Contingency and Reason: Some Habermasian Reflections on A-Legality

In this paper I assess the charges raised in Hans Lindahl’s book on the Fault Lines of Globalization against Habermas’ discourse theory of law. I argue, first, that Habermas does not construe legal norms as ‘top down’ positivizations of a given set of substantial moral norms. Discourse theory pro-vides, rather, a constructivist account of both legal and moral norms as constructed through actual and bottom-up discourses between concrete human beings. Next, I emphasize that this discursive construction is an open-ended process of which the (temporary) outcomes contain much more con-tingency than Lindahl is prepared to acknowledge. In the final section, I focus more directly on Lindahl’s own normative position and raise a few critical questions regarding the relationship be-tween normativity and contingency in the theory of a-legality