Law and Philosophy: Some Consequences for the Law Deriving From the Sociological Reconstruction of Philosophical Theory

Jurgen Habermas wants to provide a (quasi) transcendental grounding for democracy. He believes that the constituent attribute of Homo Sapiens is ordinary speech and that embedded in speech is a set of "validity claims" that are redeemable-asymptotically-only in an ideal speech situation. This ideal serves as a regulative fiction for our everyday world of social institutions. While it may not actually be present in institutional form, it serves as a ground for the normative critique of the actual social world in which we live.