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

270Chapter 6.the state and other citizens. As bearers of these rights, citizens enjoygovernment protection as long as they pursue their private interestswithin the boundaries set by legal statutes, and this includesprotection against government interventions that exceed statutorylimits. Political rights have not only the same structure but also thesame meaning as private rights that provide a space within whichlegal subjects are free from external compulsion. They give citizensthe opportunity to assert their private interests so that, throughelections, through the composition of parliamentary bodies andthe selection of Government leaders, these interests finally aggregateinto a political will that has an impact on the administration.In this way, citizens can, in the role of voters, supervise the exerciseof governmental power so that it responds to the interests ofcitizens as private persons.57According to the republican view, the status of citizens is notpatterned on negative liberties to which these citizens can lay claimas private persons. Rather, civil rights-preeminently, rights ofpolitical participation and communication-are positive liberties.They guarantee not freedom from external compulsion but thepossibility of participating in a common practice through whichcitizens can first make themselves into what they want to be:politically autonomous authors of a community of free and equalpersons. To this extent, the political process does not just serve tokeep government activity under the surveillance of citizens whohave already acquired a prior social autonomy in the exercise oftheir private rights and prepolitical liberties. Nor does it functionas a hinge between state and society, for administrative power is byno means autochthonous; it is not something given. Rather, governmentalauthority derives from the power produced communicativelyin the civic practice of self-determination, and it finds itslegitimation in the fact that it protects this practice by institutionalizingpublic liberty.58 The state's "raison d'etre" does not lieprimarily in the protection of equal private rights but in theguarantee of an inclusive opinion- and will-formation in which freeand equal citizens reach an understanding on which goals andnorms lie in the equal interest of all. Thus more is required of therepublican citizen than just an orientation to individual interest.Second, the polemic against the classical concept of the legalperson as bearer of private rights reveals a controversy about the