Abstract
Abstract In interpretations of the ‘postmodern condition’, it is often stated that there are in our time sharply differentiated and irreducible rationalities that complicate human communications and interactions. Economic rationality, legal rationality, political rationality, and technical rationality are all indispensable for functioning social systems but they each employ a different ‘logic’, they speak different languages, and their central terms and categories are mutually untranslatable. As a result, human actors functioning in social systems are forced to speak just one of these languages and exclusively to follow the dictates of its rationality—to view a problem only in economic terms, or as a matter of law, or as a political issue, or as a technical problem. Alternatively, they are forced to switch rationalities as the situation demands and are then left with irresolvable problems of translation and integration—the economic factors do not fit into legal categories, political considerations have no exact counterpart in technical expertise. There is no common standard that can be used to compare relevance across rationalities.
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