Jurgen Habermas and the Fragile Legitimacy of Modern Law

This volume offers a collection of original essays by leading scholars in which they undertake critical reassessments of Jürgen Habermas as a legal thinker. The book covers the full arc of Habermas’s work, addressing his thought not as a closed system but as an open, evolving framework. Through a series of close engagements with Habermas’s discursive theory of law and the democratic constitutional state, the volume approaches the legitimacy of modern law not as a settled status but as a fragile, ongoing achievement. The contributors offer different answers to the question of whether Habermas’s account of legal legitimacy warrants reassessment or adaptation, and of how far it still holds in the face of the crises and transformations that have reshaped the nation-state and recast the international legal order. They also consider the shifts in theoretical perspective that have accompanied these transformations. Drawing on an international dialogue that includes the Global South, the contributors return to the foundations of Habermas’s legal philosophy, test its relevance in the face of the economic and political forces that are now challenging its central categories, and follow it into debates about law and its normativity, radical democracy, social domination, human rights, transnational legal orders, and the emancipatory potential of law. This volume will appeal to scholars, academics, and students of philosophy of law and jurisprudence, social, legal, and political theory, the sociology of law, and constitutional theory, as well as those interested in intellectual history, social sciences, critical theory, and the Frankfurt School.