INTRODUCTION
Since they were introduced in the mid 1980s, the Dawkins reforms of 
higher education and subsequent Commonwealth higher education policy 
have been the focus of extensive/substantial analysis .  They have been 
described as a 'revolution' (Karmel, 1990), whilst numerous authors 
including Marginson (1993), Porter, (1990, 1993) Henry (1992), Henry 
and Taylor (1993), and Dudley and Vidovich (1995) have concluded that 
they represent more than incremental change, or responses to changing 
circumstances within an existing model or set of policies.  Rather, the 
restructuring represented a reconceptualisating of Higher Education and 
its relationships to the society of which it is a part, through the 
construction of a new model of higher education organisation with 
different legitimations and ostensibly different overt goals than in 
the past.  The master discourse (Marginson,1993: xii) or metapolicy 
(Yeatman, 1990) for all education policy, indeed all policy has become 
'economic rationalism' - the domination of neo-classical liberal ideals 
of the priority of capital and economic man, the market as the 
organising principle of society, the role of education both to 'fit' 
students for participation in the market, and to enhance Australia's 
competitiveness in the international capitalist market place through 
their/students' contribution to the competitiveness of the Australian 
economy.  Together with Lesley Vidovich I have described elsewhere 
(Dudley and Vidovich, 1995) the end of the 'long boom', the collapse in 
the 1970s and early 1980s of the Keynesian post WW II settlement, 
Australia's banana republic crisis of 1986 and the establishment of a 
new economic settlement of neoclassical liberalism and corporate 
managerialism (or, to use Lingard's term 'corporate federalism', 
(Lingard, 1993)), that is, economic rationalism.

It is not my intention in this paper to analyse the details of 
particular policy initiatives - I am assuming some knowledge (either 
detailed or broad brush) of the events of the last decade in education 
policy.  My concern in this paper is the power of claims to rationality 
in legitimating particular policies and marginalising alternatives.

RATIONALITY AND MODERNITY
A trust in human reason, or rationality, is central to modernity.  
Briefly, modernity is a post-feudal way of thinking about the world and 
the place of human beings in the world which has become increasingly 
dominant, indeed hegemonic in Western thought and society since 
approximately the 17th century.  It can be summarised in terms such as 
The Enlightenment, the enlightenment project, the project of modernity 
or the modernist project.  The project has been human emancipation from 
superstition, from 'enchantment', from the chaos and unpredictability 
of nature, from absolutism, from tradition and ascribed roles.  Through 
the application of human reason, the unique humanity of the individual, 
the autonomous, critical, rational being or subject could be realised.  
The modernist critique focussed particularly upon the privileged 
position of the determinism of traditional and hierarchical forms of 
authority (such as the Church or feudalism). In contrast to the 
premodern period when tradition, or God, was ontologically the 
organising principle of the world - that which created and maintained 
order from chaos - under conditions of modernity, God has been 
decentred in favour of the rational human being (principally man) as 
the agent of human progress and history.  Through reason, that is 
without the need for divine revelation, this rational subject can come 
to 'know' the world.  Thus modernity is both humanist and secular, and 
the world is 'real' rather than 'enchanted'.  There is an objective 
reality that can be known through the detached application of 
dispassionate reason and abstract logic.  Thus through reason, and only 
through reason, the autonomous human subject can discover substantial 
knowledge about reality, and has the potential to come to understand 

the objective 'truth' of both the non human natural world, and the 
social world.  The promise of rationality is therefore "access through 
knowledge to the grounds of truth or being" 
(Yeatman, 1994:1).  It is this truth of being, true valid and complete 
knowledge, that leads to human enlightenment and progress, what 
Foucault and others refer to as the telos of humankind.  At any time, 
human knowledge is incomplete, but the striving to achieve true, valid 
and complete knowledge and understanding of the non human natural world 
is an essential dimension/theme/strand to/of/in the emancipatory 
project of human rationality and progress.  As a result of this 
understanding, the rational subject is in a position to master the non 
human natural world, control his own destiny, and to create a 'home' in 
the world.  In other words, human emancipation is dependent upon human 
beings attaining agency/becoming agents of progress.  Human beings make 
their own emancipation - through knowledge.  

However, the rational individual of liberalism is not the only 
conceptualisation of agency in modernity.  Marx argued that " men (sic) 
make history but not always in circumstances of their own choosing".  
Thus, rather than the individual as agent, controlling his own destiny 
through rationally acquired knowledge, human emancipation according to 
Marx is to be effected by the proletariat.  Marx's materialist 
conception of history is a form of rational scientific knowledge which 
provides access to the truth and reality of human experience and 
existence.  The principle tenets of modernity - human agency, access to 
truth through rational scientifdic analysis, and the telos of human 
progress or emancipation - are fundamental to Marxism.  Thus modernity 
is essentially a "faith in humanly engineered progress" (Giddens, 
1990:2), however that may be effected.

RATIONALITY AND AUTHORITY
Under conditions of modernity, science has become the exemplar of the 
use of detached objective reason as the source of true, real knowledge. 
 Together with detached and objective observation (empiricism) 
scientific reason has had enormous power to generate  valid and 
potentially complete knowledge about the non-human natural world.  With 
the accelerating development of the social sciences in the 19th 
century, models of scientific inquiry, and reason were applied to the 
social world, so that knowledge about the social world increasingly had 
the power and authority of scientific reason.  Thus Weber's classical 
sources of authority  - the traditional which has been challenged, if 
not overturned by modernity and the Enlightenment; the charismatic, 
which is both anathema to, and contradicted by modernity's valorisation 
of reason; and legal rational authority - have been joined, in the 19th 
and 20th centuries particularly, by the authority of rational 
scientific and/or technical knowledge.  

Scientific rationality (also technocratic rationality) has the power, 
the authority of expertise or expert knowledge, and can be applied to 
the humanist project of human progress through reform.  'Reform' is in 
essence modern.  Reform is about change, change for the better, and 
hence, explicitly or implicitly, progress.  Thus reform is an essential 
constituent of modernity, and the modern polity.

RATIONALITY AND POLICY
Policy is the response of the modern polity to the dilemmas, conflicts 
and complexities of modern society.  These dilemmas, conflicts and 
complexities are constructed as policy 'problems' which can then be 
'solved' through the application of the appropriate rational technical 
expert knowledge.  Whilst it is the assumption of rational models of 
policy making that problems can be 'solved' through rational purposive 
action, it is not necessarily assumed that any particular policy 

initiative will 'solve' the problem once and for all.  Rather that the 
seemingly intractable dilemmas of the social world can be resolved 
through continued attention to the problem, or fine tuning, or the 
appropriate (rational) use of the right policy 'levers'.

The two models of rational policy making are the incremental, in which 
the progress towards resolution is evolutionary, with only small or 
incremental changes to existing policy, and the rational comprehensive 
model in which policy iniatives may more revolutionary.  Both models 
share the same end of social reform, that is they share the assumption 
that progress can be achieved.  However, they differ about the most 
effective technical means of developing and/or implementing policy.  
There may be contest within the polity about the nature of the desired 
substantive policy goals, but what is not contested is the underlying 
assumption or organising principle that reform constitutes human 
progress.  Although Lindblom's policy model of partisan mutual 
adjustment (Lindblom, 1980) is politically rather than technically 
rational - policy is decided is achieved through democratic pluralist 
debate, rather than technical expertise alone - the desired outcomes 
nonetheless are human progress, a better society, the resolution of 
policy dilemmas.  Thus each of these models of, and for policy making, 
have pretensions of progress towards order, stability and resolution; 
in other words, a civilised human home in the world.

RATIONALITY AND LANGUAGE
Clarity of language is central to modernity.  Language is assumed to be 
a neutral medium capable of transmitting untainted, the true and valid 
knowledge revealed or discoverd through reason and science.  Language 
corresponds to, or merely describes the reality which exists, 
independently of language.  It is a set of structures of uncontested 
meanings which simply communicate shared understandings of the world.  
Jane Flax (1990:42) summarises the essential charactersitics of the 
modernist conception of language as follows:

Language is in some sense transparent.  Just as the right use of reason 
 can result in knowledge that represents the real, so, too, language is 
 merely the medium in and through which such representation occurs.  
 There is a correspondence between word and thing (as between a correct 
 truth claim and the real).  Objects are not linguistically (or 
 socially) constructed; they are merely made present to consciousness by 
 naming and the right use of language.

However, language cannot be regarded as either neutral or transparent; 
rather, meaning and signification are constructed and mediated through 
language.  In Yeatman's words (Yeatman, 1994:25) language is 
"constitutive of theoretical propositions" (my emphasis).  The 
structure of western enlightenment* thought is dualistic - constructed 
of a series of binary oppositions.  So understanding of experience and 
the world is structured/organised/made meaningful by the binary 
oppositions of culture or civilisation/nature or matter; mind or 
soul/body or senses; order/chaos; logic/chance; rationality or 
reason/irrationality or unreason; male/female.  These dualisms are 
hierarchical, so that one of the couple constitutes the norm, and the 
other is'other'. Thus the 'universal' enlightenment constructs of 
Reason, Logic, and Truth have meaning, less in terms of their 
particular or intrinsic characteristics than in terms of their contrast 
to what each is not.  The privilege of "apparently neutral terms  like 
'Reason' of 'Truth', ... derives from the repression and exclusion of 
alternatives, rather than from the inherent explatory power or a priori 
relevance they claim" (Grosz, 1988:97).  That which is the norm, that 
which is valorised is human culture rather than nature; the mind rather 
than the body; order, logic and reason rather than chance or 

contingency; and the male rather than the female.   And rationality.  

CHALLENGES TO MODERNIST CONSTRUCTS OF RATIONALITY
Variously and together feminist critique, postmodernism, postcolonial 
critique and ecological political thought question the foundational 
assumptions of modernity - the transcendent status of the universal 
subject, the privileged position of rationality, 'progress' and the 
linear conception of time, and the possibility of an 'archimedean' 
position from which the detached/objective rational subject world can 
understand the world (Grosz, 1988; Di Stefano, 1990; Flax, 1990; 
Hekman, 1990; Butler, 1992; Eckersley, 1992; Flax, 1992; Singer, 1992; 
Hayward, 1994; Yeatman, 1994).  Genevieve Lloyd (1993) has shown the 
abstract generic 'man of reason' to be exactly that, whilst ecological 
political thought has challenged the anthropocentric notion of human 
emancipation through the control and mastery of nature (Dobson, 1995).  
Knowledge, reason and rationality are argued to be 
masculinist/phallocentric* (Grosz, 1988:94), and culturally, socially 
and temporally situated:

All knowledge is situated knowledge and is governed by the perspectives 
 of those who are the knowers ... the perspectivalist base of knowledge 
 renders all knowledges historically specific.  There is no site 
 available to knowers outside the specific conjuncture of positional 
 knowledges they inhabit.
(Yeatman, 1994:19,20)

Postmodern and feminist deconstruction of positivist claims to truth 
and objective knowledge have demonstrated that the rationality of 
modernity is not universal but rather serves particular interests and 
excludes and marginalises the 'other'.  Thus through valorisation of 
the male the female is diminished.  If male is norm then female is 
deviant.  Similarly,

all particular universalistic institutions establish boundaries for 
 their being which operate a particular economy of inclusions and 
 exclusions.  They cannot be corrected: all that can be done is to 
 substitute a new order of inclusions and exclusions ....  
(Yeatman, 1994:ix)
Finally, deconstruction of neutral abstract reason and the purported 
neutrality of language demonstrates that when a particular construction 
of rationality is the norm then by definition all other(s) are deviant 
and hence irrational.

The home in the world which modernity aspires to is demonstrated to be 
a patriarchial, ecologically unsustainable home where the paterfamilias 
imposes order, controls his wife and children, and civilises them 
through constraining, controlling and finally eliminating their natural 
impulses.  Similarly, the non-human natural world is made subject.

DISCOURSE AND RATIONALITY
The work of Foucault has been particularly powerful in rejecting the 
positivist conception of knowledge and of language as its mere "verbal 
translation" (Foucault, 1972:55).  He is concerned principally with the 
ontology of the subject ("the historical ontology of ourselves" 
(Foucault, 1991:49)) and hence the analysis of modern 'knowledge'.  
Hence he is concerned to subject the pricipal tenets of modernity to 
critical, sceptical scrutiny, in particular the possibility of true, 
valid and complete knowledge (Foucault, 1991:47). In his 
discussion/critique of Kant's What is Enlightenment?  (Foucault, 
1991:32-50), Foucault identifies modernity as "an attitude  ...a mode 
of relating to contemporary reality ... a way of thinking" (Foucault, 
1991:39) which is concerned to achieve human 'maturity', or autonomy, 

through human rationality*.  This project of human maturity will free 
humanity from the 'immaturity' of dependency upon the authority of God 
or temporal rulers.  Foucault does not accept this notion of human 
progress towards maturityor enlightenment.  He does not accept the 
possibiity of our resolution of the dilemmas of the contingent human 
condition.

Central to this critique is his analysis/concept of discourse.  It is 
not Foucault's way to define or state unequivocally the defining 
characteristics of discourse.  Rather he is concerned to ensure that he 
clarifies what discourse is not.  This is in keeping, firstly with his 
'methodology' of a critical scepticism regarding all totalising 
concepts, and secondly with his determination not to admit of any 
universal transcendent 'truth'.  Thus, he denies that there is a 
knowing subject anterior to discourse, and in addition, "renounces" 
(Foucault, 1972:25) that discourse is a mere and inadequately realised 
expression of an underlying pre-existing truth which human rationality 
has been uncovering, discovering, inexorably over historical time:

... the destiny of rationality and the teleology of the sciences, the 
 long continuous labour of thought ... the awakening and the progress of 
 consciousness ... the historico-transcendental thematic 
(Foucault, 1972:38,9)

Discourse is a slippery concept, and Foucault himself acknowledges that 
in his own usage(s) he is apt to elide form one 'meaning' to another:

... treating it sometimes as the general domain of statements, 
 sometimes as an individualizable group of statements, and sometimes as 
 a regulated practice that accounts for a certain number of statements.
(Foucault, 1972:80)

However, fundamental to his analysis of the nature of 
language/knowledge is that meaning and reason are constructed through 
the discursive practices of 'what can be said'.  Internal to 
discourse(s) are 'rules', or regularities which, through processes of 
inclusion and exclusion, both enable and constrain what constitutes 
legitimacy within particular domains of knowledge.  Knowledge, "what 
can be said ... what can be thought...." (Mc Houl and Grace, 1993:36), 
the social reality of objects are all discursively constructed.  Thus

discourse is not just a form of representation; it is a material 
 condition (or set of conditions) which enables and constrains the 
 socially productive 'imagination'.
(McHoul and Grace, 1993:34)

The regularities, or the rules of discourse remain constant and it is 
these regularities that ensure that discourse(s) or discursive practice 
is highly structured.  Discourse(s) thus constitute internally coherent 
discrete bodies of  'knowledge' or rationality(ies) which 
"systematically form the objects of which they speak" ( Foucault, 1972: 
 ).  It is through 'speaking' of objects that they are constituted as 
objects, concepts, knowledge; in other words, that they are made 
manifest, nameable and describable.  Discourse(s) then constitute our 
fundamental ontological schemata, and hence they constitute forms of 
rationality.  Thus rationality is not derived discursively, rather 
rationality is constituted discursively.

Through their claims to truth these fundamental ontological schemata, 
these forms of rationality also constitute power.  Knowledge of, or 
access to truth constitutes power.  Thus Foucault's work is concerned 
with the nexus of power and knowledge.  Kenway (1990:173,174) quotes 

Foucault:

Power produces knowledge ....Power and knowledge directly imply one 
 another .... There is no power relation without the correlative 
 constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not 
 presuppose and constitute at the same time, power relations.

In particular Foucault posits the notion of a 'regime of truth':

The ensemble of rules according to which the true and the false are 
 separated and special effects of power attached to the true.
(Foucault, 1980:132)
The will to know, the will to truth (Foucault, 1984:111-114; Foucaul;t, 
1991c:96) is both inseparable from, and an imperative of modernity.  
Western knowledge - true, real and valid knowledge - is discursively 
constructed through these regimes of truth (Foucault, 1984:113).  And 
it is through the discursive nature of knowledge (regime(s) of truth) 
that the will to know, the will to truth is at the same time, the will 
to power.  Thus truth and 
hence power are discursive:

... discourse is not simply that which translates struggles or systems 
 of domination, but the thing for which and by which there is struggle, 
 discourse is the power which is to be seized.
(Foucault, 1984:110)

Through regime(s) of truth, the will to power constructs particular 
forms of, or claims to rationality.  These effectively exclude or 
silence alternative claims to rationality.  A regime of truth, a 
particular form of rationality effects closure.  What counts as 
rationality is restricted and limited:  

Certain modes of arguing discursive claims effect closure by sealing 
 off the genre from alternative ways of constructing the phenomenon in 
 hand.
[ ... ]
Certain discourses, for example econometric expressions of 
 neo-classical economics, function to effect discursive closure, that is 
 to bracket out the legitimacy and even existence of alternative 
 economic discourses.
(Yeatman, 1994:25)
Thus economic rationalism is one such regime of truth, and it is 
through the positivist construction of truth, of the form of 
rationality called neo-classical or neo-liberal economics that 
alternative ways of shaping policy, that alternative assumptions 
regarding the meanings of education and its role in a society, are 
silenced.

RATIONALITY AND ONTOLOGICAL SECURITY
Economic rationalism is powerful, indeed has become near hegemonic, 
particularly in policy terms since the mid 1980s.  Pusey (1991) has 
attributed its rise and dominance to the near hegemony of neo-classical 
neoliberal ecomomics in Australian universities.  However, whilst its 
ascendancy can be documented in terms of the demise of the post war 
Keynesian settlement (for example, Dudley and Vidovich, 1995) the 
question that I find most interesting is "Why is economic rationalism 
so powerful?".  

Rationality promises order, and control of the complexity of the real 
world.  In other words, rationality promises us the modernist goal of 
mastery of the natural world, control over our own lives, the casting 
off of contingency, and the resolution of dilemma.  Because it 

constitutes a regime of truth, economic rationalism claims certainty, 
and in particular it claims to provide lasting 'solutions' to the 
dilemmas, complexities, contradictions, fragmentation and seemingly 
irreconcilable demands of late twentieth century capitalism.  At the 
end of the twentieth century, economic rationalism provides us with 
security and a home.  However, it is a home of high modernity - 
patriarchial and ecologically unsustainable.

Beck (1992) describes the world of late twentieth century industrialism 
as "risk society".  It is his claim that risk and uncertainty, rather 
than control and mastery are what is characteristic of late twentieth 
century capitalism.  Risks that are of our own making - risks that 
result from classical modernity itself:

Today, at the threshold of the twenty-first century, in the developed 
 Western world, modernization has consumed and lost its other and now 
 undermines its own premises as an industrial society along with its 
 functional principles.
(Beck, 1992:10)

At the center lie the risks and consequences of modernization, which 
 are revealed as irreversible threats to the life of plants, animals, 
 and human beings.

The gain in power from techno-economic 'progress' is being increasingly 
 overshadowed by the production of risks.
(Beck, 1992:13)

Similarly Giddens (1990, 1991, 1994) identifies risk, or "manufactured 
uncertainty" (Giddens, 1994:4) as characteristic of our present - what 
he calls "high modernity" (Giddens, 1991:4).  Manufactured uncertainty, 
or risk, is the result(s) of the modernist attempt to minimise risk or 
danger, to control uncertainty and master both the non-human natural 
world and the social world.  Neither Beck nor Giddens claim that risk 
or danger is unique to modernity nor the late twentieth century.  
Dangers have always existed, but were principally external, natural or 
physical - the risk of flood or famine, war or lightning strike.  
However, for these, Giddens prefers to use the term fortuna  (fortune 
or fate) (Giddens, 1990:31).  Risk he uses to refer to the "result of 
human intervention into the conditions of social life and into nature" 
(Giddens, 1994:4).  Examples of modern risk or manufactured uncertainty 
are ecological (including global warming and ozone depletion), economic 
(the internationalising of the global economy), and also political. 
These latter include the renewed intensity of nationalism (either 
horrific and atrocious as in the former Yugoslavia, or relatively 
civilised as in Quebec), and a sense of impotence with respect to the 
influence and meaning of democracy and nation states under conditions 
of globalisation.  The nation state seems "too small for the big 
problems and too big for the small problems" (Giddens, 1990:65).  
Similarly democracy.  He concludes:

... living in the modern world is more like being aboard a careering 
 juggernaut ... than being in a carefully controlled and well driven 
 motor car.
(Giddens, 1990:53)


Giddens (1990:17-36) analyses modernity in terms of disembedding 
mechanisms; that is, the mechanisms by which individuals are 'lifted 
out' from their traditional connections to place, space and time, their 
'rootedness', or sense of place in which time and space were, or are, 
grounded in experience, location and tradition. The disembedding 

mechanism of the dissociation of time from space and place, Giddens 
refers to as time-space distanciation.  A second set of disembedding 
mechanisms, Giddens refers to as abstract systems.  These social 
institutions consist of symbolic tokens, principally money, and expert 
systems.  These latter Giddens describes as 

systems of technical accomplishment or professional expertise that 
 organise large areas of the material and social environment ... [which] 
 provide "guarantees" of expectations across distanciated time and space
(Giddens, 1990:27-28)

modes of technical knowledge which have validity independent of the 
 practitioners and clients who make use of them [and which depend] on 
 rules of procedure transferable from individual to individual
(Giddens, 1991:18, 243)
Trust in abstract systems and particularly expert systems, or 
expertise, is both characteristic of, and essential to modernity.  
Trust, Giddens defines as:

the vesting of confidence in persons or in abstract systems, made on 
 the basis of a 'leap into faith' which brackets ignorance or lack of 
 information.
(Giddens, 1991:244)

We must have faith or trust because we cannot have either the direct 
experience (because of time/space distanciation) or the technical 
knowledge upon which to make informed decisions regarding the validity 
of particular forms of expertise.

In addition, Giddens (1991: 35-69) suggests that we have an innate need 
for ontological 
security:

a sense of continuity and order in events, including those not directly 
 within the perceptual environment of the individual.
(Giddens, 1991:243)
Ontological security provides us with a framework within which we can 
live and operate in society.  Whereas a weak sense of ontological 
security leaves us unable to function in society - the high levels of 
anxiety thus generated are at minimum socially disabling and at worst, 
potentially pathological - an excessively strong sense of ontological 
security leads to dogmatic fundamentalism.  

Industrial society at the end of the twentieth century is a risk 
society (Beck, 1992) - and the risks seem to be irreconcilable and 
unresolvable.  And the modernist responses we have to crisis - the 
modernist frame which has to date provided us with ontological security 
- do not seem to be providing solutions,  Rather, according to Beck and 
others, the responses of classical modernity are more likely to 
exacerbate  these dilemmas.  Our ontological security is modernist - 
culturally, socially and intellectually constructed in modernist terms 
(that is, mastery of the natural world and control of the social world, 
including the economy, the political and even our personal lives).  
Thus under conditions of risk society we become anxious, and our 
ontological security is threatened.  There is a number of possible 
responses to this threat - a rejection of modernity and its tenets, or 
a greater adherence to the solutions of classical modernity.  Rejecting 
modernity may take the form of mythologising a 'golden age' of 
premodern mysticism, or it may take the form of the so called 
'anti-science' movement.  Greater adherence to the solutions of 
classical modernity opens us to the power of expert systems and regimes 
of truth.  Trust in expert systems contributes substantially to our 

ontological security.  

Under conditions of modernity our ontological security is intimately 
connected to our trust, our faith, in rationality and expert systems.  
Expertise, expert knowledge claims to have the capacity to minimise 
risk:

... technical experts are given pole position to define agendas and 
 impose bounding premises a priori  on risk discourses.
(Lash and Wynne, 1992:4)

Because the capacity to minimise risk and enhance predictability 
reinforces our ontological security, expertise and expert systems are 
thus powerful.  A regime of truth, such as neoclassical economics (that 
is, economic rationalism) promises to restore us to ontological 
certainty, and predictability in the social world.  By reducing all 
domains of public life, of public policy, to the economic - that is to 
the 'discipline' of the market - economic rationalism claims to be able 
to provide us with the control of our destiny that is the modernist 
telos.  Economic rationalism promises to restore our fragile 
ontological security and is thus powerful.  It is therefore the 
interaction between our human need for ontological security, risk 
society, and the high modernist claims of economic rationalism that 
underlie its power as the master discourse, the metapolicy for all 
public policy  in Australia in the late 1980s and 1990s.

CONCLUSION
I have argued in this paper that economic rationalism is a discursively 
constructed regime of truth, and that its power can be attributed to 
the interaction of the human need for ontological security, the nature 
of 'risk society', and the high modernist claims of economic 
rationalism to have the capacity to resolve, or at least control, the 
uncertainties, risks and crises of late twentieth industrial 
capitalism.  Rationality is privileged under modernity, and it is 
rationality that legitimates claims to true, valid and complete 
knowledge.  However, Giddens and Beck have argued that it is the very 
rationality of classical modernity, and the nature of its approach to 
the 'resolution' of the problems and risks of late twentieth century 
industrial society, and indeed the 'solutions' themselves, that are 
'manufacturing' these risks, dilemmas and uncertainties.  Certainty, 
and particularly the certainty of the economic rationalist variety does 
not minimise risk; rather it generates risk.  

In addition, feminism and postmodernism variously challenge and 
deconstruct claims of rationality to neutrality, and access to the 
truth of reality.  Rationality is demonstrated to be discursive - that 
is, not real, true and valid knowledge but temporally, historically, 
socially and culturally situated, and serving particular interests.  

Such analyses are not however not rejecting reason; rather, they are 
rejecting the universalising, phallocentric, anthropocentric, racist 
and ethnocentric character of modernist rationality.  Yeatman (1994) 
refers to"desacrilizing " rationality.  Poole (1990:60) argues that the 
critique "should not be confused with an affirmation of the 
non-rational".  Similarly, Giddens and Beck are not rejecting science.  
Beck (1992:156) argues that living in risk society, we need science 
more than ever.  What we must reject, they argue, is the hubris of 
classical modernity, the ontological monism that there can be only one  
framework or form of reason.

For the flawed, totalising rationality of modernity, we need to 
substitute a more open, modest, humble and contingent rationality 

guided by "values, assumptions and purposes, not laws foundations and 
groundings (Smart , 1990:26).  The issue is one of limits to the 
modernist project of human 'emancipation' through the mastery of the 
natural and social world.

Our ontological security is not necessarily bound up with certainty.  
Reflexivity and acceptance of contingency can suffice; that is, we can 
have both contingency and ontological security.  In Beck's terms we 
must become reflexively modern.

Reflexive modernity consists of applying the critical scepticism of 
modernity not only to the world but to modernity itself, and to 
modernist notions of science, inquiry, rationality and the subject.  
Together with reflexivity on the nature of critical reflection.  There 
is no true real valid and neutral knowledge, nor is there any 
archimedean point from which we can observe and understand the world, 
in order to master it.  We are in and of the world, and rather than a 
disappointment, or a source of uncertainty, such an acceptance of 
contingency should liberate us from the hubris of modernity that we can 
be masters of the planet.

We can find a home in the world. Reflexive modernity and acceptance of 
contingency can provide us with a humane and civilised home that is 
neither patriarchal nor racist, and if not ecocentric is at least less 
anthropocentric.

* These binary oppositions in many cases predate the enlightenment - 
for example the separations between mind and body, or soul and senses 
is Greek (Collins, 1995:99-110).  However, enlightenment thought, 
especially philosophers such as Descartes and Kant, entrenched such 
structures of thought/ways of thinking.
* Phallocentrism conflates the two (autonomous) sexes into a single 
'universal' model which, however, is congruent only with the masculine.
[....]
Phallocentrism is the abstracting, universalising and generalising of 
masculine attributes so that women's or femininity's concrete 
specificity and potential for autonomous definition are covered over.
[...]
It is a theoretical bedrock of shared assumptions that is so pervasive 
that it is no longer recognised.
(Grosz, 1988:94)
* Kant exhorts us - Aude sapere  (Dare to know)

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