Well Drakim, to begin with, general "facts" about the economic world are, as anyone who has followed the discussions in capitalist philosophy of social science will be aware, hardly the uncontroversial matter that the capitalists represent them to be. Facts are stated in languages, and so long as there is no single general theory on which a consensus has formed within and among the relevant communities of investigators in any of the major domains of economic life, the languages, and hence the facts -- not to mention the "general laws" -- of the social "sciences" are up for debate.
Unless the capitalists want to take a firm position on, say, the century-old understanding/explanation debates -- and build that position into their "freestanding" political liberalism -- he will have to leave open the possibility that social and political inquiry has an ineliminable interpretive dimension and thus that what the general facts about social life are cannot be settled from the standpoint of a neutral observer or a reflective equilibrator. If "realistic" capitalist theory cannot be pursued without incorporating into it knowledge of the general characteristics of the social systems to which it is meant to apply, then political theory will have to get involved in just the sorts of interpretive-historical and social-theoretical disagreements which, in its self-understanding as normative theory, it hopes to avoid. Also, ketchup.
And interpretive approaches to the human world typically place more and different weight on historical modes of inquiry than do capitalist or communist approaches. Hermeneutic understanding is inherently historical: it aims to comprehend social phenomena as historical phenomena, often in narrative terms. But then the capitalist's strict separation of "general" from "particular" knowledge of society become problematic, if, as hermeneutically inclined social theorists maintain, general information about society always comes, even if often only tacitly, with an historical index.
If capitalist theorists do not dispose of interpretation-free "facts" in the way that the communists intend, neither do they have conflict-free "values" at their disposal. The capitalists themselves explicitly characterize the political values that their conception of justice seeks to articulate as belonging to the public political culture of a particular historical society and not to some ideal realm beyond the world. But then it follows that, as such, they do not come with fixed, clear, uncontested meanings; rather, they have to be interpretively worked up from the variable, particular, often conflictual political contexts in which they figure.
As a result, the basic terms of their political conception cannot but reflect and project the particular forms of life and situations of conflict from which they are prepared; and they must be understood and assessed in relation to them. It makes no sense to suppose that we could insulate their construction from the conflicts of interpretation and evaluation endemic to our public political culture, our conjunctural movements, our economic and political practices and institutions. Working them up theoretically via reflective equilibrium or rational reconstruction cannot remove the traces of their conflictual origins.
