Anchored to Human Rights: On the Normative Foundation of Habermas’s Public Sphere
Anchored to Human Rights: On the Normative Foundation of Habermas’s Public Sphere

Summary/Abstract: This paper explores a normative layer of Habermas’s public sphere in its relation to human rights. His public sphere came into being as a result of a spontaneous nonconformity manifested by the early bourgeoisie’s reaction to an absolutist regimen making inroads in the realm of basic human liberties; it managed to survive the changeable conditions of society and state thanks to its participants’ capability of cultivating collective self-determination, fed from the outset by the intellectual claims of modernity. Thereafter, the link between Habermas’s public sphere and human rights bifurcates, leading concurrently to liberal individual rights (Menschenrechte) and to the republican freedom of popular sovereignty (Volkssouveränität). Further revisions and corrections transpose that simple dualism from the clear-cut bourgeois world of universal morality into the realm of legalism and the protocols de rigueur in the world of systems. Habermas integrates individual human rights and popular sovereignty in the procedures of a democratic state, overcoming this ostensibly irreconcilable duality in his genuine claim about the co-originality of civil autonomy. This thesis institutionally unifies universal pre-constitutional morality, with legalism regulating the democratic world of legal subjects (citizens) and their constitutionally guaranteed entitlement.

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