ABSTRACT
The emphasis on ethics and morality in critical research is one of the main contributions of this book. At the same time, this emphasis has crowded out a number of alternative narratives. My concentration on a small subset of critical theories has kept me from exploring other theories such as postcolonialism or different streams of postmodernism. I have tried to construct the current narrative in a linear fashion. The reader will, hopefully, agree that this book is reasonably coherent and contains few contradictions. This means, however, that I have followed the traditional academic style of writing and thereby constructed a reality that may not be shared or accepted by other critical scholars. I may be accused of promoting the Enlightenment style of straightforward rationality that may be the root cause of the ills of modernity, as Horkheimer and Adorno (2004) argued so powerfully over 60 years ago. My response, which I model on Habermas’s ideas and which I discussed in more depth in Chapter 4 on the problems of cross-cultural emancipation, would be that there seems to be no way of
escaping a communication-oriented rationality and that all we can do is remain open to alternative accounts.
