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

40Chapter 1market's "invisible hand." Both media of systemic integration,money and power, are anchored via legal institutionalization inorders of the lifeworld, which is in turn socially integrated throughcommunicative action. In this way, modern law is linked with allthree resources of integration. Through a practice ofselfdeterminationthat requires citizens to make public use of their communicativefreedoms, the law draws its socially integrating force from thesources of social solidarity. On the other hand, institutions ofprivate and public law make possible the establishment of marketsand governmental bodies, because the economic and the administrativesystem, which have separated from the lifeworld, operateinside the forms of law.Because law is just as intermeshed with money and administrativepower as it is with solidarity, its own integrating achievementsassimilate imperatives of diverse origin. This does not mean thatlegal norms come with labels telling us how these imperatives are tobe balanced. In the different subject areas of law, we can certainlysee that the needs for regulation, to which politics and lawmakingrespond, have different sources. But in the functional imperativesof the state apparatus, the economic system, and other socialsubsystems, normatively unfiltered interest positions often carrythe day only because they are stronger and use the legitimatingforce of legal forms to cloak their merely factual strength. Therefore,as a means for organizing state activities related to thefunctional imperatives of a differentiated economic society, modernlaw remains a profoundly ambiguous medium of societalintegration. Often enough, law provides illegitimate power withthe mere semblance of legitimacy. At first glance, one cannot tellwhether legal regulations deserve the assent of associated citizensor whether they result from administrative self-programming andstructural social power in such a way that they independentlygenerate the necessary mass loyalty.The less the legal system as a whole can rely on metasocialguarantees and immunize itself against criticism, the less scopethere is for this type of self-legitimation of law. Indeed, a lawresponsible for the brunt of social integration in modern societiescomes under the secular pressure of the functional imperatives ofsocial reproduction; however, it is simultaneously subject to what