A hermeneutical accent on the conduct of political inquiry

Abstract

In different ways language occupies a central concern in the development of contemporary philosophy. Hermeneutics flourishes in l i terary criticism and psychoanalysis today, but there is a curious lag in political theory. Despite the natural affinity of the history of political thought and jurisprudential studies to hermeneutics in which the not ion o f interpreta t ion plays a prominent role, they have yet to make a hermeneutical turn. The day will soon come, we hope, when historians of political thought may suddenly realize that, like Jourdain of Moli~re 's play (Le Bourgeois Genn'lhomme), they have been speaking the prose of hermeneutics all their lives or must come to terms with questions posed by it. The aim of this paper is to draw at tent ion to phenomenology as a permanent revolution in thinking and to place the not ion o f tinguisticality at the center o f the conduct of political inquiry. In order to do this, it a t tempts to apply the philosophical insights of hermeneutical phenomenology to the conduct of political inquiry. We shall focus our discussion on Gadamer 's seminal work on hermeneutical phenomenology Truth and Method (Wahrheit und Method, 1960) 1 and its relevance to the conduct o f polit ical inquiry. His hermeneutical view for that mat ter , the phenomenological approach in general that the