Page 211 - Communication and the Evolution of Society
P. 211

188                        Communication  and  Evolution  of  Society

         interest  of  everyone  involved?  Today  it  is  neither  ultimate  nor
         penultimate  grounds  that  provide  legitimation.  Whoever  main-
         tains  this  is  operating  at  the  level  of  the  Middle  Ages.  Only  the
         rules  and  communicative  presuppositions  that  make  it  possible  to
         distinguish  an  accord  or  agreement  among  free  and  equals  from  a
         contingent  or  forced  consensus  have  legitimating  force  today.
         Whether  such  rules  and  communicative  presuppositions  can  best
         be  interpreted  and  explained  with  the  help  of  natural  law  con-
         structions  and  contract  theories  or  in  the  concepts  of  a  transcen-
         dental  philosophy  or  a  pragmatics  of  language  or  even  in  the
         framework  of  a  theory  of  the  development  of  moral  consciousness
         is  secondary  in  the  present  context.
           The  modern  level  of  justification  is  also  misconstrued  by  those
         who  feel  themselves  to  be  above  all  that  is  old-European.  They
         believe  that  a  replacement  for  procedural  legitimacy,  in  the  sense
         of  rational  agreement,  can  be  created  through  ‘“‘procedure”’  in  the
         sense  of  formal  properties  of  the  exercise  of  domination.”  To
         be  sure,  the  normative  power  of  the  factual  is  no  chimera;  but
         it  is  an  indication  that  many  norms  have  been  established  against
         the  wills  of  those  who  follow  them.  Before  norms  of  domination
         could  be  accepted  without  reason  by  the  bulk  of  the  population,
         the  communication  structures  in  which  our  motives  for  action
         have  till  now  been  formed  would  have  to  be  thoroughly  destroyed.
         Of  course,  we  have  no  metaphysical  guarantee  that  this  will  not
         happen.?8



                                       Ii]
         I  would  like  now  to  take  a  brief  look  at  the  legitimation  problems
         that  emerge  with  the  modern  state.  We  characterize  this  state  by
         features  like  the  monopolization  of  legitimate  power,  centralized
         and  rational  (in  Weber’s  sense)  administration,  territoriality,  and
         so  on.  These  features  describes  a  structure  of  state  organization
         that  becomes  visible  only  when  we  leave  behind  a  narrowly  po-
         litical  view  fixated  on  the  state  and  consider  the  emergence  of
         capitalist  society.  This  society  requires  a  state  organization  differ-
         ent  from  that  of  the  class  societies  of  the  great  empires,  which
         were  constituted  in  an  immediately  political  way  (in  ancient
   206   207   208   209   210   211   212   213   214   215   216