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203 Legitimation Problems in the Modern State

specify criteria and provide reasons; they must, that is, produce
theoretical knowledge.
An interesting language-analytic variant (inspired by the work
of Wittgenstein) of the same embarrassment can be found in
Hannah Pitkin’s: Wzttgenstemn and Justice. She offers an inter-
pretation of the dialogue on justice between Socrates and the
Sophist Thrasymachus, which Plato reports in the first book of
the Republic.’ If we view Thrasymachus from the perspective
of contemporary discussion, he represents an empiricist stand-
point; for him justice is just another name for the particular in-
terests of the stronger. Socrates develops a normative concept of
justice; whoever calls something unjust must apply standards and
be able to ground them as well. Both start from the fact that a
great discrepancy had arisen between the normative content of
the concept “‘Justice’’ as it was then understood by the Greeks
and the contemporary institutions, actions, and practices, that
were supposed to be legitimate and to embody justice. But Socrates
turns the concept critically against the institutions, while Thrasy-
machus deflates the concept for the purpose of describing behavior
practiced in the name of justice.
Pitkin shows the difference between the grammars of the two
language games, in which the same term is used, in one case with
quotation marks, in the other without. We assume different
“grammatically’’ regulated attitudes when we say, on the one
hand, “I like the picture,”’ and on the other, “The picture is
beautiful’ (for in the second case we can continue: “and yet I
don’t like it’). The situation is analogous when we say: “X
fought for a just cause,” and on the other hand: “X claimed to
be fighting for a just cause’ (for in the latter case we can con-
tinue: “but he was actually pursuing his own interests’). The
attitude we assume in employing normative concepts like justice,
beauty, and truth (with which universal validity claims are con-
nected) is evidently deeply rooted in human forms of life; a
change of attitude to the neutral position of the observer has to
alter the meaning of these terms. But what follows from this for
a reconstruction of the validity claims and normative content of
the concepts in question? According to Pitkin: ‘Our concepts are
conventional, but the conventions on which these concepts rest