ABSTRACT
In the classroom and in politics, the internalized norms of possessive individualism advance an attitude which takes goals and institutional settings as stage props. Educational activity in conjunction with the ‘transcendental’ practice is simultaneously the introduction of a transcendental plane toward which that practice moves. The practical/cognitive interest of hermeneutics is directed by its very structure toward the achievement of agreement among historical agents in the operational field of a self-understanding derived from tradition. Universities are being absorbed into the division of labor. Dissenting intellectuals consequently are losing the right and the political space to criticize social policy as they slip to the margins of our society. The ‘transcendental’ should be taken to signify not merely the perceptive ground which outlines the investigation of phenomena according to positivist truth systems but also the political grounds which legitimate the procedures of knowledge production and just why they are sustained generation after generation, defying history’s ‘judgments’.
