The Equalization of Effective Communicative Freedom: Democratic Justice in the Constitutional State and Beyond

Abstract

The fundamental political concern of liberalism has been to secure equal liberties for all citizens. There has, however, been no agreement among liberals on the extent to which this project depends, both normatively and practically, on the democratization of society. Socialism, on the other hand, has been fundamentally concerned with the realization of emancipated forms of life. But socialists too have disagreed with one another on the extent to which political structures of democratic self-government are central to the revolutionary task of emancipation. Social democracy, as a tradition, has involved the attempt to show how these core political projects of the modern era, liberalism and socialism, are mutually interdependent. The most appropriate emancipatory project for late modern, increasingly complex societies, from a social-democratic perspective is to create and maintain a social structure that can deliverequal and effectiveliberties for all citizens. This achievement is to be best understood in republican terms, as the realization of a democratic form of life in which free and equal citizens engage one another in the collective task of autonomous self-governance. Jürgen Habermas has been one of the most significant intellectual contributors to the development of the idea of social democracy as an emancipatory project. Over several decades from the early 1960s to the present, Habermas has set about recasting critical social theory in terms of a theory of communicative action. The main legal and political implications of this critical perspective are outlined in his discourse theory of democracy Habermas considers the realization of rights through the democratic self-organization of legal communities to be the normative core of emancipatory politics in the modern era.