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

39Law as Social Mediation between Facts and Normsalliance that the facticity of law forms with the claim to legitimacy.This connection reflects an interpenetration of fact-groundingacceptance with the claimed acceptability of validity claims-aninterpenetration that, as a tension between facticity and validity,had already entered into communicative action and into the moreor less naturally emergent social orders. This ideal tension reappearsin the law. Specifically, it appears in the relation between thecoercive force of law, which secures average rule acceptance, andthe idea of self-legislation (or the supposition of the politicalautonomy of the united citizens), which first vindicates the legitimacyclaim of the rules themselves, that is, makes this claimrationally acceptable.This tension within the validity dimension of law also makes itnecessary to organize political power, which is called on to enforce(and authoritatively apply) the law, into forms of legitimate law.This desideratum of transforming the power presupposed by lawitself is met by the idea of the rule of law (or constitutional state,Rechtsstaat). Within the framework of the constitutional state, thecivic practice of self-legislation assumes an institutionally differentiatedform. The idea of the rule of law sets in motion a spiralingself-application of law, which is supposed to bring the internallyunavoidable supposition of political autonomy to bear against thefacticity of legally uncontrolled social power that penetrates lawfrom the outside. The development of the constitutional state can beunderstood as an open sequence of experience-guided precautionarymeasures against the overpowering of the legal system byillegitimate power relations that contradict its normative selfunderstanding.From inside the legal system, this appears as anexternal relation between facti city and validity, the familiar tensionbetween norm and reality that again and again provokes a normativeresponse.Modern societies are integrated not only socially through values,norms, and mutual understanding, but also systemically throughmarkets and the administrative use of power. Money and administrativepower are systemic mechanisms of societal integration thatdo not necessarily coordinate actions via the intentions of participants,but objectively, "behind the backs" of participants. SinceAdam Smith, the classic example for this type of regulation is the