Between Fact and Norm: A Discourse Theory of Law and the Rule of Law State

Author: Habermas
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-08-01
Features: The Life·Reading·New Press has always attached great importance to introducing foreign academic thought, which has been highly beneficial for the development of China's own intellectual and cultural traditions. Since the mid-1980s, thanks to the strong support of friends in the fields of translation and publishing, our press has successively published several comprehensive series and thematic translation collections, which have had a positive impact on a broad readership. I propose to clarify the paradigmatic understanding of the background of law and constitution, which targets the increasingly prevalent legal skepticism in legal academia, particularly what I call pseudo-realism, which undervalues the empirical utility of the normative presuppositions of existing legal practices. In our ongoing discussions since the 17th century about the legal constitution of political communities, a self-understanding of the entire modern moral practice has also been revealed. This self-understanding not only exists in the various manifestations of universalist moral consciousness but also in the free institutions of the democratic and rule-of-law state. The task of the discourse ethics is to reconstruct this self-understanding in such a way that it can maintain its normative core, resisting both scientistic reduction and aesthetic assimilation. This is an extraordinary work. In a sense, it may be Habermas's best work.