Habermas’ Between Facts and Norms: Legitimizing Power? ABSTRACT: To overcome the gap between norms and facts, Habermas appeals to the medium of law which gives legitimacy to the political order and provides it with its binding force. Legitimate law-making itself is generated through a procedure of public opinion and will-formation that produces communicative power. Communicative power, in turn, influences the process of social institutionalization. I will argue that the revised notion of power as a positive influence that is produced in communicative space runs contrary to Habermas’ original concept of power in his theory of communicative action where power is understood as a coercive force that has to be avoided in order for the discursive situation to prevail. As such, I believe that the introduction of communicative power and its close tie to ‘legitimate law’ and political system greatly reduces our critical ability with respect to political systems as exercised in liberal-democratic states. In addition, I will argue that his revision alludes to a redrawing of the boundaries between the life-world and the system in favor of the latter, and consequently indicates a shift to the right in Habermas’ latest work. To overcome the gap between norms and facts, Habermas appeals to the medium of law, which gives legitimacy to the political order and provides the system with its binding force. Legitimate law-making itself is generated through a procedure of public opinion and will-formation that produces communicative power. In its turn, communicative power influences the process of social institutionalization. I will argue that the revised notion of power as a positive influence that is produced in communicative space, runs c... ... middle of paper ... ...’ new elaboration on the deliberative model of its substantive force; once again confronting it with the Hegelian charge of emptiness and ineffectiveness. (6) Habermas’ claim that Kant subordinates law to morality—because the legitimacy of law is derived from the categorical imperative—can be contested. If one sees that for Kant the categorical imperative underlies both law and morality, one can object to the use of the term "subordinate" by Habermas as an inaccurate description of the relation between law and morality. (7) J.Habermas, "Three Normative Models of Democracy", in Constellation, Vol. I, No:1, 1994, p. 8 (8) J.Habermas, "The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment: Rereading Dialectic of Enlightenment", in New German Critique, No:26, 1982, p. 27 (9) Habermas dedicates chapter six of BFN to elaborate on the role of constitutional adjudication.
Young people who face family problems, parental separation in the beginning, lack of support and encouragement by society and lack of self-esteem may end up in the youth justice system. The existing youth justice framework is totally unable to map out the solution where the young offenders can get rid of this all social problems and pass a happy righteous life.
...ay, but they gave the United States permission to use the bay as a naval base for refueling and protecting them from storms while out at sea. Also the base was used to detain war enemies for questioning. The detention center on the base is still open and running to this day even though the President of the United States ordered it be closed back in 2009. When the bay was attacked the Cubans were killed because the United States had presence there. The Cubans were not the target of the attack but because there were U.S. presence in the area many people suffered and many lost their lives because of a disagreement and war between two other countries.
In the book Written on the Heart: The Case for Natural Law, J. Budziszewski, approaches the question of government through nature and its limits. This book informs the reader on how natural law plays a role in answering political and ethical questions. This is done by review of four major philosophers and their works. In the following few pages we will focus on his review of Thomas Aquinas, and how his catholic faith affected his understanding of natural law as he understood the works of Aristotle.
The history of welfare has been a short story. This is a short summary of welfare history from Micheal Katz’s article The American Welfare State. AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) was around the 1970’s, and it was the first modern welfare division but after a reform in the 1990’s TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) rose out of the remains of AFDC. After the reform the people on welfare went down, momentarily, but the poverty rate stayed steady. Since then there have not been many changes (Katz).
Welfare is a public assistance program that provides at least a minimum amount of economic security to people whose incomes are insufficient to maintain an adequate standard of living. These programs generally include such benefits as financial aid to individuals, subsidized medical care, and stamps that are used to purchase food. The modern U.S. welfare system dates back to the Great Depression of the 1930’s. During the worst parts of the Depression, about one-fourth of the labor force was without work. More than two-thirds of all households would have been considered poor by today's standards. With a majority of the capable adult population experiencing severe financial misfortune, many Americans turned to the government for answers. In response, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt led a social and economic reform movement attacking the Depression. Part of his newly enacted “New Deal” program was the Social Security Act, enacted by Congress in 1935. This act and established a number of social welfare programs, each designed to provide support for different segments of the population.
Many of us have heard cases of welfare recipients who have taken advantage of the welfare state system. As a result many of us believe welfare is a bad thing in our society. Like I previously stated welfare is more than just receiving free money, welfare was created to level the playing field for those who have had disadvantages in life. The traditional welfare as we know is cash-aid and this affects recipients in our community because it provides job programs for those who have previously lost their jobs. If approved, the fifteen page application provides recipients with more or less of three hundred dollars a month to pay for rent. Not only ...
Peta Blood and Margaret Thorsborne are both highly respected in the field of restorative practices for their developmental work in the implementation of restorative practices in educational and workplace settings. Margaret Thorsborne is the director of Margaret Thorsborne and Associates and Transformative Justice Australia. She is an expert on school and workplace bullying and has helped with the introduction of restorative practices into schools and workplaces in Australia (Margaret Thorsborne) Peta Blood lives in Sydney Australia. Together Thorsborne and Blood co-founded Restorative Practices International (RPI) which is the words first international membership organization for restorative practitioners (Blood & Thorsborne, 2013).
Raven, Bertram, and John French. Jr. "Legitimate Power, Coercive Power, and Observability in Social Influence ." Sociometry Vol. 21.No. 2 (1958): 83. Web. 2 Aug 2010. .
Siegal, L. J., & Senna, J. J. (1991). Juvenile delinquency: Theory, practice, & law (4th ed.). St. Paul: West Publishing.
ABSTRACT: The classical contract tradition of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau have enjoyed such fame and acceptance as being basic to the development of liberal democratic theory and practice that it would be heretical for any scholar, especially one from the fringes, to critique. But the contract tradition poses challenges that must be given the flux in the contemporary socio-political universe that at once impels extreme nationalism and unavoidable globalism. This becomes all the more important not in order to dislodge the primacy of loyalty and reverence to this tradition but from another perspective which hopes to encourage that the anchorage of disclosure be implemented. The contract tradition makes pronouncements on what is natural and what is nonnatural. It offers what many have contended are rigorous arguments for these pronouncements that are "intuitive," "empirical," "logical," "psychological," "moral," "religio-metaphysical." What I offer in this essay is a challenge from the outside. I ask: 1) on what empirical data are the material presuppositions of contractarianism built? 2) what is the epistemological foundation of contractarianism? 3) is contractarianism not derivable from any other form of sociological presupposition except that of the state of nature? 4) does any human know a "state of nature"? 5) given the answers to the above questions, to what extent are the legal and moral foundations of contractarianism sacrosanct? I attempt to answer these questions in what can only be a sketch, but my answers suggest that it is very presumptuous of contractarianist to suppose that they have captured the only logically valid basis of democratic practice universally.
Some theorists believe that ‘power is everywhere: not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere… power is not an institution, nor a structure, nor possession. It is the name we give to a complex strategic situation in a particular society. (Foucault, 1990: 93) This is because power is present in each individual and in every relationship. It is defined as the ability of a group to get another group to take some form of desired action, usually by consensual power and sometimes by force. (Holmes, Hughes &Julian, 2007) There have been a number of differing views on ‘power over’ the many years in which it has been studied. Theorist such as Anthony Gidden in his works on structuration theory attempts to integrate basic structural analyses and agency-centred traditions. According to this, people are free to act, but they must also use and replicate fundamental structures of power by and through their own actions. Power is wielded and maintained by how one ‘makes a difference’ and based on their decisions and actions, if one fails to exercise power, that is to ‘make a difference’ then power is lost. (Giddens: 1984: 14) However, more recent theorists have revisited older conceptions including the power one has over another and within the decision-making processes, and power, as the ability to set specific, wanted agendas. To put it simply, power is the ability to get others to do something they wouldn’t otherwise do. In the political arena, therefore, power is the ability to make or influence decisions that other people are bound by.
...but it has for the most part been unable to completely escape Enlightenment rationalism with its presupposition that metaphysics can be known objectively and exhaustively by human beings. The pragmatic rationalism of Habermas provides an auspicious postmodern beginning for discussing the problem of God again.
In his treaty On Law, Thomas Aquinas defends the position that “the law is always something directed to the common good”. Laws are thus directed toward a comm...
The challenge that lies ahead probably is the need to work towards indigenization of human rights, and ensure their assertion within each country's traditions and history. The 1993 Vienna Convention on Human Rights speaks on the need to consider the importance of national and regional details as well as various cultural, historical and religious backgrounds when thinking about human rights.
Power is the ability to control or influence others, especially socially or politically. We often hear of the horror stories, in which corrupt dictators with too much power kill innocent citizens, eliminate all competition, and hurt others for personal gain. Power itself is not necessarily the bad thing here; it comes as an instinctive need to humans, rooted in the primal purpose of survival (Anchor text). The abuse of power leads to corruption. Power is an unstable force that can have positive or negative outcomes, depending on why it was sought and the attitude of those on the receiving end of the control.