PROBLEMS WITH A EUROPEAN PUBLIC SPHERE AN INTRODUCTION

Maryland Law Review, 2001

2018

Commentators on invisible-hand explanations often stress their distinctive explanatory virtue. They claim that one provides a greater insight about the nature of a certain social outcome when one supposes that those who contribute to that outcome do not intend it. But commentators also tend to avoid offering a precise account of the nature of the related explanatory gain. An explication is missing, and it is the goal of the present chapter to supply it. Because the notion of unintended consequences is highly ambiguous, its multiple (often conflated and tacit) meanings are preliminarily distinguished. The chapter then critically reconstructs several arguments in support of the explanatory power of unintended consequences thus disambiguated. It finally points to another understanding of the merit of unintended consequences: the point of re-describing an intended social outcome as an unintended one, I submit, is to acknowledge those social aspects that exist independently from what we or some legal authority, decide, accept or believe to be the case.

Development, 2003

Britain and Germany Imagining the Future of Europe

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2018

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Perspectives on Politics, 2010

European Journal of Women's Studies, 1999

Javnost - The Public, 2014

The article explores diff erent approaches to the theoretical grounding of public use of reason developed by Habermas, Kant and Rawls. It is focused on Habermas’s idea of communicative rationality and the public sphere, and then this approach is related to Kantian practical reason and Rawls’s idea of public reason. The article highlights liberal and republican elements in Habermas’s concept of public sphere, and emphasises that liberal concepts of democracy require public reason as a device of justifi cation of constitutional norms, while the republican idea of popular sovereignty opens up the popular public sphere. The second part of the article describes the tension between the counterfactual nature of Habermas’s discourse ethics and its practical realisation in deliberative politics in institutions of the state.