Legality and legitimacy: Juergen Habermas's reconstruction of German political thought.

摘要

Jurgen Habermas's creativity as a democratic theorist illuminates both the resources and shortcomings of German political and legal traditions, the ways in which they both resembled and diverged from Atlantic liberal traditions. Over a fifty year career, Habermas (b. 1929) navigated a major dilemma in German constitutional and political history: how to balance the classical liberal commitment to legality and rights with the democratic legitimacy afforded only by popular sovereignty. Through historical contextualization of the legal theme in both Habermas's philosophical and political writings, my work offers a reinterpretation of major features of the form, content, and significance of Habermas's work as a whole.; Chapters One and Two examine how Habermas's intellectual formation in the 1950s shaped his theory of the public sphere. In Chapter One, I argue that a contest between Social Democratic political scientists and former Nazi law professors for stewardship of the German constitution produced an insoluble antinomy between power and law, to which the theory of the public sphere responds. In Chapter Two, I reconstruct Habermas's relationship to the three dominant schools of constitutional theory in the 1950s, and show how this milieu shaped his early work. In Chapter Three, I trace the origins of Habermas's mature social theory, the theory of communicative action, and his mature political theory of radical reformism, to the political crisis of West German society in the late 1960s, in particular the conflict between student activists and technocratic elites. The West German debates on nuclear armament, West German foreign policy and the civil disobedience in the early 1980s I reconstruct in Chapter Four establish the context for my reinterpretation of Habermas's theories of modernity, constitutional patriotism, and the link to "the West." In Chapter Five, I argue that Habermas's mature vision of liberal constitutionalism as a an "unfinished project" reflects his objectives in the political contexts of the late 1980s and the German reunfication process of 1989-90. Drawing lessons from West German jurisprudence, and the history of German constitutionalism more broadly, Habermas's mature political thought constructed a usable past for his political project of radical reform.