Jürgen Habermas’ Between Facts and Norms Maria Asuncion L. Magsino, Ph.D. Abstract Modern societies are characterized by groups of people sharing a common space but upholding a plurality of “lifeworlds.” On this account Habermas claims that modern law should assume the role of being the primary medium of social integration in modern society. Although both traditional and modern law possess instrumental power of enforcement on their subjects the normative source differs greatly. The secular modern society generally looks for normative sources in the realm of rationality. This search yields to uncovering the two internal dimensions of law: facts and norms. The stipulation of the law is the fact of law and what makes it acquire a binding or a coercive force is the norm of law. Habermas claims that it is rational discourse which takes place in the communicative process that bridges the gap. The legitimacy is bestowed on the fact of law by its being justified by reason through a normative claim. Moreover, Habermas attributes the foundation of real democracy, which he calls “substantive democracy” to the exercise of the discursive process or what he calls communicative democracy. In the light of Habermas’ theory of law and democracy emerging from the communicative process, the article makes a critique of how democracy is expressed in the local scenario, from the popular exercise of voting to the political exercise through our institutions. In doing so, it hopes to raise awareness of our present state of “formal” democracy and what it takes to achieve a genuine “substantive” democracy. Keywords: Jürgen Habermas, modern law, modern society, democracy, communicative process Jürgen Habermas’ lifetime rumination on matters concerning the nature of democracy and law which was ushered in 1962 with the publication of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere culminates in this book, Between Facts and Norms. His treatment of political issues strongly bears the character of the emerging Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School where he belonged. This theory 1 holds the view that political inquiry is an integral aspect of a total process of social change. In fact, political inquiry cannot be severed from actual historical, social and political processes inasmuch as theorists are not merely “describing” the society under scrutiny but are in fact affecting it by their inquiries. Habermas, in this work as well as in an earlier book , reaffirms the “unity of theory and 2 ‘praxis’ perspective”. 3 Aided by some claims Habermas makes in this work Between Facts and Norms, this article traces the socio-political development of societies from traditional to modern. It highlights the importance of 1 “Critical Theorists have long sought to distinguish their aims, methods, theories, and forms of explanation from standard understandings in both the natural and the social sciences. Instead, they have claimed that social inquiry ought to combine rather than separate the poles of philosophy and the social sciences: explanation and understanding, structure and agency, regularity and normativity. Such an approach, Critical Theorists argue, permits their enterprise to be practical in a distinctively moral (rather than instrumental) sense.” Bohman, James, “Critical Theory”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2010/entries/critical-theory/ (accessed May 12, 2010). 2 C. Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere, (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1992), 439 ff. 3 Robert Goodin (ed.), A New Handbook of Political Science, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 84. 1