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

483- ------------Popular Sovereignty as Proceduremeans a passive medium without properties of its own, as it were.To an increasing degree, the interventionist state has contractedinto a subsystem steered by power and centered in itself; to anincreasing degree, it has displaced legitimation processes into itsenvironment. In fact, this process has progressed to the pointwhere we would do well to consider modifications in the normativeidea of a self-organizing society. I thus propose that we make adistinction in the concept of the political itself, consonant with theduality of normative and instrumental perspectives.23We can distinguish between communicatively generated power andadministratively employed power. In the political public sphere, then,two contrary processes encounter and cut across each other: thecommunicative generation of legitimate power, for which Arendtsketched a normative model, and the political-systemic acquisitionof legitimacy, a process by which administrative power becomesreflexive. How these two processes-the spontaneous forming ofopinion in autonomous public spheres and the organized extractionof mass loyalty-interpenetrate, and which overpowers which,are empirical questions. What primarily interests me is this: insofaras this distinction comes to have any empirical relevance, thenormative understanding of a democratic self-organization of thelegal community must also change.44.1The first question concerns the mode of action-upon-self. Becausethe administrative system must translate all normative inputs intoits own language, one must explain how this system can be programmedat all through the policies and laws emerging fromprocesses of public opinion- and will-formation. The administrationobeys its own rationality criteria as it operates according to law;from the perspective of employing administrative power, whatcounts is not the practical reason involved in applying norms butthe effectiveness of implementing a given program. Thus theadministrative system primarily deals with the law instrumentally.Normative reasons, which justify adopted policies and enacted