Between Facts and Norms - Contributions to a ... - Blogs Unpad

76--Chapter 2------------The positivization of law necessarily results from the rationalizationof its validity basis. As a result, modern law can stabilizebehavioral expectations in a complex society with structurallydifferentiated lifeworlds and functionally independent subsystemsonly if law, as regent for a "societal community" that has transformeditself into civil society, can maintain the inherited claim tosolidarity in the abstract form of an acceptable claim to legitimacy.Modern legal systems redeem this promise through the universalizationand specification of citizenship:A societal community as basically composed of equals seems to be the"end of the line" in the long process of undermining the legitimacy ofsuch older, more particularistic ascriptive bases of membership as religion,ethnic affiliation, region or locality, and hereditary position insocial stratification . ... This basic theme of equality has long antecedentsbut was first crystallized in conceptions of "natural rights" . . . . Thecurrent prominence of poverty and race problems in the United States islargely owing to the deep moral repugnance that the conception of aninherently "lower" class, to say nothing of an inferior race, arouses inmodern societies, despite vociferous objections to modern egalitarianismamong certain groups. 51Finally, in discussing the development of civil society as the socialbasis for public and inclusive processes of opinion- and willformationamong voluntarily associated citizens, Parsons stressesthe significance of equalizing educational opportunities or, moregenerally, uncoupling cultural knowledge from class structures:"The focus of the new phase is the educational revolution which ina certain sense synthesizes the themes of the industrial and thedemocratic revolutions: equality of opportunity and equality ofcitizenship."52 With this concept of an "educational revolution,"Parsons also touches on the political-cultural conditions for aresponsive political public sphere. This is the theme that interestsRawls, and rightly so: the more modern legal systems actuallyredeem their claim to legitimacy in the currency of effective civilrights, the more the criteria for equal treatment come to dependon ever more inclusive processes of public communication.Parsons understands modern law as a transmission belt by whichsolidarity-the demanding structures of mutual recognition weknow from face-to-face interaction-is transmitted in abstract but