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

330Chapter 8circulation that cuts across the "official" circuit of democraticdecision making steered by communicative power. To be sure,most of the descriptions of these countermovements operate withempiricist concepts of power that level out the normative distinctionswe have introduced from a reconstructive point of view. Inparticular, the construct of "communicative power" must appeartendentious in light of empiricist folklore. Political sociology usuallyeither takes an action-theoretic approach, conceiving "power"as the capacity of actors to have their way against the opposing willof others, or it follows systems theory and splits power up into thepower code of a specific, namely political, system on the one handand, on the other, a general organizational power or, more accurately,the autopoietic capacity of systems to organize and reproducethemselves. I would like to show that the normative defeatismto which both lines of political sociology lead is not simply a resultof sobering evidence but of misguided conceptual strategies aswell. These strategies lose sight of what political power owesspecifically to its formal constitution in legal terms.After a global overview of theoretical developments, I first pursueJon Elster's revisions of the economic theory of democracy. Thesespeak for the empirical relevance of the procedural concept of. deliberative politics (sec. 8.1). I then discuss Helmut Willke'sconcept of supervision, which is meant to explain how a decenteredsociety that has allegedly disintegrated into autopoietic functionalsystems can cope with challenges to society as a whole. From thecriticism of this proposal, and stimulated once again by the work ofBernard Peters, I develop a sociological model that focuses on theempirical weight of the constitutionally prescribed, hence official,circulation of power (sec. 8.2). This weight depends primarily onwhether civil society, through resonant and autonomous publicspheres, develops impulses with enough vitality to bring conflictsfrom the periphe1yr into the center of the political system (sec. 8.3).8.1 Sociological Theories of Democracy8.1.1The early theory of pluralism already relied on an empiricist conceptof power. Pluralist theory employs an instrumentalist understand-