Jurgen Habermas is a second-generation social philosopher of the Frankfurt school, the birthplace of critical theory. He suggests that modernity is a project of substituting rationality for religion. In his analysis, such a succession is the result of a process of social evolution, in which each developmental stage has its basic concepts and modes of understanding subjective, objective, and social worlds. For him, the salient feature of rationality consists of differentiation between various validity claims of truth, truthfulness, and sincerity which (...) are indistinguishable in religious language. The rationalization of religion, hence, progresses in terms of a differentiation between validity claims, a decentration of human understanding, the disenchantment of the world, and the linguistification of the sacred. Habermas proposes a universal pragmatics in which two modes of language use are separated: instrumental-strategic, and communicative. He thinks that the failure of the enlightenment movement to replace religion with reason stems from its preoccupation with instrumental reason and language use, dispensing with communicative rationality; and the remedy lies in communicative rationality. (shrink)

Identity and democracy and, more particularly, national identity and deliberative democracy account for a controversial relationship. However, from a classical deliberative democratic point of view, the controversy over who is the ‘we’ that needs to stand together in contemporary complex societies settled with the constitution of modern states. In this sense, the main contribution of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, I rebut the analytical appropriateness and conceptual coherence of Habermas’ discursive approach to democracy for the case of (...) plurinational societies in contemporary constitutional democracies. A discussion of a test case – Catalonia – demonstrates that this inadequacy renders incoherent the deliberative model regarding one of its most fundamental premises: the equal weight of the principles of law and the principle of democracy. On the other hand, I sustain that the challenge is not about identity but democracy, and more particularly, about the role deliberative democracy is called to play when controversy challenges whether the people of a state do conform to a single people or not. More concretely, I explore the opportunities offered by the systemic turn to sustain a more realistic approach to deliberative democracy regarding its capacity to steer society towards integration in the context of the system of public deliberation. (shrink)