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

341Civil Society and the Political Public Spheretion and decision making. These can be seen as arrangements thathave an effect on the preferences of participants; they screen thetopics and contributions, information and reasons in such a waythat, ideally, only the "valid" inputs pass through the filter of fairbargaining and rational discourses. With this, the perspective shiftsfrom rational-choice theory to discourse theory: "These institutions[i.e., of the United States Constitution] were designed to playthe role of'congealed' or 'sedimented' virtue, which thus made theactual practice of these virtues, such as truthfulness, wisdom, reason,justice and all kinds of exceptional moral qualities, to some extentdispensable-on the part of both the rulers and the ruled. "29 To thedegree that practical reason is implanted in the very forms ofcommunication and institutionalized procedures, it need not beembodied exclusively or even predominantly in the heads ofcollective or individual actors. Elster's investigation provides somesupport for the assumption that the discursive level of observablepolitical communication is a standard for the effectiveness of a"proceduralized reason" of this sort. The results of deliberativepolitics can be understood as communicatively generated powerthat competes, on the one hand, with the social power of actors withcredible threats and, on the other hand, with the administrativepower of officeholders.8.2 A Model of the Circulation of Political PowerSystems theory does not have to deny the phenomenon of acommunicative power generated within the parliamentary complex-northat of an influence acquired in the political publicsphere-but it describes the phenomena in a way that a fortioriexposes communicative power as impotent. From this viewpoint,once the law is fully positivized, the political system should be ableto forego independent sources of legitimate law. As with all functionalsystems, politics, too, has become an autonomous, recursivelyclosed circuit of communication furnished with its own code.In connection with the legal system responsible for securing legality,such a contingent, self-referential politics draws everything itneeds for legitimacy from itself. The need for legitimation can bemet paternalistically through lines of connection that, running