Jürgen Habermas i deliberativna demokracija
Jürgen Habermas and Deliberative Democracy

Summary/Abstract: The author looks into Habermas’ theory of deliberative democracy in the context of the present-day debates on the theory of morals and politics. The starting point of Habermas’ theory is his idea of discourse ethics. This is cognitivist ethics in the tradition of Kant, Rawls, Tugendhat and Apel that is built around the concept of normative correctness analogous to the descriptive notion of truth. This idea is best expressed by Kant’s categorical imperative, according to which the validity of norms depends on their generalizability. Habermas is aware of the impossibility to rationally found universalist ethics. Instead of the final foundations he offers the reflexion about the assumptions of a meaningful discourse i.e. the argumentation rules that must be respected if language communication is to be meaningful. Habermas’ outline of the theory of law in his book Between Facts and Norms builds on this moral-theoretical position. In modern society the function of law is to facilitate social communication: law is the legitimate framework of social communication on which the actors can rely. Habermas considers the specific link between human rights and popular sovereignty as the source of legitimacy. Human rights and popular sovereignty mutually condition each other and at the same time there is tension between them. The absolutization of individual rights makes democracy impossible since decision-making is obstructed; absolutization of popular sovereignty leads to the tyranny of the majority and the loss of rights. Habermas thinks that law can be legitimized by communicational mediation between the individual rights and popular sovereignty, in line with the principle that the claim to validity can only be laid by those norms that are approved of by all potentially affected individuals as rational discourse participants. Popular sovereignty is consistently procedurally interpreted. On the one hand, it is practised by means of public discourses and on the other through decision-making processes within democratically structured political institutions. The two dimensions of legitimizing law are different yet complementary: public discourses take place in civil society, political decisions are made in democratic institutions of the state. This is also an outline of the specific position of Habermas’ political theory of deliberative democracy. It is equally distant from the model of liberal democracy which emphasizes possessive individualism and the protection of citizens’ private interests, and from the republican democratic model that emphasizes political participation of active citizens. The theory of deliberative democracy emphasizes the importance of civil society: It is a sort of a practical verification of discourse ethics. Civil society is a sphere of autonomous public communication that is complementary to state administration but cannot substitute it.

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