Paper's abstract

Ottfried Höffe, About Habermas Theory of Law and State. Does Faktizität und Geltung by Habermas represent a watershed of the Critical Theory?
The 'Critical Theory' of Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse has a serious philosophical lack: it does not accept any political claim to power, not even that of democracy. In his second 'opus magnum', Faktizität und Geltung (1992), Jürgen Habermas tries to rectify this lack by accepting the importance of political power. Without it laws cannot be in force. Habermas's central concepts "integration", "overtaxing" (Überforderung), and "differentiation" (Ausdifferenzierung), however, do not achieve their purpose: they characterize the function of law in modern societies in an insufficient way. Other deficiencies of the book are its theoretical abandonment of human rights, its confusion of obligatory and supererogative parts of ethics, and its misrepresentation of modern theories in natural law.

Key Words : Germany, Habermas, state
t. 39, 1994 : p. 319-333