The dissertation examines the strategy of critical legitimation operative in contemporary social and political theory. Its primary thesis is that the historical emergence of critical discourse must be understood within the context of two events of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: the philosophical encounter with the rise of modern natural science, and the formation of a bourgeois intellectual elite and its essentially moral opposition to the absolutist state. These events produce a strategy of critical legitimation that combines the (...) vocabularies of mathematical objectivity and juridical normativity. ;This thesis is defended through a reading of several texts of Kant and Hegel, wherein two modes of the strategy are discerned. In Kant there is found the strategy of expropriation, or the iterative acquisition of the object of discourse, whilst in Hegel one finds a strategy of appropriation or systematic acquisition. Both modes serve to constitute the various forms of critical discourse in their specific theorization of the objects and themes of social and political inquiry. (shrink)