The im/possibility of democracy: Derrida and Habermas

Jacques Derrida’s and Jürgen Habermas’s philosophical interventions into contemporary democracy are used to address issues presented by post-national democracy and the possibilities for transforming international law and institutions to confront the dilemmas and pathologies of globalization. Chapter 1 argues that Derrida and Habermas are united by thinking with and against Immanuel Kant in order to rethink reason in an ethical relation to the other, and also to reconceive freedom more substantively, by acknowledging both its legal and material requirements and limits. Chapter 2 analyzes Habermas’s discourse theory of democracy, while chapter 3 discusses Derrida’s democracy to come. After considering the relation of Derrida and Habermas to the history of democracy, Enlightenment political theory and practice, and their own debate and rapprochement, and then separately surveying their respective political-theoretical ideas, chapters 4 and 5 once again take up Derrida and Habermas together to consider what they have to say regarding the future of democracy. In addition to considering the possibility of a hybrid critical theory based on Derridean deconstruction and Habermas’s view of philosophy as reconstructive science, chapter 4 explores several issues concerning the contemporary nation-state and democratic sovereignty, including republican foundationalism, multiculturalism, political pluralism, and the public sphere. Chapter 5 addresses possible solutions to some of the questions presented by the global movement of capital and the attendant diminishing problem-solving capacities of the nation-state—issues of globalization and post-nationalism—and Derrida’s and Habermas’s positions on the potential for regional and global democratic institutions premised on Kant’s conception of a cosmopolitan legal order