Framing the background to this book is a question that has dogged modern thought since the Enlightenment: can the critique of reason be carried out within reason? Hume's answer to this question is no, but the cost of this refusal is the severance of his reasoning, reflective self from his everyday self whenever the former proves troublesome. More ambitiously, Kant and Hegel attempt systematically to redefine the basis of thought in light of Hume's ‘no’. Though broadly in line with this project, the romantic endeavour to consecrate the other of reason in the domain of an aesthetic and imaginative conception of ‘truth’ is overruled by the Hegelian radicalisation of otherness as negativity. As a consequence, Hegel's damning verdict upon idealised, subject-centred reason, handed down, via Marx and Nietzsche, to modern theory, criticism, and historicism, is revisited today upon the romantic topos of self and community.

The present study is, in part, an attempt to redraw the image of reason upon which this judgement is made. At its heart is the claim that the subject-centred model gives an incomplete picture of the full range of Enlightenment rationality and romantic expressiveness. As Habermas argues, early nineteenth-century culture develops a language of decentred, communicative rationality that forms a counterdiscourse to the hypostasised conceptions of idealism. In Britain, this counterdiscourse emerges from within the linguistic and anthropological currents in late eighteenth-century empiricism.