Jürgen Habermas and the equiprimordial relationship between human rights and popular sovereignty

Abstract

Human rights and popular sovereignty – respectively, private autonomy and public autonomy, in another terminology – form the normative basis of the modern understanding of democracy. In Between facts and norms, Habermas seeks to establish a system of rights able to encompass the fundamental rights categories that would compose a democratic constitution. It regards the set of rights that citizens must assign to one another in order to self-organize their own political community. In this endeavor, Habermas seeks to demonstrate that the apparent tension between human rights, which guarantee subjective freedoms, and popular sovereignty, understood as the collective self-legislation of a political community, is overcome when we understand democracy by means of a discursive theory of opinion and will formation