Reconstruct Legal Legitimacy Through Procedural Democracy

This dissertation mainly focuses on the discussion of the works Between Facts and Norms, which was written by the Western Marxist philosopher Jurgen Habermas, and reveals the inherent Idea of his political philosophy from the perspective of cultural politics. In Habermas's opinion, economic crisis still exists in advanced capitalism, but it is not the main crisis in society. The fact that more administrative means are used to control the private sector leads to the decolonization of the life world; and then causes the doubt of the legitimacy on the decision-making, which makes it difficult to maintain people's loyalty of the administrative system. Therefore, the crisis in advanced capitalism has shifted from the economic system to the political system, which was named the crisis of legitimacy instead of the economic crisis. However, Habermas doesn't want to solve the crisis of legitimacy through radical revolution, which was used to solve the economic crisis by Karl Marx. On the contrary, he regards the law as an important means of social integration, which can connect system with the life world to solve the crisis of legitimacy. However, the modern law can no longer be provided legitimacy by religion-metaphysics in the era of post-metaphysics. Habermas tries to reconstruct the self-understanding of the modern law through the discourse theory instead of the social contract theory .He begins with the discussion of the relationship between facts and norms, and then he points out that the legitimacy of law doesn't stem from legality but from the discourse process, in which people can freely and equally form the public opinion in civil society. More importantly, procedural democracy plays an important role in the formation of public opinion. As a result, legal legitimacy is reconstructed through the procedural democracy: the law-abiding people are considered as legal legislators. In my view, Habermas's reconstruction of legal legitimacy provides a significant reference to the Chinese legal philosophy, and the idea of procedure provides an important way to reconstruct Chinese modern thinking. However, we must rethink and learn Habermas's theory from the position of the Marxist historical materialism.