Page 215 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

192 Communication and Evolution of Society

the nineteenth century, focused on working out a procedural type of
legitimation.3? From Hobbes to Rousseau and Kant the leading ideas
of rational agreement and self-determination were explicated to the
extent that questions of justice and public welfare were stripped of
all ontological connotations. This controversy dealt implicitly with the
depreciation of a level of justification dependent on world views.
c. Abstract Right and Capitalist Commodity Exchange. Rational
natural law had, of course, not only a formal side but a material side
as well. From Hobbes and Locke through the Scottish moral phil-
osophers (Hume, Smith, Millar), the French Enlightenment phil-
osophers (Helvetius, d’Holbach), and classical political economy to
Hegel, there emerged a theory of civil society that explained the bour-
geois system of civil law, the basic liberties of the citizen, and the
capitalist economic process as an order that guaranteed freedom and
maximized welfare.33 At the new level of justification only an order
of state and society organized along universalistic lines could be de-
fended. The controversy with the traditionalists concerned the histor-
ical price exacted by bourgeois ideals; it concerned, that is, the rights
of the particular, the limits of rationality—from the perspective of
the present, the “dialectic of enlightenment.”
d. Sovereignty. The establishment of monarchic sovereignty within
and without ignited a conflict that was carried out first along the fronts
of the wars of religion. (See the political journalism of the Protestants
after St. Bartholomew's Night in 1572.) From Bodin to Hobbes the
sovereignty question was then resolved in favor of absolutism. In the
course of the eighteenth century there was an attempt to rethink
princely sovereignty into sovereignty of the people, so that the external
sovereignty of the state could be unified with political democracy. The
sovereignty of the people was, of course, a diffuse battle cry, which
was unfolded in the constitutional debates of the nineteenth century.
In it various thought motifs flow together: the sovereign power of
the state appears as the expression of a new principle of legitimation,
of the domination of the third estate, and of national identity as well.
e. Nation. This last complex has a special place insofar as national
consciousness developed inconspicuously in very differentiated cultures,
often on the basis of a common language, before it was dramatized
in independence movements. Actually national identity became a con-
troversial theme (in the nineteenth century) only where moderniza-
tion processes were delayed, as in the succession states of the empire
dissolved in 1804. A nationalism that served, as in the Bismarckian
empire, to separate out internal enemies—Reichsfeinde such as social-