Life world, democratic ethos and mundialization: deliberative democracy according to Habermas

Abstract

The article seeks to show to what extent the conception of deliberativedemocracy proposed by Jürgen Habermas’s discourse theory accounts for the problemsof juridification and economic reductions inherent in globalization, regardedas a technical, systemic colonization of the lifeworld. By resorting to hisconception of a transnational, democratic ethos grounded in popular sovereignty,Habermas’s theory succeeds in rescuing the normative thrust of globalization bymeans of irreducible human values, such as freedom, dignity, and human rights,intrinsic to different, incompatible self-understanding accounts of lifeworlds.