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

301Deliberative Politicsphysically present) people. According to the republican view, thepeople, who are at least potentially present, are the bearers of asovereignty that in principle cannot be delegated: in their sovereigncharacter, the people cannot have others represent them.Constitutive authority is grounded in the citizens' practice of selfdeterminationand no tin their representatives. Liberalism countersthis with the more realistic view that in a constitutional democracy,political authority emanating from the people is exercised only "bymeans of elections and voting and by specific legislative, executive,and judicial organs" (as we read, for example, in art. 20, sec. 2, ofthe Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany).Of course, these two views exhaust the alternatives only if onedubiously conceives state and society in terms of the whole and itsparts, where the whole is constituted either by a sovereign citizenry ·or by a constitution. By contrast, the discourse theory of democracycorresponds to the image of a decentered society, albeit a society inwhich the political public sphere has been differentiated as anarena for the perception, identification, and treatment of problemsaffecting the whole of society. Once one gives up the philosophyof the subject, one needs neither to concentrate sovereigntyconcretely in the people nor to banish it in anonymous constitutionalstructures and powers. The "self' of the self-organizing legalcommunity disappears in the subjectless forms of communicationthat regulate the flow of discursive opinion- and will-formation insuch a way that their fallible results enjoy the presumption of beingreasonable. This is not to denounce the intuition connected withthe idea of popular sovereignty but to interpretitintersubjectively.12Popular sovereignty, even if it becomes anonymous, retreats intodemocratic procedures and the legal implementation of theirdemanding communicative presuppositions only in order to makeitself felt as communicatively generated power. Strictly speaking,this power springs from the interactions among legally institutionalizedwill-formation and culturally mobilized publics. The latter,for their part, find a basis in the associations of a civil society quitedistinct from both state and economy alike.Read in procedural terms, the idea of popular sovereignty refers 1to social-boundary conditions that, although enabling the selforganizationof a legal community, are not immediately at thedisposition of the citizens' will. The normative self-understanding