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

296Chapter 7must not suppress the genuinely normative sense of the intuitiveunderstanding of democracy. Empiricist redefinitions thus do notgive us a way to avoid the question of how norm and reality arerelated. If this is the case, then we must return to those normativemodels of democracy already introduced and ask whether theirimplicit conceptions of society offer any points of contact withavailable sociological analyses.Our reflections from the standpoint oflegal theory revealed thatthe central element of the democratic process resides in theprocedure of deliberative politics. This reading of democracy hasimplications for the concept of society presupposed in the receivedmodels of democracy, that is, the view of society as centered in thestate. The reading proposed here differs both from the liberalconception of the state as guardian of an economic society andfrom the republican concept of an ethical community institutionalizedin the state.10According to the liberal view, the democratic process is effectedexclusively in the form of compromises among interests. Rules ofcompromise formation are supposed to secure the fairness ofresults through universal and equal suffrage, the representativecomposition of parliamentary bodies, the mode of decision making,rules of order, and so on. Such rules are ultimately justified interms of liberal basic rights. According to the republican view, onthe other hand, democratic will-formation takes the form ofethicopolitical self-understanding; here deliberation can rely onthe substantive support of a culturally established backgroundconsensus shared by the citizenry. This socially integrative preunderstandingcan renew itself in the ritualized recollection of thefounding of the republic. Discourse theory takes elements fromboth sides and integrates these in the concept of an ideal procedurefor deliberation and decision making. Democratic procedure,which establishes a network of pragmatic considerations,compromises, and discourses of self-understanding and ofjustice,1grounds the presumption that reasonable or fair results are ob- Itained insofar as the flow of relevant information and its properhandling have not been obstructed. According to this view, practi1cal reason no longer resides in universal human rights, or in thethical substance of a specific community, bllt in the rules o/