ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the philosophical programmes and suggests some differences that it would make to social science if they could be successfully carried through. The explanatory and predictive questions to which economists, historians, sociologists, and social psychologists currently address themselves would remain, virtually unaffected. There is no reason to suppose, that the arguments necessary to establish such prescriptive claims would be any easier to formulate or more reliable in practice than those by which economists who accept Humean-Weberian limitations warrant their merely hypothetical prescriptions. Kant's central concern was to show that the human will could be free to determine its own ends, rather than submit to the determination of passion, desire, or inclination. The Kantian emphasis on autonomy through the rational choice of ends is developed in the work of Jurgen Habermas, who in effect combines Kant's view that freedom consists in rationality with Aristotle's claim that rationality is man's natural end.
