Introduction

Abstract

Ever since both the social movements and intellectual currents that peaked in the late 1960s, there has been a change in the basic goals that many emerging social theorists have set for themselves. These theorists all have in common that they have accepted that there is really no possibility of either mounting or justifying one’s theory on the basis of its putative descriptive adequacy. Whether it is believed, as some do, that a neutral description is literally impossible or, as others do, that if all one is doing is describing, then one’s own activity of theorising is impossible to justify, all these theorists have in common that they have embarked on a search for alternatives to the standard scientific goal of descriptive or observational adequacy. Instead, they are beginning to propose theories that are admittedly normative; that, in other words, instead of just pretending to describe how society is, theories that are both implicitly and explicitly making evaluations about what a society ought to do, be, what it needs, what would be desirable for it, and so on. In even contemplating such an enterprise, all these theorists face an obvious problem: if we now tend to think that would-be empirical, observational theories are not valid, at least we can imagine how they could have been valid, i.e. in so far as they really do describe the world correctly. By contrast, what sort of standards could we even begin to use to evaluate avowedly normative theories? How are they not, to use a well-worn but perhaps still not adequately addressed question, just someone’s personal opinion?