Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy by Jürgen Habermas

Author:Jürgen Habermas [Habermas, Jürgen]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2015-10-09T04:00:00+00:00

7.1.2

To summarize the results of our analysis, we can say that if rational citizens were to describe their practices in empiricist categories, they would not have sufficient reason to observe the democratic rules of the game. Obviously, a theory with justificatory intentions must not suppress the genuinely normative sense of the intuitive understanding of democracy. Empiricist redefinitions thus do not give us a way to avoid the question of how norm and reality are related. If this is the case, then we must return to those normative models of democracy already introduced and ask whether their implicit conceptions of society offer any points of contact with available sociological analyses.

Our reflections from the standpoint of legal theory revealed that the central element of the democratic process resides in the procedure of deliberative politics. This reading of democracy has implications for the concept of society presupposed in the received models of democracy, that is, the view of society as centered in the state. The reading proposed here differs both from the liberal conception of the state as guardian of an economic society and from the republican concept of an ethical community institutionalized in the state.10

According to the liberal view, the democratic process is effected exclusively in the form of compromises among interests. Rules of compromise formation are supposed to secure the fairness of results through universal and equal suffrage, the representative composition of parliamentary bodies, the mode of decision making, rules of order, and so on. Such rules are ultimately justified in terms of liberal basic rights. According to the republican view, on the other hand, democratic will-formation takes the form of ethicopolitical self-understanding; here deliberation can rely on the substantive support of a culturally established background consensus shared by the citizenry. This socially integrative preunderstanding can renew itself in the ritualized recollection of the founding of the republic. Discourse theory takes elements from both sides and integrates these in the concept of an ideal procedure for deliberation and decision making. Democratic procedure, which establishes a network of pragmatic considerations, compromises, and discourses of self-understanding and of justice, grounds the presumption that reasonable or fair results are obtained insofar as the flow of relevant information and its proper handling have not been obstructed. According to this view, practical reason no longer resides in universal human rights, or in the ethical substance of a specific community, but in the rules of discourse and forms of argumentation that borrow their normative content from the validity basis of action oriented to reaching understanding. In the final analysis, this normative content arises from the structure of linguistic communication and the communicative mode of sociation.

In the present context, it is interesting that these descriptions of the democratic process also set the stage for a normative conceptualization of state and society. All we need presuppose is a type of public administration that emerged in the early-modern period with the European nation-state and developed functional ties with the capitalist economy.

According to the republican view, the citizens’ opinion- and will-formation forms the medium through which society constitutes itself as a political whole.

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