social order. It is less a dialectical function of that order than a 'solution' parachuted in from some ontological outer space. It thus figures as a form of 'bad' Utopianism, as opposed to that 'good' Utopianism which seeks somehow to anchor what is desirable in what is actual. A degraded present must be patiently scanned for those tendencies which are at once indissolubly bound up with it, yet which -- interpreted in a certain way -- may be seen to point beyond it. So it is that Marxism, for example, is not just some kind of wishful thinking, but an attempt to discover an alternative to capitalism latent in the very dynamic of that form of life. In order to resolve its structural contradictions, the capitalist order would have to transcend itself into socialism; it is not simply a matter of believing that it would be pleasant for it to do so. The idea of a communicative rationality is another way of securing an internal bond between present and future, and so, like Marxism itself, is a form of 'immanent' critique. Rather than passing judgement on the present from the Olympian height of some absolute truth, it installs itself within the present in order to decipher those fault lines where the ruling social logic presses up against its own structural limits, and so could potentially surpass itself. There is a clear parallel between such immanent critique and what is nowadays known as deconstruction, which seeks similarly to occupy a system from the inside in order to expose those points of impasse or indeterminacy where its governing conventions begin to unravel.

Habermas has often enough been accused of being a rationalist, and there is no doubt some justice in the charge. How far is it really possible, for example, to disentangle the 'force of the better argument' from the rhetorical devices by which it is conveyed, the subject positions at stake, the play of power and desire which will mould such utterances from within? But if a rationalist is one who opposes some sublimely disinterested truth to mere sectoral interests, then Habermas is certainly not of this company. On the contrary, truth and knowledge are for him 'interested' to their roots. We need types of instrumental knowledge because we need to control our environment in the interests of survival. Similarly, we need the sort of moral or political knowledge attainable in practical communication because without it there could be no collective social life at all. 'I believe that I can show', Habermas remarks, 'that a species that depends for its survival on the structures of linguistic communication and cooperative, purposive-rational action must of necessity rely on reason'. ³⁴ Reasoning, in short, is in our interests, grounded in the kind of biological species we are. Otherwise why would we bother to find out anything at all? Such 'species-specific' interests move, naturally, at a highly abstract level, and will tell us little about whether we should vote Tory to keep the rates down. But as with

-206-