ABSTRACT
What is the link between explaining society and criticizing it? This book is about developing a new answer to this question in the context of social theory strongly committed to democracy and the progressive Left. The answer that it proposes, however, is at considerable odds with the answers that frame most leftist social criticism. We propose that both criticism and explanation should be done “from the inside out”—which is to say, they should focus on the interpretation of meaning. The link between explaining society and criticizing it is thus a strongly hermeneutic one. Here, I want to sketch out what this means, in the generalized terms of contemporary social theory.
