ABSTRACT
The life-world conception of the taken for granted, everyday features of life is taken as an initial example of this abstract way of thinking, in that it represents an at once arbitrary and absolute division of the social world where small-scale interaction represents the domain of morality and freedom in contradistinction to the world of structural determination and unfreedom. This has important consequences for the configuration of rationality in its dichotomisation of reason from spontaneity, objectivity from feeling, imagination or values from factuality, metaphorical from propositional language, theory from practice, representation from reality, common sense or popular ideologies from scientific discourse, and so on. The structures of state and economy work through social interactions. One way in which the rationalisation debate has become focused is in relation to the instrumental reason-values dichotomy as found in the contrasting of science and common sense beliefs.
