The great challenge of the coming century, both for politics and for social science, is that of understanding the other. The days are long gone when Europeans and other “Westerners” could consider their experience and culture as the norm toward which the whole of humanity was headed, so that the other could be understood as an earlier stage on the same road that we had trodden. Now we sense the full presumption involved in the idea that we already possess the key to understanding other cultures and times.

But the recovery of the necessary modesty here seems always to threaten to veer into relativism, or a questioning of the very ideal of truth in human affairs. The very ideas of objectivity, which underpinned our social science, seemed hard to combine with that of fundamental conceptual differences between cultures, so that real cultural openness seemed to threaten the very norms of validity on which social science rested. What often does not occur to those working in these fields is the thought that their whole model of science is wrong and inappropriate. It is here where Gadamer has made a tremendous contribution to twentieth century thought, for he has proposed a new and different model, which is much more fruitful, and shows promise of carrying us beyond the dilemma of ethnocentrism and relativism.