17,788 research outputs found
Contesting the Public Sphere: Within and against Critical Theory
This chapter examines how European thinkers working from within and without the Frankfurt School of critical theory have understood the public sphere as a distinctive political category. First-generation members of the school rejected institutional democracy and mass politics as ideologies that mask domination. The succeeding generation, whose most important representative is Jürgen Habermas, rejected that diagnosis. Habermas’s more optimistic assessment of the emancipatory potential of the public sphere as a medium of rational learning sought a middle ground between critics and defenders of liberal democracy. This ambivalence provoked strong counter-reactions from systems theorists, such as Niklas Luhmann, and from adherents of theories of agonal democracy descended from Carl Schmitt, on the right, and Hannah Arendt, on the Left. As we shall see, these reactions are amplified by those who seek to extend the public sphere beyond the boundaries of the nation state
Where the right gets in: on Rawls’s criticism of Habermas's conception of legitimacy
Many commentators have failed to identify the important issues at the heart of the debate between Habermas and Rawls. This is partly because they give undue attention to differences between their respective devices of representation, the original position and principle (U), neither of which are germane to the actual dispute. The dispute is at bottom about how best to conceive of democratic legitimacy. Rawls indicates where the dividing issues lie when he objects that Habermas’s account of democratic legitimacy is comprehensive and his is confined to the political. But his argument is vitiated by a threefold ambiguity in what he means by “comprehensive doctrine.” Tidying up this ambiguity helps reveal that the dispute turns on the way in which morality relates to political legitimacy. Although Habermas calls his conception of legitimate law “morally freestanding”, and as such distinguishes it from Kantian and Natural Law accounts of legitimacy, it is not as freestanding from morality as he likes to present it. Habermas’s mature theory contains conflicting claims about relation between morality and democratic legitimacy. So there is at least one important sense in which Rawls's charge of comprehensiveness is made to stick againstHabermas’s conception of democratic legitimacy, and remains unanswered
The false promise of the better argument
Effective argumentation in international politics is widely conceived as a matter
of persuasion. In particular, the ‘logic of arguing’ ascribes explanatory power
to the ‘better argument’ and promises to illuminate the conditions of legitimate
normative change. This article exposes the self-defeating implications of the
Habermasian symbiosis between the normative and the empirical force of
arguments. Since genuine persuasion is neither observable nor knowable, its
analysis critically depends on what scholars consider to be the better argument.
Seemingly, objective criteria such as universality only camouflage such moral
reification. The paradoxical consequence of an explanatory concept of arguing
is that moral discourse is no longer conceptualized as an open-ended process of
contestation and normative change, but has recently been recast as a governance
mechanism ensuring the compliance of international actors with pre-defined
norms. This dilemma can be avoided through a positivist reification of valid
norms, as in socialization research, or by adopting a critical and emancipatory
focus on the obstacles to true persuasion. Still, both solutions remain dependent
on the ‘persuasion vs. coercion’ problem that forestalls an insight into successful
justificatory practices other than rational communication. The conclusion
therefore pleas for a pragmatic abstention from better arguments and points to
the insights to be gained from pragmatist norms research in sociology
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