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

547Notes to pages 275-280sharply on the country's most visible, formal legislative assemblies-Congress,state legislatures, the councils of major cities-as exclusive, or even primary,arenas ofjurisgenerative politics and political freedom. I do not mean that thosearenas are dispensable or unimportant. Rather I mean the obvious points thatmuch of the country's normatively consequential dialogue occurs outside themajor, formal channels of electoral and legislative politics, and that in modernsociety those formal channels cannot possibly provide for most citizens muchdirect experience of self-revisionary, dialogic engagement. Much, perhaps most,of that experience must occur in various arenas of what we know as public life inthe broad sense, some nominally political and some not: in the encounters andconflicts, interactions and debates that arise in and around town meetings andlocal government agencies; civic and voluntary associations; social and recreationalclubs; schools public and private; managements, directorates and leadershipgroups of organizations of all kinds; workplaces and shop floors; publicevents and street life; and so on . ... Understandings of the social world that arecontested and shaped in the daily encounters and transactions of civil society at .large are of course conveyed to our representative arenas . ... [They] are, then,to be counted among the sources and channels of republican self-governmentand jurisgenerative politics.66. Sunstein, After the Rights Revolution, p. 164.67. C. R. Sunstein, "Interest Groups in American Public Law," Stanford LawReview 38 (1985): 59.68. Sunstein, "Interest Groups," p. 58.69. B. Ackerman, "The Storrs Lectures: Discovering the Constitution," Yale Lawjoumal 93 (1984) : 1013-72. See also his We the People, vo!. 1 (Cambridge, Mass.,1991).70. Michelman, "Supreme Court 1985 Term," p. 65 (Michelman's emphasisremoved).71. Michelman, "Law's Republic," p. 1532.72. B. Manin, "On Legitimacy and Political Deliberation," Political Theory 15(1987): 347; cf. my critique of Rousseau in]. Habermas, The Structural Transformationof thePublic Sphere (1962), trans. T. Burger (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), sec.12; see also J. Habermas, "Further Reflections on the Public Sphere," in Habermasand the Public Sphere, ed. C. Calhoun (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), pp. 421-61.73. See appendix II in this volume.74. Michelman, "Law's Republic," p. 1513.75. In the Federal Republic, the legal thought of the communitarians finds acertain parallel in P. Haberle's interpretation of constitutional law; see hisVerfassungals offentlicher Prozejl (Frankfurt am Main, 1978); cf. also A. Blankenagel,Tradition und Verfassung (Baden-Baden, 1987).76. The communitarians also consider this relation to a community necessary forexplaining the meaning of political duties. Because the observance of an