1 JÜRGEN HABERMAS: MODERN SOCIAL THEORY AS POSTMETAPHYSICAL NATURAL LAW * Daniel Chernilo Abstract This article revisits Jürgen Habermas’s long‐lasting engagement with the tradition of natural law and argues that his work is unique in the contemporary context because it takes place without seeking to sever all possible connections to natural law. Its goals are then twofold. On the one hand, the article reconstructs what Habermas understands by natural law in order to account for its wider relevance as an intellectual resource in modern social theory; on the other, it reassesses the natural law elements that still reside in Habermas’s thinking. The article starts by revisiting Habermas’s definition of natural law and its role in modernity’s claim to normative self‐foundation. The second section focuses on the role Habermas gives to sociology as the discipline through which the theory of communicative action was systematically elaborated. Being simultaneously an empirical approach and a normative theory of modern society, the sociological tradition is thus reconstructed in connection rather than in opposition to natural law. The last part turns to the universalistic foundations of Habermas’s social theory as way of recovering its moment of ‘unconditionality’. As they centre on the question of universalism, all the three sections come together in the idea that Habermas’s social theory is best depicted as postmetaphysical natural law. Keywords: Jürgen Habermas, social theory, sociology, natural law, modernity, universalism Jürgen Habermas’s fifty years engagement with the philosophical, sociological and normative foundations of modern social and political thought is the most accomplished of his generation. It is then of particular interest that, as we shall see below, over the years explicitly Habermas has argued that the tradition of natural law remains of crucial importance in coming to terms with modern intellectual challenges. To be sure, Habermas’ engagement with natural law is attempted from the point of view of modern social theory. His stance is that we ought to embrace fully modernity’s scientific developments although without surrendering to positivistic restrictions, must learn to handle the tension between the descriptive and normative tasks that are inscribed in the understanding social life, and while remaining committed to the renovation of the universalistic orientation that is central to the tradition of natural law, we will only be able to do so if we avoid resorting back to ideas of first philosophy or the ethical contemplation of the good * Forthcoming in Journal of Classical Sociology 2013, special issue on social theory and natural law edited by Daniel Chernilo and Robert Fine.