ABSTRACT
In accordance with Hegel’s dictum that Minerva’s owl does not spread her wings before dusk, the deepest concerns of the ecologist project and the reasons why it has always been doomed to failure might reveal themselves only as the ecologist paradigm is in decline. And if philosophy and social theory are really not able to make (ecological) prescriptions about how the world ought to be, then they may at least be expected to fulfil the function of midwife to the process of this revelation. In the previous chapters I argued that ecological thought is, contrary to its pluralistic and radically democratic ambitions, fundamentally ‘uncommunicative’, hostile to theoretical enquiry and incompatible with rational justification. This seems to suggest that ecological thought is essentially premodern. When I was outlining my ‘refined constructionist research agenda’, I then insisted that the contemporary ecological discourse can only be theorised in an adequate way on the basis of a postmodernist approach. And I am now setting out to interpret ecological concerns within the framework of critical theory, which is a clearly modernist model. This raises the old question of the relationship between ecology and modernity. There is no need here to engage in the huge debate on this question, but in order to justify why I regard critical theory as an appropriate framework for the interpretation of the ecological critique, some clarification seems to be necessary to do with whether ecological thinking has to be considered as modern, premodern, anti-modern, postmodern, or perhaps, as Ulrich Beck argues (see Chapter 5), as reflexively modern.
