ABSTRACT
The great challenge of nineteenth century, both for politics and for social science, is that of understanding the other. The days are long gone when Europeans and other Westerners could consider their experience and culture as the norm toward which the whole of humanity was headed, so that the other could be understood as an earlier stage on the same road that they had trodden. In Wahrheit und Methode, Hans-Georg Gadamer shows how understanding a text or event that comes from history has to be construed not on the model of the ‘scientific’ grasp of an object but rather on that of speech partners who come to an understanding. The chapter shows the full force of the Gadamerian image of the ‘conversation’. The kind of operation described can be carried out unilaterally and must be when one is trying to write the history of the Roman Empire, for instance.
