Critical Theory and Contemporary Europe by William Outhwaite

Author:William Outhwaite [Outhwaite, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General, History & Theory
ISBN: 9781441158840
Google: vI8cmdusgrkC
Goodreads: 23071437
Publisher: Not Avail
Published: 2012-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

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Critical theory at the turn of the twenty-first century

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, as we saw in the previous chapter, Habermas was working on a major collective project arising out of his Tanner lectures of 1986 on ‘Law and Morality’ and published in 1992 as Faktizität und Geltung.1 The book is essentially a development of implications of Habermas’s theories of communicative action and discourse ethics. To put it very briefly, post-conventional morality relies on rational consensus; we need law to give teeth to generally shared moral norms and this in turn can only be legitimated under modern conditions by political democracy. Thus what seems, and indeed is, a rather dry and formal line of argument (and one which is notably less critical of the law than Theory of Communicative Action) also directly confronts issues of contemporary democratic politics and the public sphere.

As he put it in the Tanner Lectures,

The rational quality of political legislation does not only depend on how elected majorities and protected minorities work within parliaments. It also depends on the level of participation and school education, the degree of information and the precision with which controversial issues are articulated – in short, on the discursive character of non-institutionalized opinion formation in the political public sphere.2 (p. 570)

A legal system is autonomous only to the extent that the procedures institutionalized for legislation and legal decision guarantee a non-partisan formation of opinion and will and thereby give moral procedural rationality access, as it were, to law and politics. No autonomous law without the realization of democracy. (p. 599)3

It is impossible to apply discourse ethics or a simple concept of discourse directly to democratic politics. Following an earlier essay ‘On the pragmatic, ethical and moral use of practical reason’,4 Habermas distinguishes in Between Facts and Norms between pragmatic discourses, relating individual or collective choices to given preferences, ethical-political discourses concerned with the implementation of broader collective ideals and moral discourses cast in universal terms. ‘Ethically relevant’ issues include environmental and animal protection, urban planning, immigration policy, the protection of minorities and ‘generally issues of political culture’; morally relevant issues would be, for example, abortion law, statutes of limitations of criminal responsibility, or matters of social policy affecting ‘the distribution of social wealth and of life or survival chances in general’.5

In many cases, however, there will be a pragmatic choice to be made between alternatives, opening the way to negotiation and compromise and leading hopefully to an accommodation (Vereinbarung) which balances out conflicting interests. (The fairness of such negotiations and compromises is however a moral question.) The complex relations between these various levels of discourse include ‘at least’ a ‘process model of rational political will-formation’ in which pragmatic discourses lead via regulated negotiations and/or ethical-political discourses to moral discourses and finally legal discourses; the latter are concerned essentially with the compatibility of new proposals with established laws and rights.6 This reconstruction allows for familiar institutions such as parliamentary assemblies and majority voting.7 Parliaments are however seen, not as simply

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