Habermas, Jurgen - Law and Morality (The Tanner Lectures on Human Values) 1986.pdf

Law and Morality
JÜRGEN HABERMAS
Translated by h Baynes
Boston University
THE TANNER LECTURES ON HUMAN VALUES
Delivered at
Harvard University
October 1 and 2, 1986
DR. JÜRGEN HABERMAS was born June 18, 1929, in
Düsseldorf. He studied in Göttingen, Zürich, and Bonn
pleted his doctoral research with a dissertation
on Schelling. He was professor of philosophy at Heidel-
berg, and for ten years he was the director of the Max
Plank Institute for Research of Living Conditions in a
Scientific and Technical World. He is the recipient of
many honors, prizes, and degrees, as well as professor of
philosophy at Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität in
Fr ankf urt.
LECTURE ONE: HOW IS LEGITIMACY POSSIBLE
ON THE BASIS OF LEGALITY?
Max Weber regarded the political systems of modern Western
societies as forms of “legal domination.” Their legitimacy is
based upon a belief in the legality of their exercise of political
power. Legal domination acquires a rational character in that,
among other things, belief in the legality of authorities and
enacted regulations has a quality different from that of belief in
tradition or charisma. It is the rationality intrinsic to the form
of law itself that secures the legitimacy of power exercised in
legal This thesis has sparked a lively discussion. With
it Weber supported a positivistic concept of law: law is precisely
what the political legislator — whether democratic or not —
enacts as law in accordance with a legally institutionalized pro-
cedure. Under this premise the form of law cannot draw its
legitimating force from an alliance between law and morality.
Modern law has to be able to legitimate power exercised in a
formally legal manner through its own formal properties. These
are to be demonstrated as “rational” without any reference to
practical reason in the sense of Kant or Aristotle. According to
Weber, law possesses its own rationality, independent of m