The Politics Of Social Theory: Habermas, Freud and The Critique Of Positivism. Russel Keat. Chicago:  The University of Chicago Press, 1981.  ix + 245 pp.

Russell Keat has written a dense, compressed defense of Max Weber's notion of the possibility of producing social scientific statements that can be assessed by value-free criteria of validity. More specifically, Keat has examined the possibility of a social theory which is constructed from a critical socialist standpoint but which is nevertheless value free. This is a difficult task, requiring Keat to avoid the pitfalls of a positivist conception of social science on the one hand, while responding to the critical theorists' rejection of such a possibility on the other. At the same time, however, if Keat could establish such a value free conception of social science, he could improve the status of socialist, specifically Marxist, theory, putting it on a sounder basis than others, particularly the critical theorists, have thus far managed.

Keat's efforts in this regard entail an assessment of positivist, her-meneutic, and critical theories, a discussion of jurgen Habermas's theory of knowledge-constitutive interests, a critique of Habermas's uses of psychoanalysis, specifically of Habermas's attempt to eliminate a biological conception of instincts, which logically permits a vision of conscious control over social reality but only at the expense of a realistic assessment of the human condition. Keat's efforts entail a further re-examination of psychoanalytic theory on his own terms, and a re-examination of Karl Popper's attack on the scientific status of psychoanalytic theory.

This is a very ambitious program, probably too ambitious, and Keat does not fare well with it. He succeeds in a lesser sense in that his arguments are intelligently and precisely crafted and useful for interested professionals to consider. But he fails in the larger vision to convince us of the possibility of a value-free social science that enhances or helps confirm the Marxist position he prefers. Marxism remains as ever splendid in principle, abominable in practice, and Keat offers nothing to i