Radical democracy and an abolitionist concept of justice. A critique of Habermas' theory of justice

Critical Horizons

Volumn 6, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 137-152

  Renault, Emmanuel ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

Critique of the Political; Democracy; Habermas; Justice; Rawls

Indexed keywords

EID: 33748945221     PISSN: 14409917     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1163/156851605775009564     Document Type: Article

References (30)

1. I wish to record my gratitude to the Centre for Research on Social Inclusion at Macquarie University (Sydney) where I was invited as a Visiting Scholar (July-August 2004); to the Humboldt foundation who financed my stay for one year at the Institut für Sozialforschung at Frankfurt (September 2004-August 2005), and to Jean-Philippe Deranty and Peter Schmiedgen who discussed previous versions of this paper.
2. J. Rancière, La Mésentente, Paris, Galilée, 1995.
3. J. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, Cambridge, UK, Polity Press, 1996, p. 82. See also his critique of the sociological approach of Law, p. 43 sq.
4. J. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, Ibid., p. 389.
5. J. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, Ibid., p. xli.
6. J. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, Ibid., p. 118.
7. A. Honneth, "Die soziale Dynamik von Missachtung. Zur Ortbestimmung einer Gesellschaftstheorie," in Das Andere der Gerechtigkeit. Aufsätze zur praktischen Philosophie, Frankfurt/Main, Suhrkamp, 2000, p. 98: "moralische Erfahrungen sich nicht an der Einschränkung von Sprachkompetenzen entzünden., sondern sich mit der Verletzung von sozialisatorisch erworbenen Identität bilden."
8. Although Habermas seems to oscillate between two models, the first which gives to public deliberation the capacity to rule bureaucratic and market mechanism, whereas in the second one, democratic institutions exercise at best a limited check on market and administrative constraints; see W. E. Scheurman, "Between Radicalism and Resignation: Democratic Theory in Habermas' Between Facts and Norms," in Habermas: A Critical "Reader, ed. P. Dews, Oxford, Blackwell Publishers, "1999.
9. In the Introduction to Spheres of justice, M. Walzer explained that the political concept of equality is an "abolitionist concept" but he does not give a systematic function to this thesis in his study of justice. See Spheres of Justice. A Defence of Pluralism and Equality, Oxford, Blackwell, 1982.
10. Implicitly or explicitly, in so far as the communicative constraints define the normative presuppositions of social life.
11. In other words, the study of the experience of injustice doesn't only have sceptical consequences. For a sceptical opposition, to theories of justice and the study of the experience of injustice, see J. Shklar, The Faces of Injustice, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1990.
12. A. Honneth highlights the critical power of the negative experiences of denial of recognition as experiences of injustice in chapter 6 of The Struggle for Recognition: Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1996, but he considers the study of the experience of injustice neither as a theoretical means nor as a principle for a critique of theories of justice.
13. This last point has been made by I. M. Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1990, chap. 1.
14. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, p. 137.
15. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, Ibid., p. 107.
16. The rebirth of normative political philosophy can justify itself through the critique of the lack of normative foundations in the late Marx. But the theory of the late Marx is rooted in the critique of the political and of political philosophy that was developed by die young Marx. This latter critique can be addressed to this rebirth itself. For a distinction between various model of critique in Marx, see E. Renault, Marx et l'Idée de Critique, Paris, PUF, 1995.
17. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, p. 123;
18. see also p. 403: "From, a normative point of view, both the materialisation of private law and the new category of social entitlements are justified in a relative sense, namely, in relation to an absolutely justified equal distribution of individual liberties."
19. From, a normative point of view, both the materialisation of private law and the new category of social entitlements are justified in a relative sense, namely, in relation to an absolutely justified equal distribution of individual liberties. Ibid., p. 401.
20. From, a normative point of view, both the materialisation of private law and the new category of social entitlements are justified in a relative sense, namely, in relation to an absolutely justified equal distribution of individual liberties. Ibid., p. 84.
21. See E. Renault, L'Expérience de l'Injustice. Reconnaissance et Clinique de l'Injustice, Paris, La Découverte, 2004.
22. J. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, p. 17 sq.
23. J. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, Ibid., p. 182.
24. J. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, Ibid., pp. 175, 308.
25. See Scheuerman, "Between Radicalism and Resignation," p. 160.
26. A critique that is not really taken into account by Habermas' discussion of the feminist critique of liberal and welfare democracies, see Between Facts and Norms, p. 418 sq.
27. C. Gilligan, In a Different Voice. Psychological Theory and Women's Development, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1982.
28. N. Fraser's rejection of Honneth's theory of recognition rests also on this Habermasian principle; see N. Fraser, A. Honneth, Anerkennung oder Umverteilung, Frankfurt/Main, Suhrkamp, 2003, pp. 233-237.
29. J. Rancière tried to develop the theory of these situations in La Mésentente.
30. J. Lyotard tried to study this kind of experience of injustice in Le Différend, Paris, Minuit, 1984, without taking its cognitive resources into account.