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

Author: (German) Habermas
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-08-01
Features: The Life·Reading·New Sanlian Bookstore has always attached great importance to introducing foreign academic thought, which has been highly beneficial to the development of China's own intellectual and cultural traditions. Since the mid-1980s, thanks to the strong support of friends in the field of writing and translation as well as among readers, our bookstore has successively published several comprehensive library collections and specialized translation series, which have had a positive impact on a broad readership. I propose to clarify the paradigmatic background understanding of law and constitution, which targets the increasingly prevalent legal skepticism in the legal academia, particularly what I call the false 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 evidences of a universalist moral consciousness but also in the free institutions of a democratic and rule-of-law state. The work of the discourse ethics is to reconstruct this self-understanding, so that it can maintain its normative core, resisting both scientism reduction and aesthetic assimilation. This is an extraordinary book. In a sense, it may be Habermas's best work.