The Human Rights in Habermas' Discursive Democracy

2023

This paper explores a normative layer of Habermas’s public sphere in its relation to human rights. His public sphere came into being as a result of a spontaneous nonconformity manifested by the early bourgeoisie’s reaction to an absolutist regimen making inroads in the realm of basic human liberties; it managed to survive the changeable conditions of society and state thanks to its participants’ capability of cultivating collective self-determination, fed from the outset by the intellectual claims of modernity. Thereafter, the link between Habermas’s public sphere and human rights bifurcates, leading concurrently to liberal individual rights (Menschenrechte) and to the republican freedom of popular sovereignty (Volkssouveränität). Further revisions and corrections transpose that simple dualism from the clear-cut bourgeois world of universal morality into the realm of legalism and the protocols de rigueur in the world of systems. Habermas integrates individual human rights and popular sovereignty in the procedures of a democratic state, overcoming this ostensibly irreconcilable duality in his genuine claim about the co-originality of civil autonomy. This thesis institutionally unifies universal pre-constitutional morality, with legalism regulating the democratic world of legal subjects (citizens) and their constitutionally guaranteed entitlement.

With the publication of Faktizität und Gelrung, Jürgen Habermas reunites two principle concerns from his earlier writings into a comprehensive theoretical discourse on law. First, the democratic thrust behind Habermas' considerations place this work within the tradition inaugurated by the critique of contemporary political life found in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Second, an original reconstruction of the philosophy of language drawn from the author's earlier Theory of Communicative Actions addresses the proposed tension between facticity and validity through the claims of communicative reason. From these preliminary considerations the complex basis from which Between Facts and Norms originates becomes apparent: in reconsidering the relation between the philosophy of law and political theory, we must discern what grants validity to law. The justifications Habermas provides for a system of rights bring together the central intentions behind the proposed theory of law. On the one hand, these justifications develop the underlying tension between facticity and validity as the basic structure of law: Habermas' argument develops from the extreme aspect of law as a guarantor of liberty through coercion. On the other, the theoretical reconstruction of rights elucidates the grounds for reestablishing a connection between legal and social theories.

Ratio Juris, 1999

Jiirgen Habermas is a radical democrat. The source of that self-designation is that his conception of democracy-what he calls "discursive democracy"-is and founded on the ideal of "a self-organizing community of free and equal citizens," coordinating their collective affairs through their common reason. The author discusses ris 2:

Deliberative theory of democracy or discursive democracy is distinct albeit inextricable from the concept of communicative rationality. Habermas employs this outlook in the advancement of other spine facets that institute his theory of deliberative democracy. For him, communication is a core medium for resolving many of the social malaise. The intricate issue of pursuit in this disquisition is that Habermas' deliberative democracy is exclusivist, thus, posing further encumbrances in its realization of the mutual good. The approach utilized in the pursuit of conceivable panaceas to this convoluted matter was hermeneutics. We are here to first and foremost accentuate Habermas' theory of deliberative democracy and later on proffer a critique to it. It is interesting to engage with Habermas on the tenets of democracy and strive to construe the rationale as to why he opts to attenuate or parallel democracy to communication that wears a procedural stance. In the same mode of thought, he treats other human realms from a communicative standpoint. The core domains that he employs the power of communication to develop are human rights and popular sovereignty, legitimacy, and ethics. In setting out to comprehend the link between his concept of human rights and popular sovereignty, he notes that these two realities are co-original, to denote that, they might have been con-created or they are concomitant so to mention, thus, one might not profoundly deem one exclusive of the other. The findings of the paper were: Habermas borrows his concept of popular sovereignty from Rousseau's worldview of the social contract. Moreover, Habermas utilizes deliberation to shape his perspective of law. For him, the laws can only be promulgated via deliberation, whereby, the members of the society actively take part in the varied sorts of debates that are to transpire within the gamut of the public sphere. What of those who are privated of the faculty of speech? Eventually, he tackles matters appertaining to discourse ethics, which ought to be informed by the public discourse(s). There is a common thread that cuts across these three central pillars of Habermas' theory of deliberative democracy, the faculty of communication, which for him, communication gives the impression of being the source and the summit of moulding the society.

Res Publica, 2005

Jürgen Habermas’s discourse-theoretic reconstruction of the normative foundations of democracy assumes the formal separation of democratic political practice from the economic system. Democratic autonomy presupposes a vital public sphere protected by a complex schedule of individual rights. These rights are supposed to secure the formal and material conditions for democratic freedom. However, because Habermas argues that the economy must be left to function according to endogenous market dynamics, he accepts as a condition of democracy (the formal separation of spheres) a social structure that is in fact anti-democratic. The value of self-determination that Habermas’s theory of democracy presupposes is contradicted by the actual operations of capitalist markets. Further democratic development demands that the steering mechanisms of the capitalist market be challenged by self-organizing civic movements.

My presentation focusses on a key theme of his political philosophy that relates to the theme of this year’s conference: popular sovereignty. Habermas has elaborated this theme in his treatise ‘Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy’ , first published in German in 1992, and in English in 1996. However, my presentation also draws on Habermas’ earlier works: the ‘Theory of Communicative Action’ and his writings on ‘Discourse Ethics’ , as well as directly on Rousseau’s ‘Social Contract’. All quotes from Habermas are taken from ‘Between Facts and Norms’. This paper concerns Habermas’ account of “the two ideas of human rights and popular sovereignty have determined the normative self-understanding of constitutional democracies up to the present day.” Habermas’ point of departure is that our modern democratic states are relying on two conflicting political conceptions as fundamental basis of their constitution and self-understanding. The 1st conception is the idea of a liberal constitution that protects individual liberties in the form of a system of rights, including fundamental and inalienable human rights. The 2nd conception is the idea of popular sovereignty, i.e. unconstrained political sovereignty or government by the people or their elected representatives.

Human Rights (Menschenrechte) consolidated as one of the key issues in Habermasian thought and aims to the three most important issues for Habermas: Reason, Discourse and the Public Sphere 2 .

Revue française de science politique, 2008

Jurgen Habermas is probably the intellectual whose writings had the biggest political influence in Europe in the last twenty years. Amongst its numerous works, Right and Democracy mightwell be the most important in this respect. In this book, Habermas explains its conception ofdemocracy, and more widely of politics. He lays down the theoretical foundations of what henames a « radical democracy », a democracy that would not be based on the natural rights of man anymore, but on what Habermas dubs « the discussion principle ». Such a democracy seems necessary to him to combine the individual freedoms of the liberal tradition with there distributive functions of the Welfare State. The present article tries to assess the solidity of the foundations of this « radical democracy » for which Habermas is striving.

International Relations and the Limits of Political Theory, 1996

Symposium, 1997

One of the most interesting features of Jiirgen Habermas 's latest work on democracy is his attempt to acknowledge the problem of social complexity while remaining faithfol to the core idea of the Rousseauian conception of democratic legitimacy: the idea that legitimacy is grounded on citizens' participation in processes of opinion-and will-formation which ensure the reasonableness of collective decisions. The challenge for Habermas is to show how it is possible to conciliate the consequences of social complexity with this understanding of legitimacy and popular sovereignty. Does Habermas's attempt succeed? This is the question examined in the present article.