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

274--- ----------------------------·------Chapter 6a contest of power is determined by the rational choice of optimalstrategies. Given an indissoluble pluralism of prepolitical valuesand interests that are at best aggregated with equal weight in thepolitical process, politics loses all reference to the normative coreof a public use of practical reason. The republican confidence inthe force of political discourses stands in contrast to this liberalskepticism about reason. Such discourses are supposed to allowparticipants to discuss value orientations and interpretations ofneeds and wants, including their prepolitical self-understandingsand worldviews, and then to change these in an insightful way.Under discursive conditions that encourage each to adopt theperspectives of the other members or even of all other persons,rationally motivated changes in one's initial views are possible. Asparticipants in such a discursive process of opinion- and willformation,citizens exercise their right to political self-legislation:Given plurality, a political process can validate a societal norm as selfgivenlaw only if (i) participation in the process results in some shift oradjustment in relevant understandings on the part of some (or all)participants, and (ii) there exists a set of prescriptive social and proceduralconditions such that one's undergoing, under those conditions,such a dialogic modulation of one's understandings is not considered orexperienced as coercive, or invasive, or otherwise a violation of one's· identity or freedom, and (iii) those conditions actually prevailed in theprocess supposed to be jurisgenerative.646.3.2If we return to the question concerning the legitimacy of constitutionalreview with a heightened "republican" sense for the deliberativecomponents of the legislative process, then we can render Ely'sproceduralist proposal more specific. The republican understandingof politics reminds us that the system of rights is internallyrelated to citizens' political autonomy. From this perspective, theconstitutional court must work within the limits of its authority toensure that the process of lawmaking takes place under the legitimatingconditions of deliberative politics. The latter is in turn boundto the demanding communicative presuppositions of politicalarenas that do not coincide with the institutionalized will-formationin parliamentary bodies, but rather include the political public