What is Critique? From Gadamer to Apel via Habermas (and Rorty)

What is it about?

In what sense may Gadamer's hermeneutics be critical? Or does the relativism embedded in hermeneutical thinking also preclude critical perspectives? In what sense, then, may Habermas' formal pragmatics and Apel's transcendental pragmatics supply Gadamer's hermeneutics with criterions necessary for a critical hermeneutics?

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Why is it important?

Gadamer's hermeneuticcs offers us important perspectives for our understanding of history and society. But it is also in need of clearer criterions for social criticism. Ideas of individual freedom and mutual recognition of each other's freedom are ideas that are vital to the modern history of the West. Are these ideas also justifyable on a non-ethnocentric basis? That is what the paper discusses.