Abstract

This dissertation attempts to offer both an account and a commentary of Jurgen Habermas's theory of citizenship, as it emerges out his work of the last ten years, mainly out of Between Facts and Norms. Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy . Its main purpose is to focus on the notion of citizenship in order to examine the normative foundations of Habermas's theory of law. Its working hypothesis is that Habermas's conception of citizenship must be understood in connection with his discourse ethics, on the one hand, and with his theory of democracy, on the other; the two notions of the moral person and of "constitutional patriotism" have proved especially relevant and rich with problematic implications. The study adopts a pluridisciplinary approach in order to bring out the complex layout of Habermas's theory, which ranges from history to philosophy, from sociology to psychology and political theory; it questions some of Habermas's assumption by drawing on Michael Walzer's writings on citizenship and Clifford Geertz's notion of culture, among others. ;The dissertation argues that Habermas's work on citizenship can be read as a plea for a postnational democracy "from a cosmopolitan point of view", in which law is the last resource against the moral and political desertification operated by unbridled economic globalization and the functional imperatives of administrative power. It also argues that some of the implications of his theory, notably the conviction that the democratic constitutional state embodies a practical-rational potential which is the result of a species-specific process of learning and the conviction that such practical-rational potential can be articulated into a normative conception of democracy with universal range, these convictions, in fact, do not go unchallenged when compared with realistic and empirical theories of democracy, or with relativistic conceptions of culture and identity