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7 Ratio Juris 1 (1994)

handle is hein.journals/raju7 and id is 1 raw text is: Ratio Juris. Vol. 7 No. 1 March 1994 (1-13) Human Rights and Popular Sovereignty: The Liberal and Republican Versions* JURGEN HABERMAS Abstract. Popular sovereignty and human rights are the modern pillars of legal legitimacy and political power. Liberal and republican thought, however, tend to interpret the two notions from different perspectives: either as moral principles, emphasizing the self-legislation and autonomy of individuals, or as ethical values, stressing the self-realization of the political community. Adhering to his theory of communicative action, the author brings the two principles together in a non- competitive relation. Here the connection between popular sovereignty and human rights is given by the procedures of a discursive process of opinion- and will- formation. Theoretically, the institutionalization of this process through law leads to a normative model of contemporary democracy, which is based on the substance of human rights as a formal condition for deliberative politics.** The two ideas of popular sovereignty and human rights have shaped the normative self-understanding of constitutional states up to the present day. With the first idea we postulate that members of a democratic community are governed by themselves collectively; with the second, that they are governed by law and not by men. This is no less true for the United States than for any modern constitutional regime. Let me start with this quote from Frank Michelman: I take American constitutionalism -as manifest in academic constitutional theory, in the professional praxis of lawyers and judges, and in the ordinary political self- understanding of Americans at large-to rest on two premises regarding political freedom: first, that the American people are politically free insomuch as they are governed by themselves collectively, and, second, that the American people are politically free insomuch as they are governed by law and not by men. I take it that no * This is the text of a lecture given at the Philosophy Department of North-Western-University, Evanston held on September 23, 1992. ** Abstract by Francesco Belvisi. © Basil Blackwell Ltd. 1994, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 IJF, UK and 238 Main Street, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA.

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