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