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

320Chapter 7a general mode of operation of social systems. Democratic proceduresmake the production oflegitimate law depend on a presumptivelyreasonable treatment of problems that correspond, in thekind of issues they pose, to precisely those problems that havealways already been dealt with unconsciously, so to speak, in lessspecializedareas of society. For the centerpiece of deliberativepolitics consists in a network of discourses and bargaining processesthat is supposed to facilitate the rational solution of pragmatic,moral, and ethical questions-the very problems thataccumulate with the failure of the functional, moral, or ethicalintegration of society elsewhere.Given the need for functional coordination that arises today incomplex societies, the simple model of a division oflabor betweenexperts and laypersons no longer suffices. Rather, this need can bemet only through indirect forms of regulatory action (i.e., steering)on the part of the administrative system. Dahl has recognized thedanger that these "cognitive" problems of functional coordinationdisplace other, namely, moral and ethical, problems and overburdenthe problem-solving capacity of democratic procedures. Varioussymptoms of such a cognitive overburdening of deliberativepolitics lend support to the assumption, by now widely accepted,that discursive opinion- and will-formation governed by democraticprocedures lacks the complexity to take in and digest theoperatively necessary knowledge. The required steering knowledgeno longer seems capable of penetrating the capillaries of a communicationnetwork whose structures are predominantly horizontal,osmotically permeable, and egalitarian. Such evidence, however,should not lead one to forget the other fact that the uncoupling ofadministrative action from parliamentary control and the displacementof pertinent topics from public arenas did not take placewithout resistance. In changing constellations, the "democratic question"in one version or another has continually returned to theagenda. Dahl might even have considered his own investigation asone more instance of the drive to reinvigorate public discussion.That these countertendencies should arise is by no means accidental,if one assumes that the very medium of law, to which politicalpower is internally linked, requires the supposition that law has ademocratic genesis-and that this partly counterfactual suppositionalso has empirical effects. On this premise, the deployment of