Conservatives and Liberals take two very different attitudes to the role of reason in politics. Discuss the differences and establish which attitude is most reasonable?
             In this essay there is need to look at what the term 'Reason' means and its role in politics in view of the attitudes of the conservatives and the liberals.
             This could be seen as the analysing and combining of ideas to form knowledge. Reason is a means of acquiring knowledge of the objective world (cognition) For Marxists, Reason, or rationality, is the objective form of processes of social action. Reason is often contrasted with Experience (as in the dispute between Rationalism and Empiricism) and with Intellect, which in this context refers to the aspect of cognition in which concepts remain stable and provide the basis for interpretation of experience. Reason is man's tool of understanding. It is the method of identifying entities through one's senses. It is the means of integrating those perceptions into concepts, gaining knowledge through this integration, integrating that knowledge into the rest of one's knowledge, and evaluating and manipulating ideas and facts. In Marx's Theses on Feuerbach:
             "The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism (that of Feuerbach included) is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism - which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such".
             In this theses Marx criticised the materialists for under-rating the role of Reason, and in this sense supports the Rationalists against the Empiricists; but, he says, the idealists (i.e. Hegel), who have understood the significance of Reason (the active side), do not know real, sensuous activity as such, and it is this which is...