Legitimacy Category Habermas Legal Philosophy

Legitimacy especially the legitimacy of law is the subject under the discussion in jurisprudence. Tow most representative ideas emerged in development of the western jurisprudence, one is the virtual legitimacy from the nature law school, another is the formal legitimacy from the analytical positivist jurisprudence.During the process of the research on the crisis of late capitalist society, Habermas payed a close attention to the legitimacy of political power. The apriori values from natural law and formalistic facts from positivism provide him a logical starting point in discussion. In his opinion, the transcendent, universal and invariable nature law emphasized by the nature law school overlooks the specific historical environment and differences between different cultures. The network made by the given social relations, historical system, real class structure and the pattern of interests is simplified into a self-constructed rule system. On the other side, analytical positivism cleared the paternalism in law and make it an independent and self-controlling system.Public sphere theory and the analysis of the crisis in capitalist society finish the change of topic, from justice to legitimacy. Communicative action theory and the analysis of the relations between the fact and norm make the procedural legitimacy become possible in theory. The legitimacy of political order cares about the value of public approvment of this order. In accordance with the communicative theory, communicative reason is contained in the speech action of beings, and this means that reach a consensus between different person is possible. And this possibility lays the foundation of procedural legitimacy, Habermas holds the belief that we can coordinate our will and reach a consensus by the equal and free discussion and make new rules. And in this process, legitimacy of law has been proved.