Abstract
This article argues that Habermas’s division of the process of Western modernization into cultural modernity (a pure normative sphere) and social-economic modernization (a pure technical-logical or instrumental sphere) and his use of this theoretical-political standpoint in order to ground a model of radical political democracy as an impartial, neutral, impersonal and formal procedural juridical-political paradigm based on the dialectics between institutionalization and spontaneity lead to strong institutionalism in politics. The notion of modern social systems or institutions as structures of impartial, neutral, formal and impersonal proceduralism with a technical-logical or instrumental sense, constitution and evolution implies their non-political and non-normative understanding, depoliticizing them. As a consequence, institutions (especially political and economic ones) become self-referential and self-subsisting structures-subjects which are centralized and managed by institutional elites and technicians from a technical-logical standpoint-dynamics. We argue that a model of radical political democracy must overcome such separation between cultural modernity and social-economic modernization, politicizing the social systems and making them normative-political institutions-subjects streamlined and defined by social struggles between conflicting social classes, their hegemony and counterpoints.
Highlights
We argue that a model of radical political democracy must overcome such separation between cultural modernity and social-economic modernization, politicizing the social systems and making them normative-political institutions-subjects streamlined and defined by social struggles between conflicting social classes, their hegemony and counterpoints
Habermas’s theory of modernity, a theory of the process of Western or European modernization, is characterized by a correlation between normative theory and institutional theory, that is, between philosophy and sociology
The normative theory enables the critical point of view that grounds and streamlines a social analysis and a political praxis; on the other hand, the institutional paradigm, in the moment that it conceives of basic social systems as the fundamental ground of Western modernization, enables the sociological diagnosis regarding the structural movements, dynamics and subjects which determine — at least in the case of some objective consequences — the senses and the ways of institutional constitution as the main tendencies of social evolution
Summary
The most problematic consequence of the correlation between systems theory (as the basis of the understanding of the process of Western modernization) and juridical-political proceduralism (as the basis of the legitimation of democratic political praxis and institutions) is that (a) institutions become a self-referential and self-subsisting structure-dynamic-subject, which is highly overlapped with the political subjects of civil society and class struggles, assuming a very strong technical-logical constitution, legitimation and evolution as an impartial, neutral, formal and impersonal proceduralism which can adopt a very unpolitical core-role (due to being technical-logical and internal, with no external link and roots, as limited by self-referential and self-subsisting depoliticized economic system); as (b) institutions become the epistemological-political arena, dynamics, procedure, value and subject of their internal structuration, functioning and programming and of societal evolution as a whole.
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