New book: Critical Encounters with Habermas’s Political and Legal Theory

Critical Encounters with Habermas’s Political and Legal Theory

ed. by John Abromeit, Matthew Dimick & Paul Linden-Retek

(Leiden: Brill, 2025)

Description

With over a dozen contributions from scholars across a range of disciplines, this book revisits Jürgen Habermas’s de­fining text on legal and political theory, Between Facts and Norms (1992). The contributors interrogate the prospects for Habermas’s optimistic defense of liberal democracy in our current age of straining global capitalism and menacing authoritarian populisms. The authors arrive at different conclusions, with some contributors engaging directly with his theory while others assessing it through the prisms of political economy, the media, policing, employment discrimination law, international relations theory, social movements, democratic institutions and the historical context of Between Facts and Norms.

The book is based on papers presented at the conference "Critical Encounters with Habermas' Legal Theory" in May 2023 (Presentation abstracts are available).

Contents [pre-view]

1. John Abromeit, Matthew Dimick & Paul Linden-Retek – Introduction: the Pasts and Futures of Between Facts and Norms – a Critical Exchange

Part 1: BFN and the Challenge of Neoliberalism and Political Economy

2. John Abromeit - Historicizing Habermas’s Between Facts and Norms: a Critique from the Perspective of Early Frankfurt School Critical Theory

3. Brian Caterino & Phillip Hansen - Between Facts and Norms at 30. Habermas, Neoliberalism and Radical Democracy

4. William E. Scheuerman - What’s Left? Democratic Theory in Between Facts and Norms after Three Decades [Abstract]

5. Matthew Dimick - How the Legal Form Distorts Public and Private Autonomy

6. Michael J. Thompson - Why Proceduralism Is Not Enough: Reading Habermas in an Age of Democratic Decline

Part 2: BFN and Political (and Legal) Theory

7. Isabelle Aubert - Between Facts and Norms Facing Pseudo-Democracy

8. Rúrion Melo - In Search of Counter-Tendencies: on the Heuristic Potential of the Public Sphere in Habermas’s Between Facts and Norms

9. David Ingram - Democratic Theory’s Existential Crisis: Between Discourse and Partisan Empowerment

10. Cristina Lafont - Is Democratic Legitimacy Purely Procedural? An Institutional Account of the Legitimacy of Democratic Decision-Making

11. Erin R. Pineda - Policing the Public Sphere

12. Matthew Specter - A Great Misrecognition: How Between Facts and Norms Was Conflated with (but Resists) the Cosmopolitan Moment in 1990s International Relations Theory

13. Seyla Benhabib - Afterword: The Specter of Popular Sovereignty in Habermas’s Between Facts and Norms