Between Fact and Norm (On the Discourse Theory of Law and the Rule of Law State)

Author: Habermas (Germany) ; Translated by Tong Shijun
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-08-01
Features: The Joint Publishing House of Life, Reading, and New Knowledge has always attached great importance to introducing foreign academic ideas, which has been beneficial to the development of China's own intellectual and cultural traditions. Since the mid-1980s, thanks to the support of friends in the fields of writing, translation, and reading, our store has successively published several series of comprehensive libraries and thematic translation collections, 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 popular legal skepticism in the legal academia, especially 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 evidences of a universalist moral consciousness but also in the free institutions of a democratic and rule-of-law state. The work of the speech act 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.