theoretical reason, nous, could not be inherent in the human organism but came from 'outside' and was immortal. It was simple and changeless, and since it dealt with pure forms and did not depend on physical sensations and images to provide it with its subject matter, it was self-sufficient. As the theoretical reason was thus detachable from the human body, it was believed to be totally uninfluenced by its physical and social environment.

Man, on the traditional view of rationality, was essentially a theoretical being whose primary concern was to discover and contemplate the truth. In his pursuit of truth he was guided by nothing other than the disinterested concern to reach the truth. As practical interests distorted and corrupted thought, man, it was believed, could pursue the truth only if he had no interest in the practical outcome of his pursuit. The more the human reason was dissociated from passions and desires, the more it was considered capable of attaining the truth. It is worth noting that for Plato, Aristotle, Descartes and even Spinoza, desires and passions were not original properties of the human soul but the 'disturbances' it suffered as a result of its union with the body and which it could and should constantly endeavour to transcend. Not only was the human reason not influenced by human passion, it was not influenced by the surrounding society or the social position of the thinker either. That the thinker existed in a particular society was considered a historical contingency that in no way affected the operations of his reason. When the socially transcendent human reason discovered truths, they were naturally believed to be eternally valid.

While some of the beliefs of the traditional view of rationality were questioned by many Christian theologians, the first full-scale challenge to it was not mounted until the dawn of the modern era. The challenge came from two related but essentially different directions.

The first attack was based on a psychological theory of human action that was initiated by Hobbes, refined by Locke, and perfected by the thinkers of the French Enlightenment. Man, it was argued, was essentially a practical being whose main concern in life was to pursue his happiness, to make the world a habitable place. Reason, it was argued further, was set in motion by human desires; indeed, it was created by desires, so that the more a man desired, the greater the stimulus he had to think and therefore the greater his reason. As Voltaire, in his Treatise of Metaphysics, remarked, 'the passions are the wheels which make all these machines go'. Vauvenargues reflected the same attitude in his Introduction to the Knowledge of the Human Mind when he concluded that the true nature of man did not lie in reason but in the passions. Helvetius observed in his Treatise on Man that reason in itself was inert and was set in motion only by desires. As reason thus arose and operated within the overall context of practical interests and desires, its essential task was considered to be to serve passions, to find the best means of gratifying them. It was argued, further, that of all human passions the concern for personal interest was the 'most powerful, most important, most uniform, most lasting and most general' (Bentham). It was believed to be natural to man to 'prefer himself to mankind'; indeed, it was argued that this desire comes with us 'from the womb' and 'never leaves until we go into the grave' (Adam Smith). Now if a man was a creature compelled by his very nature to pursue his own interest, and if reason was only a means to satisfying human desires, it was very difficult to see how human thought could be other than self-interested. Not only in all his conscious activities but even in his unconscious desires and motivations man could not but be guided by considerations of self-interest. And this applied not merely to his practical activity but also to his intellectual activities.

The second major attack on the traditional theory of rationality came from the historicist school of which Hegel was the greatest philosopher. Kant had already paved the way for this line of attack by denying the objective and ontological unity of the world on which the traditional theory was based. He took the view that the world in itself had no order, no internal principles of unity, and that it was the perceiving subject who imposed order on his experiences and created a coherent perceptual universe out of the chaos of experience. However, as Kant had assumed that the human mind had an inherent structure, and that the principles it imposed were universally common, his view did not lead to epistemological subjectivism. But it did raise some acute problems. He had assumed that the human mind had fixed categories of understanding, without explaining how they came to be there in the first instance. He had further treated the human mind as if it somehow stood outside society and was not a product or even an integral part of society. He had also not asked if the human mind and its categories always remained the same or if they were subject to historical evolution.

Trying to meet the difficulties that Kant's epistemology had raised, Hegel argued that man was essentially a social creature, and society essentially a historical product. He thought that each society had a unique modality of consciousness, a Volkgeist that permeated and unified all its parts and gave it an internal unity and distinctive identity. The Volkgeist, further, was a manifestation of the world spirit, representing a particular stage in its successive historical manifestations. Hegel's philosophy implied that human thought was culturally and historically conditioned and could not transcend the categories and assumptions of its time. It implied further that human thinking was not an individual but a social activity, that man thought not as an individual but as a member of his society, and that the relationship between the human mind and its object was necessarily culturally mediated.

Both the psychological and the historicist attacks on the traditional theory of rationality were coordinated by Marx, which is why he is such a central figure in the discussion of ideology. Marx married liberal psychology to Hegel's historicism. Like Hegel he too divided history into several epochs, but unlike him his principle of division was not cultural but economic. Human thought for him was determined by interests as the liberals had argued; but he defined interest not in individual but in socio-historical terms. Each individual thought, he believed, in terms of the categories characteristic of his class, and what made him a representative of his class was the fact he continued to wrestle with the same problems at the theoretical level that preoccupied other members of his class in actual life. He remained unable, Marx thought, to transcend the categories and assumptions of his class because ultimately, to put it somewhat crudely, it was not in his interest or in the interest of his class that he should do so. Such limited and distorted thought Marx called ideology.

The psychological and the historicist attacks on the traditional theory of rationality created a serious intellectual crisis and generated 'the problem of ideology'. They managed to cast serious doubts on the traditional theory, and yet what they proposed to put in its place destroyed human rationality and capacity ever to reach the truth. If self-interest was the ultimate spring of human conduct it was difficult to see how it did not permeate and distort thought, how a man could accept truths that went against his interest. One could of course argue that truth and interest always harmonized, or that it was in man's interest to pursue truth. But this was, to say the least, a highly questionable assumption and it in no way relieved the tension between liberal psychology and liberal epistemology. Similarly if all thought was historically conditioned as Hegel had argued, the idea of the Absolute could not make any sense, and even if it did, it was difficult to see how the historically limited mind of Hegel could claim to grasp the ways of the Absolute in their totality. Similarly, Marx too could not argue that while all thought was class determined he had somehow transcended the categories of his class or that interest had not distorted his thought. And therefore if they were to be consistent both he and Hegel had to argue that truth was relative to historical epoch or class, that man could never attain objective and universally valid truths, that there were as many different types of rationality as there were societies and classes, and that therefore mankind did not constitute a rational community capable of mutual comprehension.

The essence of the problem of ideology then was, and is, whether the historically, sociologically and psychologically naive traditional theory of rationality could be revised without destroying rationality altogether. In other words, can one bring down human reason from its seat in high heavens (as Greeks had imagined it) to the earth and locate it firmly and securely in the human world without losing it in the process? Or can the dignity and power of reason be secured only by pretending that it is a divine and transcendent faculty? In short, can reason be human (or humanized) without ceasing to be reason?

Of a number of attempts made to deal with this crisis of rationality, Mannheim's was one of the most significant. He saw the problem that Weber did not. And he did not feel committed to defending Marx and Hegel in a way that Lukacs did. While he did not resolve the problem, he did face up to it and opened up an interesting line of inquiry. It will therefore be rewarding to consider in some detail his analysis and proposed resolution of the problem. In the next two sections I shall outline his position and criticize what appears to be a fundamental weakness in an otherwise stimulating analysis. In the final section I shall sketch very briefly the outlines of a theory of rationality that incorporates many of Mannheim's basic insights and avoids his mistakes.

I

Following Marx, Mannheim argues that human thought arises and operates in a definite social milieu. The process of knowing in his view is 'decisively' influenced at 'critical' points by 'extratheoretical' or 'existential' factors. To every social situation, he argues, there pertains a definite point of view: a definite perspective on the world, a definite conceptual framework, a definite set of beliefs about man and society, a definite set of 'basic categories of thought', a definite standard for evaluating and validating knowledge. As he puts it [in Ideology and Utopia], 'mental structures are inevitably differently formed in different social and historical settings'. It is the social context that determines the way an individual defines and uses concepts, the way he contrasts them with other concepts, the sorts of concepts that are absent from his thought, the dominant models of his thought, the level of his abstraction and his theory of reality. Mannheim explains in some detail how this is so.

It is because their different social backgrounds give rise to different perspectives that two different persons, both reasoning accurately, judge the same object and define the same word very differently. Thus to a nineteenth-century German conservative, freedom meant the right of each estate to live according to its own privileges, while to a contemporary liberal, it meant precisely the absence of these privileges. That each side saw only one aspect of the concept is 'clearly and demonstrably connected with their respective positions in the social and political structure'. Similarly, conservatives generally use morphological categories of thought that enable them to grasp the totality of experience as a whole, whereas left-wing groups, concerned to change things, generally atomize a situation into its component elements in order that they can reassemble them anew. Take again, the differences in the thought-models of different individuals and groups. While the success of the natural sciences created a general desire to study social phenomena in mechanistic-atomistic terms, it is significant, thinks Mannheim, that not all the groups in society accepted their dominance. The landed nobility, the displaced classes and the peasantry were generally disinterested in and even resentful of any attempt to study society in scientific terms. This was so because the world view that the natural sciences represented 'belonged to a mode of life other than their own', was alien to their 'life-situation'. Mannheim offers a similar explanation of the difference in the level of intellectual abstraction of different individuals and groups. Why is it, he asks, that Marxism, which is so keen to trace the ideological origins of its opponents' thought, did not develop a general theory on this basis? And replies that this was because of the Marxists' subconscious reluctance to think out the implications of their insight to a point where they would have a 'disquieting effect' on their own position. In other words Marx did not develop a general theory of ideology because it would have shown that his own ideas were as ideological as those of his opponents.

The recognition of the 'infiltration of the social position of the investigator into the results of his study', Mannheim argues, entails a rejection of nearly all the basic assumptions of the traditional theory of rationality. Its biggest mistake was to detach human thinking from its social and activist context. It had naively assumed that thinking was a solitary and uniquely individual activity. In Mannheim's view, on the other hand, men are members of various groups and confront the world both practically and intellectually as members of these groups. As they think with some groups and against some others, thinking is basically a social, a collective, activity. 'Strictly speaking it is incorrect to say that the single individual thinks. Rather it is more correct to say that he participates in thinking further what men have thought before him'. Thinking, further, is not a contemplative but a practical activity and is integrally connected with the human need to respond to the world. Its problems, concepts, forms of thought are not sui generis or excogitated out of the human mind but arise in the course of transforming and grappling with the world. Thinking and acting, theory and practice, are not separate activities but two somewhat different dimensions of a single composite activity. Theory arises out of and reacts on practice, just as practical concerns generate and transform, and are in turn transformed by, theory.

As the traditional theory of rationality is based on false assumptions concerning the nature of thought, Mannheim goes on, its notions of truth and objectivity need to be radically revised. If all thought is practical, the idea of a disinterested pursuit of truth does not make any sense. And if all thought is socially determined the idea of absolute and universally valid truth does not make any sense either. To suggest that some forms of thought and criteria of validity are universally true is naive in the extreme. 'Such simple and unsophisticated ideas in their purity and naivety are reminiscent of some intellectual Eden that knows nothing of the upheaval of knowledge after the fall'. The discovery that thought is immersed in the life of society, that it has 'social and activist roots', has already been made, and it is no longer possible to go back to the cosy and comforting but essentially invalid rationalism of the traditional theory of rationality. One can, of course, keep pointing to a few basic propositions of logic and mathematics and even of some of the natural sciences as examples of universally valid truth and continue chanting slogans about the dignity and purity of human thought. But that is no answer to a man who, deeply perplexed and bewildered by the sheer multiplicity and chaos of social and political thought, asks how 'the partisanship, the fragmentariness of our vision' can be transcended and how we can deal with the 'undoubted' fact that human ideas are profoundly conditioned by deep psychological and social forces. It is no use talking to him about the formal consistency or inconsistency of a theory, since his query is about the diversity of substantive interpretations of facts. And it is no use either to refer him to the verificationist criteria for evaluating different theories, since the social and political facts to which an appeal is being made can themselves be interpreted and described in so many different and conflicting ways. To put the point differently, the recognition of the 'inherently ideological character of all thought', of the fact that the 'thought of all parties in all epochs is of an ideological character', has destroyed 'man's confidence in human thought in general'. And the fundamental problem that any well-considered theory of rationality must answer is as to how one can deal with this crisis in human self-confidence, without taking recourse to the already discredited Platonic, Cartesian and other forms of abstract rationalism, or to self-destructive scepticism and irrationalism, or to an 'ill-considered and sterile form of relativism … increasingly prevalent today'.

Mannheim's own answer to the crisis created by the knowledge of the existential determination of truth is along the following lines. Just as in personal life one acquires mastery over blind and unconscious impulses by first becoming aware of them, and then consciously controlling them, so too in his pursuit of knowledge man can acquire objectivity, not by ignoring or holding 'in abeyance' his interests and evaluations but only by recognizing and accepting them. And just as a patient needs a psychoanalyst to make him aware of his unconscious impulses and to help him to come to terms with and even conquer them, a society needs a sociologist of knowledge. The task of the sociologist of knowledge is threefold. First, he is to interpret and organize people's complex and chaotic ideas into coherent and intelligible perspectives. Second, he is to interpret and analyse these perspectives and classify them into a few basic styles of thinking. Having done this he is to take the third and final step of going 'behind' these basic styles of thinking, relating them to their relevant social backgrounds and showing how each perspective is existentially determined. This three-stage inquiry Mannheim calls sociology of knowledge. And its method of operation he calls 'relationism', that is, relating isolated ideas to a perspective, a perspective to a thought style, and relating the latter in turn to a life-situation. Relationism then is Mannheim's answer to relativism, and sociology of knowledge is his answer to ideology.

By analysing the life-experiences within which a perspective arises and from which it derives its meaning, the sociologist of knowledge, in Mannheim's view, is able to comprehend its inner significance and rationality. He is also able to show to its adherents why they think the way they do, why they emphasize certain experiences and not others, why they value certain things and not others, why they use words and concepts one way rather than another. By thus demonstrating to them how their perspective reflects and articulates a Weltanschauung appropriate to their particular social position, he is able both to show them the one-sidedness of their perspective and to make them receptive to the insights of other perspectives. In seeing how various perspectives differ and why, the sociologist of knowledge, further, is able to go beyond them all and is in a position to create a higher level of abstraction that offers a 'common denominator', a common vocabulary and a common body of standards for translating the insights and results of one perspective in terms of another. He is able, in other words, to develop 'a more comprehensive basis of vision', a dynamic and synthetic viewpoint that encompasses, explains and integrates conflicting perspectives.

Sociology of knowledge, Mannheim maintains, does no more than provide a common framework within which different perspectives can engage in a dialogue. Since a mere empirical demonstration of the origin of an idea tells us nothing about its validity, sociology of knowledge is not equipped to assess the validity of ideas, which, as the traditional theory of rationality had insisted, remains the preserve of epistemology. However, sociology of knowledge is not entirely irrelevant to epistemology. The knowledge of the origin of an idea clarifies its meaning and indicates how it is intended to be taken. It informs us, further, about the scope of the statement, the area of experience it is intended to cover; by thus indicating how its truth or falsity is to be ascertained, it guides us in deciding how it is to be validated and within what limits it is to be considered valid. In other words sociology of knowledge 'particularizes' the 'scope and the extent' of the validity of an idea or a theory. In Mannheim's cryptic and vague phrase, the value of the findings of the sociology of knowledge 'lies somewhere … between irrelevance to the establishment of truth on the one hand, and entire adequacy for determining the truth on the other'.

Since Mannheim is convinced that there is a 'close' relationship between the origin of an idea and its validity, between sociology of knowledge and epistemology, he argues that the 'fundamental presuppositions' of the traditional conception of epistemology should be radically revised. The 'self-sufficiency of epistemology', accepted as a self-evident truth by the traditional theory of rationality, is a myth. The traditional conception of epistemology is derived from the natural sciences; and since the historical-social perspective of the investigator is irrelevant to the validity of the knowledge acquired in these sciences, traditional epistemology has remained unhistorical and abstract. When therefore it is applied to the social sciences where the social position of the investigator is of utmost importance it leads to distortion. What we need to do therefore is to evolve a historically orientated epistemology that takes full account of the concrete interplay between existence and knowledge. Once the traditional epistemology is revised, says Mannheim, its notions of truth and objectivity have to be revised as well. Different perspectives have different insights into social reality and all we can hope for is to encourage a debate among them and arrive at a broader and richer insight, an insight that is more comprehensive and richer than any of them but not one that can pretend to represent 'truth as such'. A true social or political theory is not one that no one can deny but one that most men can accept. The idea of 'absolute truth' or 'truth in itself is therefore inapplicable to the study of man. Besides, as a richer and more satisfactory conception of social reality can only be attained by integrating partial and narrower conceptions of reality, an 'indirect approach through social history' is in the end far more fruitful than 'a direct logical attack'. Truth, that is to say, is reached not by falsifying and knocking down theories but by understanding their social context, appreciating their partial insights, and incorporating them in a wider perspective.

II

Mannheim spoils a good thesis by exaggerating it. He says much that is interesting and valid and with which, as will become apparent in the next section, I agree. As we shall see later he is right to emphasize the social and activist context of social and political thought and to draw attention to some of the problems created by the remarkably different ways in which people see the same reality. He is right to criticize the traditional theory of rationality for its historical and sociological naivete; and he is no less right to criticize Hegel and Marx for emphasizing the historicity of all thought but claiming inconsistently that their own theories somehow represented absolute truth. He is also right to see the narrowness of Marx's economism, and to want to define the category of social factors much more widely. Mannheim's own proposal for a sympathetic analysis and systematic synthesis of conflicting social and political theories does suggest a way out of the pluralist impasse and opens up an interesting line of inquiry. His basic mistake, however, was twofold. First, while he was right to see that human thought, especially social and political thought, cannot be dissociated from human interests, values, anxieties, cultural biases, etc., he went wrong in arguing that it was determined by any or all of them. In other words, he confused the fact that man is culturally conditioned with the dubious view that man is socially determined, and rejected only the economistic version of the determinist thesis, but not the thesis itself. Mannheim's second basic mistake was to confuse pluralism with relativism, the undoubted fact that different people see reality differently with the dubious view that they see different realities and that truth and reality are relative. These mistakes led his otherwise stimulating analysis into blind alleys.

Although Mannheim's entire analysis hinges on his basic thesis that knowledge is determined by social background, he never clearly defines any of the key terms involved. He does not explain what he means by knowledge. It is not clear, for example, if he means the total body of information that an individual has or only the systematic body of theoretical knowledge. That your name is John and that Paris is the capital of France can in one sense be called knowledge, but Mannheim clearly does not want to say that this type of knowledge is relative to different perspectives. By knowledge therefore he must be taken to mean systematic and organized knowledge. Even here, however, he qualifies his thesis by saying that not all but 'most of the domains of knowledge' are existentially determined. How the distinction between different types of knowledge is made and why only some of them are considered socially determined is nowhere explained. He is not even certain what domains of knowledge are existentially determined. He is clear that 'historical, political and social sciences' and 'ordinary thought' are determined and 'exact sciences are not. But his attitude to logic is ambiguous. At times he suggests that its 'laws' are immune from social determination; but at other times he argues that even formal logic is acceptable and appears plausible only to certain types of society or to certain sections of it.

Not only does he not give a coherent account of what type of knowledge is determined and why, he also does not explain what precisely he means by determinism. Sometimes knowledge is said to be 'casually' determined; sometimes it is said to be 'conditioned' by existential factors; sometimes it is said to be 'closely connected' with or 'in harmony' with or 'in accord' with them; sometimes it 'corresponds' to them; while at other times, as is more often the case, he is content to remark that it is 'no accident' that ideas and social background correspond. Mannheim could, of course, argue, as in fact he does, that these and other expressions do not reflect any ambiguity in his thought but only represent different types and levels of correlation that can exist between thought-process and life-situation. Thus in some cases ideas are determined by social factors; in other cases, they are only conditioned by them; and in some other cases they only correspond to them. This would be a plausible thesis to maintain, but then it would mean that Mannheim is not justified in talking about existential determination of knowledge, since determination refers to but one particular type of relationship and an extremely strong one at that. What is more, in those cases where ideas are said to accord with or correspond to existential factors, he would not really be establishing any meaningful correlation between them, since merely to show that certain ideas happen to be vaguely associated with certain social backgrounds is not to say anything of real significance. Mannheim needs to show that this association is not a mere coincidence but due to the influence of social factors.

Mannheim, again, does not show what existential factors determine ideas, why they and not others should be singled out, and why they have this kind of influence. Unlike Montesquieu he does not assign any influence to climatic, geographical and other natural factors without showing why. One would have thought that they too are 'existential' factors. He is also not clear whether or not psychological factors 'determine' thought and to what degree. At times he assigns key role to 'collective-unconscious, volitional impulses' and argues that thought requires an 'emotional-unconscious undercurrent to assure the continuous orientation for knowledge in group life'. In his view it is 'impulsive, irrational factors' that furnish 'the real basis' for the development of society and of ideas. Knowing, he maintains, 'presupposes a community of knowing which grows primarily out of a community of experiencing prepared for in the subconscious'. Since the collective unconscious of a group has such a powerful influence on its ideas he devotes nearly eighteen pages to the discussion of how to control it. For the most part, however, Mannheim is not happy with such psychological accounts; and while stressing their importance, he seems to want to explain them in sociological terms, generally taking the view that unconscious psychological influences are themselves the result of social forces.

But when it comes to specifying social factors he is, again, ambivalent. Sometimes he takes every possible type of social grouping to be a determinant of ideas, and emphasizes the role of family, childhood experiences, occupational groups, etc. At other times, he follows Marx in regarding the class as all-important. At yet other times he stresses 'political interests' as existentially very important. Sometimes he moves away from groups altogether and resorts to that capacious umbrella of social forces, social structure as a whole, and even the entire historical epoch as the existential determinants of ideas. Thus he says at various places that the rationalistic manner of thinking arose in the modern society because it was 'in accord with the needs of an industrial society ', that the post-Romantic generation adopted a revolutionary view of society because it was 'in accord with the needs of the time', that psychic energies and forms of thought are transformed by 'social forces'. To say that social factors determine ideas is not really to say anything meaningful, unless one shows how the social factors are themselves interrelated. Now either Mannheim should pick up one of them as all-important, or he should establish a pattern of interaction among them. He does neither. He is tempted to take the familiar Marxist line, but fights shy of its reductionism and naive economism. The result is that he keeps emphasizing different factors as they suit his argument, leaving his theory of social determinism incredibly chaotic.

Mannheim's basic thesis then is muddled. He does not clarify what types of ideas are determined by what types of existential factors; and he is not clear either on whether they are determined or conditioned or stimulated by them or whether they simply happen to correspond to them. What is worse his concern to establish his thesis leads him to make highly dubious assertions. Explaining why Marx did not develop a sociology of knowledge, he argues that it was because he did not want, albeit unconsciously, to jeopardize his own claim to represent an absolutely true theory of society. But how does Mannheim know that this was Marx's unconscious reason? Why cannot one admit that Marx did genuinely believe, however wrongly, that while the ideas of some classes were determined by interests, his own were not? Perhaps he was inconsistent, but what evidence does Mannheim have to jump to the conclusion that this inconsistency sprang from Marx's unconscious desire to distort the truth to bolster his scientific claims? Mannheim asserts, again, that much of modern sociology shies away from dealing historically and concretely with the problems of society and remains abstract and formalistic because it is afraid that otherwise its own internal contradictions, and those of capitalism itself, might become visible to others. The bourgeois discussion of freedom, Mannheim again insists, has always concentrated on political but never on social and economic freedom, because the bourgeoisie are fearful that this might pose a threat to their interests. In no case does he offer any evidence that this was or is really the intention of the parties concerned. He does not show, for example, that formalistic sociology is really committed to the defence of capitalism, or that the adoption of an historical approach will necessarily lead it to criticize it. The reasoning in each case is deductive and speculative and one could just as plausibly offer a totally different account of the phenomenon concerned.

Even if Mannheim's thesis could be correctly formulated, it would have to be rejected on a number of grounds. If all thought is existentially determined, so is the thought that all thought is existentially determined, and therefore has no general validity. Again, a society is a system of roles and reciprocal relationships which cannot be sustained if its members do not have similar ideas on their position in society and the rights and duties it entails. In other words the existence of an organized society becomes impossible to explain if its members have different ideas corresponding to their different social backgrounds. Again, Mannheim's view rests on a naive conception of the nature of ideas. It assumes that as social conditions change ideas change automatically; but this is to treat ideas like a baggage that one can pick up and put down at will. It also implies that men cannot change their ideas unless they change their social group, and this not only denies all intellectual value to education, discussion, criticism, introspection and disturbing personal experiences, but also makes it impossible to explain the familiar fact that people do change their ideas without changing their social position.

Even though Mannheim's account of ideology and rationality is untenable, what he says about sociology of knowledge makes some very interesting points. His view that the knowledge of the life-situation of a person is useful in understanding his social and political ideas is valid and his belief that it is possible to work out a realm of debate where competing viewpoints can carry on a dialogue and come better to appreciate their partialities opens up an interesting line of inquiry. Even though he does not establish any clear relationship between the origin and the validity of an idea, he does manage to suggest that the two are related, although not in quite the way he proposes. His plea for both an historically orientated epistemology in social and political thought, and for a revision of the notions of objectivity and truth as they apply to the study of man, is blacked up by some very powerful arguments.

The point, however, is that his sociology of knowledge is impossible if his theory of ideology is correct. In other words, paradoxically, his cure is only effective if his diagnosis is wrong. It is not at all clear how it is possible for holders of different perspectives ever to argue if their categories of thought and forms of consciousness are determined existentially. As each perspective is a self-enclosed world and no one can get out of it, the possibility of a dialogue is foreclosed. This applies to the sociologist of knowledge as well who, despite Mannheim's rather naive theory of 'socially unattached intellectuals', is as much a prisoner of his existentially determined perspective as anyone else, and therefore cannot have the ability to reconstruct other perspectives faithfully or to relate them to their adherents' life situation or provide a 'common denominator' between them. Further if different perspectives are to criticize each other, they must have some common standards to which they can appeal and whose general validity they must accept. This means that objective standards that Mannheim had earlier rejected and that indeed generated the problem of ideology in the first instance have now to be brought back through the backdoor, as he actually does in his reference to 'the direct examination of facts'. But once they are brought back, it becomes possible for different perspectives to communicate and criticize each other directly; and therefore sociology of knowledge is no longer necessary to provide a common vocabulary or a common realm of discourse. In other words, if all social and political thought is ideological, sociology of knowledge is impossible; if, on the other hand, it is not ideological, sociology of knowledge is not necessary to play the redemptive role that Mannheim assigns it.

III

Mannheim then has failed to provide a satisfactory theory of social and political rationality. As he mistakenly took a determinist and relativist view of social and political thought he remained unable to explain how social thought could be improved, how men could debate and discuss, how the partial insights of conflicting social and political theories could be synthesized. The problem for any well-considered theory of rationality, therefore, is how it can come to terms with the plurality of social and political thought without getting misled into determinist and relativist blind alleys. Below is sketched very briefly and tentatively the outline of one possible way of conceiving rationality.

We can take it as true that a human being does not exist in a vacuum but is a member of a society by whose cultural milieu he is necessarily conditioned. He grows up with its values, prejudices and categories of thought that are often too deep even for consciousness. His language too directs his perceptions and thoughts along definite channels. He occupies a definite position in society that delimits his range of experiences, and therefore influences the view he will be inclined to take of his fellow-men, the beliefs he will find plausible, the weight he will attach to an argument or to an account of human behaviour. The cultural ethos of his society moulds and shapes his mind; it disposes him to look at the world in a certain way and gives his consciousness a quality, a tone, a content, a rhythm, a structure. His reason, which is only the way his consciousness operates, is thus firmly and securely located in the culture of his community and is not a natural or transcendent faculty but a cultural capacity. Human mind, further, is a complex totality in which reason, passion, desire are all closely intertwined. It cannot therefore be broken up into separate parts each of which operates in isolation from the rest. Just as human feelings and emotions are not primeval raw forces but are already permeated by reason, so also human reason is immersed in the individual's values, interests, anxieties and aspirations. To abstract it from them is to distort it, to miss its inspiring and guiding principles. Thinking in short, is not a cerebral or a mental process but a total human response, and it is not the human reason, nor the human mind, but the total human being who thinks and reasons. Further, man faces the world not in his sovereign loneliness but as a cultural being, as a being with a complex of values and attitudes. This is indeed what is involved in being human. Contra Mannheim he can, of course, change or modify some or most or even all of his values and attitudes but it is impossible to imagine a human being who has no definite way of looking at man and society, who is not orientated to the world in some definite way.

Intellectual inquiries differ in the way they involve the total human person. In the inquiries like logic and mathematics that are purely formal, one proposition follows from another with deductive rigour, leaving no room for preference or interpretation, and therefore human values and prejudices do not enter. In the natural sciences where there is room for interpretation and discretion, they do enter, but to a limited degree and not in a way that affects the substance of the theories developed. Thus whether or not the universe is a deterministic system and allows 'free will', whether or not it leaves room for God, whether its ultimate constituents are isolated and singular atoms or whether they constitute a 'community' are issues that do affect the scientist's personal values, emotions, world view, and therefore influence the way he describes his conception of the universe or what theories he finds persuasive and appealing. One has only to consider, for example, the way some scientists refuse to accept a deterministic conception of the universe, or the way they talk about the 'community' of atoms, or define the notions of absolute space and time. Again, not every scientific hypothesis can be completely verified, and a scientist has to decide if evidence for it is sufficiently strong and probability sufficiently high. And here one of the factors influencing his judgements is his view of the seriousness of the consequences issuing from making a mistake in accepting the hypothesis. Thus, for example, if the hypothesis under consideration was that a toxic ingredient was present in a drug in lethal quantity, the scientist would want a relatively high degree of confirmation before accepting it.

The study of man is of a very different kind. Being a study of men like himself whose actions provoke attitudes of approval or disapproval, praise or condemnation, it activates the theorist's cultural values in a way that the study of nature or number does not. Human actions have a meaning that is not obvious and straightforward and has to be teased out. And this can only be done on the basis of what one expects men to be like, what one's experiences of men are like. What one says is capable of influencing others, and therefore involves one's interests and values. One likes to see a certain type of world, a certain pattern of interpersonal relationship, and since theory is one mode of action one's theories and interpretations are unavoidably coloured by one's anxieties and aspirations as the testimonies of Plato, Augustine, Hobbes, further, Rousseau and Marx make so abundantly clear. A theorist, further, has a certain way of looking at the world. He is either a pessimist or an optimist; he either loathes conflict or welcomes it. And these attitudes influence his selection of facts, the importance he assigns them and the way he feels inclined to relate them. Again, his language is already charged with the ethos of his community and directs his thought, and therefore his choice and manner of relating facts, in a certain definite way. A language that offers no means of describing or referring to men separately from their caste or other social groupings would make it most difficult to develop a theory, e.g. of methodological or ontological individualism and would incline its users to look for only those aspects of human conduct in which individuals cooperate and act in a concerted manner.

Apart from this general fact that human prejudices, values, interests, attitudes, are activated by the study of man in a way they are not by other types of study, there are also several other reasons why the study of man is culturally conditioned. Unlike natural events human beings are historical creatures. They have a past that endures in the present; they are subject to historical change; and they can and do organize their personal and social life in so very different ways. Our moral life, for example, is a precipitate of several moralities: the Greco-Roman, Judaic, Christian, feudal and the contemporary bourgeois and socialist moralities. All these strands have given rise to a highly complex pattern of moral conduct that is by no means a coherent structure. What is more they are combined differently in different sections of society or by different individuals and generate unique patterns of moral conduct. A moral philosopher is no exception and therefore he will tend to offer an account of moral life that is faithful to his own moral experiences. But his moral experiences are not others' moral experiences; and therefore an account that strikes him as natural, accurate, obvious, true, strikes another as one-sided and even false. Kantian moral theory, for example, offers a perfectly valid account of the moral experiences of men who live a life of duty for duty's sake and generally take a legalistic attitude to life. But it cannot but strike as odd to those who take life less rigorously, who would bend a rule at the first available opportunity to make others happy. This does not mean that the Kantian moral theory is valid for some and not for others, but rather that it is able to account for certain types of moral experiences much better than others, and that therefore those to whom the former types of experience come naturally will be persuaded of its truth in a way that others would not be. Contra Mannheim it does not mean either that a moral philosopher cannot imagine what different types of moral experiences are like and take account of them in constructing his moral theory. However, imagination, like reason, is not some abstract faculty but is culturally conditioned and therefore there are limits to what a man can imagine. When a moral or social theorist tries to comprehend another society or an unfamiliar experience, he does not approach it with a blank mind but with a mind already accustomed to looking at man and society in a specific way. He can certainly stretch his imagination and revise his preconceptions, but there are limits to how far he can go. And even when he can imagine unfamiliar experiences, he needs to interpret and make sense of them, and here his own cultural assumptions and categories inescapably enter.

In social and political thought there is also the further question of theoretical discretion in conceptualizing experience. A concept can best be understood on the analogy of a beam of light; it has an unmistakable centre but a nebulous and hazy circumference and therefore covers a wide range at either end of which it merges into other concepts. An analysis of a concept therefore involves determining both its centre (its paradigmatic usage) and its range (that is, its permissible usages). Take, for example, the concept of man. We know how to use this concept and have generally no difficulty recognizing human beings. But suppose walking through the jungles of Africa I come across a tiny insect who greets me and strikes off an extremely pleasant conversation about the beauty of the jungle and its wild life, the misery and poverty of Africans, etc. How am I to describe this creature? It behaves like a man, and therefore I could call it a man. But it looks like an insect, and therefore I could refuse to call it a man. There is no reason why I could not take either view, and in each case I would be no more or no less objective or right than the person taking the upposite view. The same sort of problem comes up in less bizarre cases. Is the so-called psychic 'violence' violence or not? Is exploitation violence as the New Left insists? Or should the term violence be reserved only for the use of physical force? Is Aristotle's proportional equality to be called equality? Is the Greek city-'state' a state? Or is the term to be reserved only for the modern post-Renaissance state? Is university politics politics? Or is the term to be reserved only for the conduct of the affairs of the state? There are good and bad reasons for each side of the controversy, and therefore a theorist has a discretion. Depending on how he uses each of the countless concepts that go to compose his theory, he will describe, interpret and relate the relevant phenomena differently.

Theories about man and society then are culturally conditioned and reflect the cultural orientation of their originators. Hence they appear plausible to those sharing their underlying cultural values and attitudes; to those who take a different view of man and society, they appear less convincing and persuasive. Not that they are true for one group and false for another, but rather that they appear true, self-evident, to one group but not to another. That all theories about man and society are permeated by their creators' cultural biases and values, and that they appear more plausible and persuasive to some but not to others, can be established not only on the basis of a philosophical analysis of the nature of thinking but also by showing empirically how there is hardly any social or moral or political theory that does not, as it were, give away its originator's identity.

Max Weber is one of the clearest examples of a thinker who believed that a social scientist could and should offer, and that he himself did offer, 'an unconditionally valid type of knowledge' that, in his favourite phrase, 'must be acknowledged as correct even by a Chinese'. Ignoring the vulgar Nazi criticism of his writings as essentially 'Jewish', the crude Communist attack on him as a man concerned to make out a case for charismatic leadership and thereby for the Fuhrer, and ignoring also the rather crude neo-liberal attack on him as a man whose writings were inspired by a Machiavellian worship of power and German imperialism, it is still possible to show that underlying Weber's sociological writings is a definite cultural bias, a definite Weltanschauung, a clearly identifiable body of moral values. He is an old-fashioned liberal who prizes individual liberty, above all the freedom of conscience, the freedom to make one's moral choices oneself. One of the important reasons why he separated fact and value was not that this might corrupt the objectivity of science but rather that it might create moral experts and give the scientist a power to prescribe moral values that might detract from the individual's unique moral status and dignity. It is also this that explains his interest in and intense concern about the consequences of bureaucratization. Consider, for example, his following description of it:

… each man becomes a little cog in the machine and, aware of this, his one preoccupation is whether he can become a bigger cog … it is horrible to think that the world could one day be filled with those little cogs, little men clinging to little jobs and striving towards bigger ones… this passion for bureaucracy is enough to drive one to despair. It is as if we were deliberately to become men who need order and nothing but order, who become nervous and cowardly if for one moment this order wavers, and helpless if they are torn away from their total incorporation in it. That the world should know men but these; it is in such an evolution that we are already caught up, and the great question is therefore not how we can promote and hasten it, but what we can oppose to this machinery in order to keep a portion of mankind free from this parcelling-out of the soul, from this supreme mastery of the bureaucratic way of life.

This is not a value-free statement but the remark of a man firmly committed to individual liberty. His liberalism comes out in a variety of other ways as well. As a secular rationalist he denies that the world is intrinsically rational; and as a good pluralist, he sees different religions as so many equally valid attempts to make some sense of it. Similarly he regards different moral systems as more or less equally valid ways of organizing moral life. Again, as a good liberal he takes the individual as the ultimate social reality, an unanalysable 'atom' of sociology, and issues the methodological prescription that any property involving reference to a collectivity must ultimately be resolved into concepts referring to actions of identifiable individuals. Again, he subscribes to the liberal view of man as an essentially rational being in whom irrationality is a deviation, an aberration, and deduces the methodological prescription, embodied in his theory of ideal type, that all 'irrational, affectually determined, elements of behaviour' should be treated 'as factors of deviation from a conceptually pure type of action'. Even without consulting a 'Chinese', someone who takes a different view of man and society, a Marx or a Tawney or a Samuelson, for example, would quarrel with many of Weber's interpretations and explanations and offer a different account of the nature and rise of bureaucracy or capitalism or Protestantism or Calvinism.

Not only that Weber, the champion of 'unconditionally valid knowledge', himself does not produce a body of knowledge that 'even a Chinese' must accept; no other political or social scientist has so far done so either. Don Martindale has shown in detail how many of the allegedly value-neutral sociological theorists rest on unmistakable normative foundations. Henry Murray and David McClelland have shown how theories of personality project their authors' personal and cultural orientations. Charles Taylor has analysed Lipset's Political Man in considerable detail and shown how underlying his analysis is an unmistakable liberal preference for a society in which conflict is not suppressed but brought out into the open and integrated into the social framework, in which economic inequality is reduced, in which there is a large middle class and whose members are prepared to settle their differences by compromise and bargain. After a careful survey of the researches on the Negro problem in America, Myrdal concluded that 'there is no piece of research on the Negro problem which does not contain valuation, explicit or implicit'. J. W. Bennett has shown in a most interesting article how researches into the Pueblo culture describe and account for the same basic facts so very differently. Thompson, Benedict and others describe Hopi life as harmonious, organic, spontaneous, and involving minimum physical force; Goldfrank and Eggam, on the other hand, emphasize its deep social conditioning, its harshness, its coerciveness, and the emotional price it exacts from its members. These and other differences, as Bennett has shown, arise not from any carelessness in empirical research on the part of either group of writers, but essentially from the basic differences in their values, their attitudes to life, their cultural background, their prejudices, that lead them to select different facts, or to order the same facts differently, or to interpret and elucidate their meanings differently. Bertrand Russell was not entirely wrong when, commenting on the studies of the behaviour of rats by American and British psychologists, he remarked how American and British rats seemed to him to behave almost exactly as the Americans and Britishers did in their ordinary life. It is not difficult either to show how the study of the Third World by developmental experts says more about them than about the countries they study.

Since social and political theories are unavoidably selective, partial and culturally conditioned, the only way to improve them is to force them to explain themselves, to articulate and justify their assumptions and choice of concepts, to defend their interpretations of facts and show why other interpretations are mistaken. By criticizing a theory we can show how it rests on dubious assumptions, or how its concepts are muddled, or how it does not account for certain types of experience and how it becomes incoherent and muddled when it tries to give a plausible account of them, or how it draws illegitimate inferences or is internally inconsistent. In other words the institutionalization of criticism, as Popper has rightly emphasized, is the basic precondition of improving social and political theories.

If our earlier account of social and political theory is correct, Popper's theory of criticism, however, needs to be modified in several important respects. Popper argues that a theory can be falsified if it does not conform to facts. This does not take account of the twofold fact that facts can be interpreted differently and that facts themselves can be so very different. As we saw earlier, Kant's moral theory gives a satisfactory account of certain types of moral experience but not others. It would be wrong to say that the latter falsify his theory; rather they demonstrate how it is partial and limited, how its explanatory power and truth-content are limited. Similarly to a Bentham taking an egoistic view of man Jesus's martyrdom is as much an act of self-love or self-interest as Shylock's demand for a portion of flesh or Hitler's slaughter of Jews. This certainly goes against our ordinary evaluations of Christ's motives, but it would not do to use this as a 'fact' that falsifies Bentham's moral psychology, no more than our ordinary feeling that the earth is flat could be invoked to reject the scientific theory that the earth is round. Our ordinary evaluations can be wrong, or while admitting them at one level Bentham might rightly want to deny them at another.

The only way we can criticize Bentham's account of Christ's behaviour is by examining if and how he can show why self-love takes so very different forms in the cases of Shylock and Jesus, what secret pleasure Christ is pursuing in his martyrdom, why Bentham takes the view that man is necessarily an egocentric creature, how he would knock down other interpretations of human conduct, etc. In other words, facts do not falsify a social and political theory in a way that the discovery that there is no cat in my room falsifies the assertion that there is. Rather they impugn the validity of a theory by showing how in the course of explaining them it is forced to become more and more muddled, incoherent, ambiguous, bizarre. Facts destroy a social or political theory not so much by falsifying it as by undermining its integrity and credibility, by making it incoherent. In some sense this is like the way a lawyer proves a hostile witness a liar. He presents him with an inconvenient fact and asks him to explain it. The latter might be able to explain it away, in which case the lawyer presents him with another awkward fact. He might be able to explain away this fact as well, and then the lawyer presents him with yet another disturbing fact. And so on until the man is cornered, exposed, rendered incoherent. Hobbes or Bentham or Weber or Hegel, too, cannot be refuted, but cornered by being patiently presented with inconvenient facts at each stage of the argument. The more general methodological point of this example is that coherence correspondence dichotomy needs to be revised in discussing social and political thought, since the most effective way to criticize a social theory is not merely to expose its formal inconsistencies or to show that it does not correspond to facts but rather to use facts to demonstrate its incoherence, to use empirical evidence to demonstrate its logical weakness.

The second important respect in which Popper's theory of criticism needs to be modified is directly related to the peculiar character of social and political thought. As social and political facts can be interpreted differently and given different meanings and significance, our concern here, as Mannheim has argued, is to understand each other, to benefit from each others' insights, and ideally to acquire as comprehensive and rich a vision of social life as possible, a vision to which each theory makes a contribution and which unites all contestants at a deeper level of understanding. What one needs, therefore, is not a boxing match between different theories where each gets a point for every punch it lands and the victory goes to the one who deals a knock-out blow, as Popper's rather aggressive metaphors suggest, but a sympathetic and imaginative dialogue in which each contestant tries to learn from the rest. In this process of helping each theory to understand what makes others tick, what they really mean, and why they have an appeal for their adherents, something like Mannheim's sociology of knowledge has a useful role. Even the sociology of knowledge, however, is a somewhat crude tool and needs to be supplemented by literature, art and philosophy that can present the insights of each theory in an imaginative way and increase their mutual comprehension. As social and political knowledge grows not merely by criticism but also by sympathy and imagination, as one's concern here is not to knock down a theory but to absorb and incorporate its insight into an ever-widening vision, a theory that aims only to devise methods of falsification is one-sided and misses out one of the crucial dimensions of social and political debate.

Popper's theory of criticism needs to be modified in another respect as well. We saw earlier how social and political thought is integrally tied up with interests, values, prejudices. The civil climate of criticism that presupposes the willingness to expose oneself to others' relentless probing and to learn from their criticisms can hardly be sustained in a society where participants are involved in a ruthless struggle for survival or supremacy. Since social and political theory inevitably has, or can be seen to have, some practical implications, its discussion inevitably arouses fears and suspicions and introduces into calm academic discussion the all too familiar urgency of the market place. Marx is right that in a society characterized by clashes of sectional interests, the tendency to distort ideas is likely to be great. Mannheim's point that participants in a debate can better understand each other the greater the similarity of their experiences, is also appropriate here. In other words the pursuit of objectivity and truth requires the creation of a society from which violent clashes of interest have been eliminated, where there is less acute division of labour and specialization of thought so that people have the disposition and the ability to view their disciplines in a wider context, where there is considerable social mobility so that individuals have a chance to see their society and life from different perspectives, where there is equality of educational opportunity so that no intellectual inquiry is dominated by people sharing a uniform life-style. This is indeed the basic lesson we can learn from ideologists, that just as ideas are closely tied up with individual interests and values, so also is the search for truth and objectivity tied up with the creation of a humane society.

By criticism and sympathetic imagination social and political theories can be improved. But we need to be careful how we describe the process of improvement. Popper himself and many others have described it as getting closer to the truth, implying that one day we might reach the truth, the absolute truth as Popper calls it. Now because social and political thought is necessarily partial, selective, culture-bound, the idea of absolute truth does not make sense. An absolutely true theory would be one that can never be faulted, that accounts for the total diversity of relevant experience without distorting or overlooking any element in it, that uses concepts with which no one can quarrel, that rests on no assumptions that the theorist has not clearly articulated and defended. It is difficult to imagine what such a theory can even look like. Since values enter into the theorist's interpretation and explanation of his subject matter, an absolutely true social theory is possible only if we have an absolutely true moral theory, a set of absolutely true moral values; but such a moral theory is not available for obvious reasons. Just as the notion of absolute truth does not make sense, the notion of progressive approximation to it has to be rejected as well for the simple reason that there is nothing towards which one can be said to be moving or to which one can be said to be getting closer. The spatial metaphor carries the danger of inducing the belief that if we keep trying hard we would one day get to the truth. In other words it conveys the mistaken notion that the pursuit of truth is a journey that has a terminus, a destination that will one day be reached. It was this imagery that probably led Mill, Hegel, Marx and others to believe that progress will or must one day reach perfection. Theories, like society, can certainly be improved; but as they can always be improved, there is no terminus where improvement can be assumed to come to an end. Even as there cannot be an absolutely perfect society, a society in which there are no deficiencies whatsoever, for somewhat different reasons there cannot be an absolutely objective or absolutely true social theory either.

Because no theory about human behaviour can ever pretend to absolute truth and objectivity, there is no theory that cannot be criticized. But precisely because every social theory can be criticized and shown to be partial, culture-bound and narrowbased, no social theory can be rejected simply because it is open to criticism; otherwise no social theory would ever deserve acceptance. Since no theory can be absolutely true, one can only judge it in comparative terms, that theory being better which is less open to criticism than its rivals. To continue with our analogy, theories are like societies; if one demanded to live only in a society that was flawless, one would never find a society worth living in. One must be content to judge a society as better or worse than others that exist or are practically possible. Similarly, one theory is better than another and deserves acceptance if it is less partial, less discretionary, less culture-bound than its rivals.

A choice between social and political theories however is not always as clear-cut as this. Of a social theory, as of any other theory, we make a number of demands. It should not ignore any relevant fact; it should not distort facts; it should define its concepts clearly; it should be internally consistent; it should be imaginative and open up fruitful lines of inquiry; it should be structurally neat and tidy. Like moral ideals that cannot all be achieved, these demands cannot all be met. In tightening up its concepts or in achieving comprehensiveness, a theory may lose in empirical richness. In trying to be 'absolutely accurate', it might become as chaotic as the reality itself, losing in coherence what it gains in suggestiveness. As no theory possesses all the qualities one ideally expects in it, beyond a certain point the choice between them is a matter of individual discretion. There is also another point. Extreme and one-sided theories have often contributed far more to the growth of knowledge than those prosaic and balanced theories that see all sides of the question and never manage to rise above the level of common sense. Their uncompromising intransigence and unconcealed and fierce partiality force other practitioners of the discipline to reassess their assumptions, and stimulate and raise the level of intellectual debate. Objectivity, therefore, is not the only or even always the highest virtue in a theory. If a discipline is dominated by a single body of assumptions that its professionally socialized practitioners unconsciously assume to be self-evidently true, there is much to be said for advancing or accepting an extreme theory in order to stir them into critical self-examination and to encourage a radical reappraisal of the conceptual tools of the discipline. Since objectivity and impartiality are achieved as a result of the clash of subjectivity and partiality, falsehood and extremism often make most worthwhile contributions to the discovery of truth.