The Ways of Power: Hermeneutics, Ethics and Social Criticism

The Ways of Power advances a hermeneutical conception of ethics, one oriented particularly toward questions of power and the critique of power in the aftermath of foundationalism. Bringing into mutual interrogation such disparate traditions as hermeneutics, liberalism, critical theory and postmodernism, and such figures as Gadamer, Ricoeur, Habermas, Foucault, Nietzsche, and Artistotle, Fairfield argues that the principal question of ethics is no longer how to ground practices and judgments on a secure epistemological foundation but how normative discourses rooted in tradition and invested with power may adopt a critical posture toward these same conditions without generating an impossible circularity. Fairfield asserts that the practice of social criticism is ultimately inseparable from that of hermeneutic interpretation; critique is a matter of perceiving and understanding contexts of moral action in light of principles. In taking this view, Fairfield defends hermeneutics from the charge that hermeneutical philosophy’s emphasis on historicity and finitude demonstrates an absence of critical perspective in reflecting upon tradition and the power operative within it.