In this chapter, I describe pluralism as an approach to securing legitimacy for laws that govern democracies. While I assume that no other approach is acceptable, and that pluralism is a prerequisite for democracy, I argue first that pluralism has a problem. I also argue that the most promising attempt to resolve this problem – Habermas’s theory of discourse – fails to do so. To conclude, I suggest that another Habermasian term – truthfulness – might be developed in a way that addresses the problem of pluralism.
For the purposes of this chapter, I will define legitimacy as a quality conferred on some authority by citizens recognizing the right to govern. I take the view that legitimacy is simultaneously factual and normative. If citizens recognize an authority’s right to govern, that authority has legitimacy as a matter of fact. At the same time, they recognize that authority’s right to govern because they believe it is legitimate, and this belief is based on norms.1
A good general definition of legitimate is “that which conforms to the law.”2 More distinctive definitions arise when the source of the law is identified. If the law’s source is an extra-legal authority – a king with divine right, for example3 – legitimacy is relatively straightforward. When the source of authority is the law, as in a constitutional democracy, legitimacy is more complex. This is because in constitutional democracies the source of the law is the people, who are simultaneously under its authority.
Conflicts between interpretations of this arrangement can challenge the legitimacy of democratic laws. The prevailing view is that the dual author/subject relation of the people to the law requires a distinction between legislative procedure and the content of legislation, and that this distinction secures legitimacy. I will call this the proceduralist view of legitimacy. Non-proceduralist interpretations may blur the distinction and tie legitimacy more closely to the law’s content. For some who hold such a dissenting view, a law cannot be called legitimate simply because it is constitutional or otherwise procedurally sound. Rather, its legitimacy is finally determined by the values that it instantiates.
The proceduralist view of legitimation arises from what I will call the pluralist impulse. Conflicts between adherents of competing values have a long history. Consider Europe’s wars of religion, in which all sides tied the legitimacy of a governing authority to the religious values that authority enforced. For many observers, the violence and injustice this produced showed that in some equal way, all sides lacked the legitimacy they claimed. These observers suggested that conflicting religious values need not cause social instability. This is an example of the pluralist impulse.4
Pluralists share a belief about legitimacy, which I will put as follows: disagreement need not threaten the legitimacy of our laws.5 That is, the persistence of disagreement about the values instantiated by laws does not necessarily mean those laws are illegitimate. To many modern ears this seems uncontroversial. But against the context of history – in which wars of religion were far more common than the political coexistence of deeply conflicting values – pluralism appears counter-intuitive.
It may also seem counter-intuitive when the pluralist belief about legitimacy is probed a bit further. Non-pluralist beliefs about legitimacy share the assumption that the legitimacy of a governing authority requires an agreement about the values that authority enforces. Totalitarian regimes, for example, often require the ideological allegiance of their citizens, and may punish dissent precisely to maintain (what the regime believes is) legitimacy.6 By contrast, the pluralist impulse to permit or even embrace disagreement grows out of a conviction that eliminating dissent for the sake of legitimacy is wrong.
Yet in another sense, pluralism also demands an agreement of its own. In effect, the pluralist advocates for an agreement about a disagreement. This is not necessarily a self-contradiction; the saying “let’s agree to disagree” does not strike anyone as senseless. But it does raise the possibility that pluralism has a problem. After all, the pluralist impulse to permit disagreement is based not only on the conviction that disagreement need not threaten the law’s legitimacy, but also on the conviction that suppressing disagreement necessarily does threaten the law’s legitimacy. Here then there is the potential for self-contradiction: if a pluralist wants an agreement about a disagreement, and believes legitimacy in some way depends on this agreement, she must be careful what she does when people will not “agree to disagree.”
In its proceduralist version, pluralism encounters this problem quite directly. Proceduralism is an approach to making pluralism work – to permitting disagreement while sustaining the legitimacy of authority. It does so by legalizing disagreement in the double sense that the law allows disagreement, and disagreement informs the law (through procedures like elections and deliberation between representatives). Proceduralism insists on the pluralist agreement about disagreement. For proceduralists, the legitimacy of the law’s authority depends on the recognition by the law’s subjects that the law – which is to say, the procedure by which disagreements are decided, not resolved – has the right to govern. Those who disagree – those who do not believe the procedure secures legitimacy – may be considered a threat to legitimacy.
For example, Randall Terry is the founder of the radical US prolife/anti-abortion group Operation Rescue. He is not beyond endorsing theocracy. Regarding pluralism, he says: “Let a wave of intolerance wash over you. I want you to let a wave of hatred wash over you . . . Our goal is a Christian nation . . . we have a biblical duty, we are called by God to conquer this country. We don’t want equal time. We don’t want pluralism.”7 To be sure, Terry’s views do not represent those of everyone who opposes abortion. Nor does he speak for everyone with misgivings about pluralism.8 However, his phrasing here poses the problem I am trying to address. What follows then is not an argument about Terry, but about a position sharply expressed by the words “we don’t want pluralism.” What exactly is it that he does not want?
There is an ambiguity between two senses of the word pluralism. In its weaker sense, pluralism mostly denotes the recognition of some sort of diversity, be it cultural or religious or ideological. In its stronger sense, pluralism describes a perspective on that diversity. The weaker sense is merely pragmatic; to recognize diversity is to grant that politics must start with the fact of diversity, and cannot hope to overcome it. The stronger sense is normative; a pluralist perspective on diversity insists that politics should not try to overcome it.9
One may recognize diversity while also bemoaning it. This is one way to read Terry’s words: as a wish that there were no disagreement about abortion, and that everyone shared his view. In this sense, “we don’t want pluralism” registers as a complaint about a social fact, or more seriously as a call to shun political pragmatism. In pluralism’s stronger sense (which seems justified by the remark about equal time), however, Terry’s words clearly express opposition to a belief about that fact.
This distinction between the facts of pluralism and a perspective on those facts is helpful, because it serves to clarify pluralism’s problem. The potential for self-contradiction pluralism’s “agreement about disagreement” raises is tested by people, like Randall Terry, who will not agree to disagree. The problem this raises is that the distinction between fact and belief about fact cannot be maintained. If it is possible to disagree with the agreement – the belief – about disagreement, then it seems the belief in pluralism can fall back into the fact of pluralism. The perspective – the “commanding height” – on which the pluralist foundation of legitimacy rests seems unsustainable.
For it would seem that to secure legitimacy, pluralism requires that everyone be a pluralist and agree that disagreement need not threaten the legitimacy of our laws. But then legitimation becomes the elimination of disagreement (or at least the exclusion of the disagreeable), which for the pluralist is an alarmingly good definition of illegitimacy. One might say that the problem of pluralism is that pluralism is a problem for pluralism.
Again, then, the problem is not that people disagree about abortion, but that they disagree about their disagreements about abortion. The pluralist thinks those disagreements should be allowed to influence the law. Randall Terry does not. The pluralist is obliged to think Terry should not be allowed to influence the law, which is a very unpluralist thing to think. It seems the pluralist is as much of a problem for pluralism as Terry is.
Any proceduralist view of legitimacy must address this “problem of pluralism.” It must show that proceduralism works to secure legitimacy even when some of the citizens under the procedure’s jurisdiction do not believe that it does. I read Jürgen Habermas’s theory of discourse and discursive democracy as an attempt to meet this challenge.
Since the problem of pluralism begins with the persistence of disagreement, its solution must too. A good way to explain the discourse approach to pluralism’s problem is that it tries to distinguish rational from irrational disagreement. If Habermas can be found to make this distinction, he may be able to show that disagreeing about abortion is meaningfully different from disagreeing about our disagreements about abortion. That is, he may be able to show that a disagreement with pluralism is distinct from the disagreements embraced by pluralism. He might keep the belief from falling back into the facts. To do this, he needs a theory of rationality.10
Rationality for Habermas is about criticizability. He explains rationality in terms of the structure of communication (communicative action, to be precise; his is a pragmatic rather than semantic theory of communication). When we use speech acts, we implicitly raise validity claims. These are claims about the objective world of facts, the intersubjective world of norms, and the subjective world of experience. Each world corresponds to a dimension of validity: truth, right, and truthfulness, respectively.
To raise a validity claim (which is unavoidable) is to be accountable for it. Others can criticize my claim and ask that I support it with reasons. Crucially, our ability to communicate – to come to a mutual understanding with one another about the world, our relationships, or our selves – structurally depends on this implicit criticizability. When we want to redeem a speaker’s implicit promise that she has good reasons for what she says (or does), we can turn implicit criticizability into explicit criticism. We ask her to provide those promised reasons. We can challenge her if we are not satisfied, and she can challenge us. This critical exchange of reasons is called argumentation.
Discourse is a certain type of argumentation. In discourse, we criticize validity claims to truth and right. Claims to truthfulness are not handled by discursive criticism. The reason is that claims to truthfulness are different from the other two kinds of validity claim. Claims to truth and right refer to mutually accessible worlds, and so they are made with “universal intent.”11 We claim that some fact is universally true, or that some norm is universally right. Claims to truthfulness, however, refer to a private world and have no universal intent. We cannot criticize them in the same way. Discourse does not test truthfulness; it tests claims about facts and norms. Or, more precisely: claims about facts and norms are only rational (which is not to say that they are true or right) to the extent that they are discursively criticizable.
I have suggested that the discourse approach to the problem of pluralism is to distinguish between rational and irrational disagreements. Disagreements, of course, raise validity claims. Specifically, the disagreements with which I am concerned are disagreements about facts and norms. I have said that validity claims are rational if they are criticizable, and that claims about facts and norms are rational if they are discursively criticizable. It follows that such disagreements (as instances of validity claims) must be discursively criticizable if they are to be rational. This category cannot include disagreements for which I myself can see no “good reason,” because the person who disagrees may offer what he sees as several very good reasons. Such claims can be wrong (on my view) without being irrational. To be precise: rationality does not exactly test whether a claim is correct or not. Rather, the way a claim is tested for correctness can be rational or not. Important to emphasize is that this is a procedural rationality.12
In this way, the discourse version of proceduralism develops the pluralist belief about legitimation. As I have described it, pluralism holds that disagreement need not threaten the legitimacy of laws. Proceduralism tries to make good on this belief by identifying legitimacy with the way a law is passed, not with whether the law is “correct.”
The question discourse theory poses is whether it is possible to disagree with this pluralist belief rationally. In other words, does Randall Terry’s disagreement with pluralism test the claim of pluralism in a rational way? There may be an answer to this question, but first I need to explain another component of Habermas’s theory of rationality. This is the idea of learning from mistakes.
Learning depends on the willingness to recognize the force of reasons both for and against our own position. Quoting Toulmin, Habermas explains that rationality is demonstrated by “the manner in which [the participant in an argument] handles and responds to the offering of reasons for or against claims.” To argue rationally is to “acknowledge the force of those reasons or seek to reply to them,” while to argue irrationally is to “ignore contrary reasons or reply to them with dogmatic assertions.”13 This is why Habermas describes rationality in terms of learning from mistakes. To acknowledge the force of reasons against our own position is to acknowledge that we are mistaken. Thus to recognize a mistake may require us to exchange an existing view for another. To recognize our own mistake means to recognize that someone else (or some other part of ourselves) is more correct. To learn, we must be prepared to accept the intrusion of other views, and to give those views the purchase of potential. The idea of learning from mistakes helps to flesh out the idea of accountability that is at the heart of discourse theory. It deepens the definition of rationality as criticizability by stipulating that it is not enough simply to give reasons for a position. If we can give reasons for our views in the course of an argument, but we cannot learn from that argument, then we are only rational in an “accidental” way.14
If the aim is to distinguish between rational and irrational disagreement with pluralism, this is crucial. If rationality were defined simply by justifying claims, then there would be no way to show that opposition to pluralism is irrational. No doubt Terry could offer plenty of “reasons” for his anti-pluralism. Instead, defining rationality in terms of learning may provide a way forward.
The concept of learning applies not only at the level of communicative action itself, but also at the level of legislative procedure. At this level, the question of legitimation appears directly. For Habermas, legitimate law is a matter of institutionalized discourse.15 If discourse is not only about giving reasons for positions but also about learning from mistakes, law must also be about learning. A law’s legitimacy will not only be secured by the reasons for the (normative) claim that it legislates; it will also be open to revision. A legitimate law will be informed by – and accountable to – the disagreement that it creates.16
It is potentially in this sense that disagreement with pluralism might be classed as irrational. Pluralism is the claim that disagreement need not threaten the legitimacy of laws. As Habermas formulates it in his theory of discursive democracy, pluralism establishes a discursive procedure through which that disagreement informs what the law becomes. To disagree with pluralism (at least in Terry’s pointblank manner) is to believe that disagreement does threaten the legitimacy of law. More specifically, it is to believe that disagreements must not inform the law’s content, or else the law’s legitimacy is in question. For Terry, no law is legitimate that permits abortion. On Terry’s view, how then could the law be revised if disagreement were prohibited, even if that prohibition were defended with good reasons?
Despite its summary nature, the preceding has explained what it means to be rational according to Habermas. My question is this: does it really matter? I personally believe it does. That is, I believe it matters that we are rational, and I find Habermas’s definition of rationality compelling. I believe it is crucial that we participate in discourse and that we permit disagreement to inform legislation. I will go even further and say that I think everyone should be a pluralist (so far as I have defined it).
The question is, what do you think? Suppose you simply do not care about being rational. Suppose you disagree with pluralism, and are quite content to do so irrationally. More to the point, suppose you are a citizen who lives under the same laws that my pluralist friends and I do. After all the admirable work done by the theory of communicative rationality, and by discourse theory in particular, my concern is with a question that remains unanswered. Habermas has compellingly explained what rationality is – but can he also explain why we should be rational?17
To quickly revisit discourse, recall that it criticizes validity claims about fact and norms, which are claims to truth and normativity. These are separated from claims to truthfulness by their universal intent. Yet as a mode of communicative action, the structure of discourse is itself universal.18 When Habermas defines rationality, he makes a claim about the world of fact that has universal intent. He does not think the structure of communicative rationality differs between persons or cultures. He thinks the structure of rationality is an objective, invariable fact about the way human beings communicate. He also makes a normative claim, which also has universal intent. The structure of rationality has a “built-in structure of accountability”; you must be prepared to defend your claims with reasons and learn from your mistakes.19
According to Habermas, if in order to answer the “why” question I were to test these claims, then I would ask him to provide reasons for them and challenge him with some counter-reasons of my own, and otherwise engage in what the claims themselves describe as discourse. Here then is the problem: an explication of the “structure of rationality” (a fact) urges us to “be rational” (a norm). Yet the why question cannot be answered with claims about facts and norms, because the significance of claims about facts and norms is being called into question. If we entered into discourse in order to determine whether we should engage in discourse, then the why question no longer matters. “Why” only matters before we enter discourse, because it cannot be answered discursively.20
More technically, the objection has to do with Habermas’s contention that speech acts implicitly raise validity claims. He says that there is an “internal relation” between the two.21 This is crucial, because it is in validity claims – specifically in their validity aspect, and its separability from their claim aspect – that Habermas finds rationality. The internal relation between speech acts and validity claims is central to the theory of communicative rationality and to discourse. The problem is that in order to demonstrate this relation, Habermas must “already presuppose [the] possible reference to argumentation.”22 In other words, the internal relation between speech acts and validity claims cannot be demonstrated by the theory; it is assumed by the theory.
The why question, as I call it, appears throughout Habermas’s discursive solution to the problem of pluralism.23 The problem of pluralism is such that it is easy to address with discourse theory after that theory has been accepted. There is no problem of pluralism for people who accept that rationality is about criticizability, and that one should be rational and disagree discursively (instead of, say, violently). The problem is only difficult to solve because other people are not already committed to discourse.
Of course, the fact that some people are not committed to discourse is precisely the problem of pluralism, at least so far as pluralism is formulated as proceduralism. It seems then that this problem has not been solved by defining rationality and distinguishing rational from irrational disagreement. Yet I believe that this is the most compelling theoretical solution yet proposed. I suspect therefore that legitimacy will have to be secured not by solving the problem, but in spite of it.
The problem of pluralism remains not so much because this theory of rationality that tries to address it fails, but because the problem cannot be addressed by a theory at all. The problem persists because two things remain: the pluralist conviction that we have to agree that disagreement need not threaten our laws, and the fact that people like Terry simply do not agree. What remains, in other words, is the fact of pluralism.
In the face of this impasse, I would like to suggest that if we cannot answer the why question with claims about facts and norms, we may be able to address it with claims about subjective experience – with claims to truthfulness. My argument so far has been that the problem of pluralism is a problem for the possibility of legitimate law, that discourse theory is an attempt to resolve that problem, and that the why question keeps discourse theory from succeeding. Addressing this question is therefore squarely aimed at understanding what secures legitimacy.
One objection to this strategy is that using what Habermas calls “truthfulness” to secure legitimacy still ties legitimation to the model of rationality as criticizability. Discourse per se may be unsuited to securing legitimacy, but claims to truthfulness are still validity claims and can be criticized. How will this be any less of a problematic approach? My answer is that claims to truthfulness are more distinct from claims to truth and right than Habermas seems to allow.24 All three kinds of claim are made in relation to a world (objective, inter-subjective, or subjective). Regardless of type, the validity claim is “equivalent to the assertion that the conditions for the validity of an utterance are fulfilled.”25 These conditions are established by the world to which an utterance reflectively refers.26 Claims are criticized based on how they “fit” with their respective world.27
The difference between truth/right claims and truthfulness claims, according to Habermas, is the difference between the objective/intersubjective worlds and the subjective world. The first two worlds are accessible to all and allow for claims with universal intent (the stuff of discourse), while the third world is accessible only to the speaker.28 Claims about the subjective world must therefore involve trust in a way that claims about other worlds do not.
Habermas allows that truthfulness involves trust,29 but he also contends that the ability to be criticized defines all three kinds of claim to the same degree: “The possibility of intersubjective recognition of criticizable validity claims is constitutive for their rationality too.”30 Claims to truthfulness can be criticized by comparing expressions against actions and checking for consistency.31 By contrast, I think that claims to truthfulness involve a moment in which it is impossible to criticize them. It seems to me that it is only possible to accurately assess truthfulness not by comparing actions to expressions, but by comparing actions and expressions to experiences. We can compare actions with expressions but our ability to gauge consistency has a final limit because we do not have access to those experiences. Beyond this limit trust becomes definitive and claims to truthfulness become crucially distinct from claims to truth and right.
If I am right about this (and the argument would of course need further development, in close conversation with Habermas’s text), then in my view it becomes possible to address the problem of pluralism with an expanded conception of truthfulness without falling prey to the same difficulty that prevented discourse from solving that problem. That difficulty arose from the so-called motivational deficit: discourse theory cannot explain why we should prefer discourse – why we should disagree rationally instead of irrationally – except by referring to discourse as a presupposition. My version of truthfulness would not suffer this weakness because, by definition, claims to truthfulness refer finally to themselves. We do not have to ask why we should presuppose that someone is being truthful, because that is what we must do by default when confronted with a claim to truthfulness.32
An adequately developed conception of truthfulness would successfully address the problem of pluralism where discourse failed to solve it by describing what really does motivate people to disagree rationally, given that facts and norms cannot. In an exchange of reasons for and against the pluralist belief, what finally motivates the exchange’s participants to disagree rationally can only be the trust they have in the truthfulness of their interlocutor’s expressions about their subjective experience – in this case, their experience of the idea of pluralism, which is an idea about rational disagreement. In Habermas’s words: “This concept of communicative rationality carries with it connotations based ultimately on the central experience of the unconstrained, unifying, consensus-bringing force of argumentative speech.”33
My argument is that it matters for legitimacy that the pluralist belief is correct (something to be established by discourse), but it matters more fundamentally that the belief as expressed is sincere. The problem of pluralism can only be addressed if discourse depends on truthfulness and its final inaccessibility to criticism, its final appeal to trust. Trust is pre-rational, in the sense that what is being trusted is that a speaker is being rational by expressing something that really does fit her subjective experience. I as a pluralist can claim to experience the idea of discourse as convincingly “true” and “right,” and Terry can either trust me or not. Convincing Terry that he should become a pluralist cannot, finally, be a matter of discourse, but of trust.
As a concluding thought, I will draw a tentative analogy between the pluralist experience of society and the truthful person’s experience of an idea. A pluralist is defined by her acceptance of disagreement within society. She thinks society can still be society, legitimately, even if the popular will is divided by disagreement. Perhaps a truthful person, truthful with himself and others about how an idea strikes him, is similarly accepting of disagreement within himself. He is comfortable with considering himself as an integrated person, free of hypocrisy, even if his own will is divided by disagreement.
To be sure, it is entirely possible for a truthful person to find no internal disagreement. Part of my point is that it is as possible to be a truthful pluralist as it is to be a truthful anti-pluralist (and vice versa). There is more work to be done on this subject. But I am intrigued by the possibility that being truthful with oneself inclines one to be a pluralist when it comes to thinking about public disagreements about abortion, gay marriage, and the like (which is not to say that it inclines you toward one view of the matter or another). Truthfully recognizing multiple points of view within one’s heart and mind makes it easier to recognize multiple points of view within society.
Therefore, the viability of pluralism depends on truthfulness rather than on the discursive procedures that, from its point of view, secures legitimacy. But truthfulness might also lead one to become a pluralist. These are not the same thing. When I say that pluralism depends on truthfulness, I mean that we cannot address the problem of pluralism by appealing to pluralism, even the compelling discourse expression of it. Pluralists must be prepared to trust that opponents of pluralism are being perfectly truthful. But when I say that truthfulness might lead to pluralism, I mean that in conversation with people who do not believe in discourse, the only thing to which we can appeal is our own experience of discourse. The hope is that our opponents trust that we speak the truth about that experience.
I realize that my argument leaves democracy on a less secure footing than if it could be tied to discourse as a foundation. By going a level below discourse, where claims to truthfulness work pre-rationally, I elevate social trust and individual character to priority over procedure. I think this is the only way to talk about legitimation in light of citizens who do not believe in pluralism. But I also recognize that while I avoid certain errors, I leave democracy in a more precarious position – yet one I prefer. Over time, democracies are inclined to rely more and more on the apparatus of the procedure because of their precarious dependence on individual character and social trust. They try to mitigate the instability on which they depend. This can pose a danger to their democratic character. By re-emphasizing their fundamental dependence on trust and truthfulness, and showing that the procedure cannot do the whole job of legitimation, I have highlighted the fundamentally pluralist, but not fundamentally proceduralist, character of democratic society.
1 For arguments in support of conceiving legitimacy both descriptively and normatively, see David Beetham, The Legitimation of Power (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991), and Jürgen Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979).
2 See Jean-Marc Coicaud and David Ames Curtis, Legitimacy and Politics: A Contribution to the Study of Political Right and Political Responsibility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 13. Put another way, “that which is lawful is also legitimate.” See Richard H. Fallon, “Legitimacy and the Constitution,” Harvard Law Review 118 (April 2005): 1,794.
3 While the sanction of divine right was normally explained in terms of “natural law,” this was different from the laws made by the king for his subjects. For an absolute monarch, natural law may be the source of royal authority, but royal authority is the source of the law of the land.
4 One famous observer was of course Montaigne. For a study of the pluralism he developed in response to the wars of religion, see Malcolm Smith, Montaigne and Religious Freedom: The Dawn of Pluralism (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1991).
5 Rawls, then, is what I call a pluralist. See Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 54. Larmore expresses the “pluralist impulse” when he describes “the crucial element of modern experience [as] the realization that on the meaning of life reasonable people tend naturally to disagree with one another.” See Charles Larmore, The Morals of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 12, quoted in Eric MacGilvray, Reconstructing Public Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 209.
6 For a study see Juan J. Linz, Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes (Boulder, co: Lynne Rienner, 2000).
7 Quoted in Bob Caylor, “Terry Preaches Theocratic Rule: ‘No More Mr Nice Christian’ is the Pro-life Activist’s Theme for the ’90s,” Fort Wayne News Sentinel, 16 August 1993.
8 Nor are conservative activists the only people who “don’t want pluralism.” I do not mean to suggest by my choice of examples that there are no leftwing anti-pluralists. For example, in a 21 October 2010 article in Slate, David Weigel reported on a conference in Berkeley where academics had gathered to analyze the US Tea Party movement: “ ‘I wonder if we’re likely to see a Timothy McVeigh situation,’ says Nicholas Robert, an attendee originally from Australia, who basically wonders if any Tea Partiers can be arrested. ‘It seems to me that we’re being very polite. I wonder if there are any legal mechanisms – one that comes to mind are the provisions used to crush the Wobblies.”
9 For example, the weaker sense could describe imperial policies of accommodation (such as those often favoured by the British Empire) in contrast to policies of assimilation (such as those used by Japan in its rule of Korea). The stronger sense often appears in defences of multiculturalism. Bhikhu Parekh argues, “since each [different culture] realizes a limited range of human capacities and emotions and grasps only a part of the totality of human existence, it needs others to understand itself better.” Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 336.
10 I am summarizing from the account of communicative reason Habermas developed in The Theory of Communicative Action, especially volume 1 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984).
11 The Theory of Communicative Action 1, 42.
12 Habermas develops his theory of communicative action in order to show “what we mean by procedural rationality after all substantial concepts of reason have been critically dissolved.” Ibid., 448.
13 Ibid., 18, quoting Stephen Toulmin et al., An Introduction to Reasoning (New York: Macmillan, 1979), 13.
14 See ibid., 18.
15 See Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 431. “The discourse theory of law conceives constitutional democracy by institutionalizing – by way of legitimate law (and hence also guaranteeing private autonomy) – the procedures and communicative presuppositions for a discursive opinion- and will-formation that in turn makes possible (the exercise of political autonomy and) legitimate lawmaking.”
16 See Between Facts and Norms, in particular pages 104–18. See also Habermas’s “A Genealogical Analysis of the Cognitive Content of Morality,” in The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory, ed. Ciaran Cronin and Pablo De Greiff (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 3–46.
17 See Charles Taylor, “Language and Society,” in Jürgen Habermas, vol. 4, ed. David M. Rasmussen and James Swindal (London: SAGE, 2002), 131.
18 Habermas’s approach seeks to identify “the presumably universal bases of rational experience and judgment, as well as of action and linguistic communication.” Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 16.
19 See Joseph Heath, “What is a Validity Claim?” in Jürgen Habermas, 85.
20 This is the so-called motivational deficit. See Habermas, “On the Cognitive Content of Morality,” in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, 96 (1996): 335–8. See also Sharon Krause, “Desiring Justice: Motivation and Justification in Rawls and Habermas,” in Contemporary Political Theory 4 (November 2005): 363–85; and Aresh Abizadeh, “On the Philosophy/Rhetoric Binaries: Or, Is Habermasian Discourse Motivationally Impotent?” in Philosophy and Social Criticism 33 (2007): 445–72.
21 Language has an “inherent relation to the validity of statements” such that “[we] understand a speech act when we know what makes it acceptable.” Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action 1, 276, 297.
22 Martin Seel, “The Two Meanings of Communicative Rationality,” in Jürgen Habermas, 112.
23 The problem squarely confronts the central claim of discourse theory “that the peculiar predilection for the communicative over the strategic is not grounded in a personal preference, in a belief that this is the way things ‘ought’ to be.” David Rasmussen, Reading Habermas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 37.
24 I am influenced on this point by Georgia Warnke’s criticism of Habermas’s distinction between normative and evaluative judgment. See Warnke, “Communicative Rationality and Cultural Values,” in The Cambridge Companion to Habermas, ed. Stephen K. White (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 120–42.
25 The Theory of Communicative Action 1, 38.
26 The reference of utterance to world is not direct, but “reflective,” such that “speakers . . . refer simultaneously to things in the objective, social, and subjective worlds in order to negotiate common definitions of the situation.” Ibid., 95, 98.
27 See ibid., 84–94, where Habermas presents communicative action as a synthesis of teleological, normative, and dramaturgical action theories.
28 Ibid., 100.
29 For example, see ibid., 91: “An actor has desires and feelings in the sense that he can at will express these experiences before a public, and indeed in such a way that this public, if it trusts the actor’s expressive utterances, attributes to him, as something subjective, the desires and feelings expressed.”
30 Ibid., 15–16. Here he is equating normative action and expressive presentation with assertions.
31 Ibid.
32 Of course there is a choice: instead of trust, we may choose distrust. At that juncture it is possible to ask “why” we should choose one or the other. My point, however, is that this is not a choice that can be made rationally so far as Habermas has defined rationality as criticizability.
33 The Theory of Communicative Action 1, 10.