178 Habermas: An intellectual biography
“disembodied,” and “fully dispersed” to characterize a popular
sovereignty that has “withdrawn into democratic procedures.”^29
Habermas believed that breaking up legislative power into institu-
tionalized and noninstitutionalized spaces – the parliament and a
plurality of public spheres – was the best way to preserve the dem-
ocratic ideal of popular self-determination while eschewing the
holism that he believed connected Aristotle to Rousseau, Hegel,
and Marx. Habermas thereby updated his idea of political culture as
the “space in-between” and the “non-institutionalizable” mistrust
of the citizens he had posited as the critical ingredient in the “non-
identical Rechtsstaat” in his 1983 writings on civil disobedience.^30 He
repeatedly used the metaphor of “withdrawal” to describe the subli-
mation of core liberal and republican ideals (human rights and pop-
ular sovereignty, respectively) into discursive “rules of procedure”:
[Proceduralism]... relieves citizens of the Rousseauian expectation
of virtue – the orientation to the common good only needs to be
extracted in small increments insofar as practical reason withdraws
from the hearts and heads of collective or individual actors into the
procedures and forms of communication of political opinion and
will formation.^31
Similarly, Habermas substituted the rules of discourse for the more
“concrete” (sittlich) features of universal human rights:
According to [the] proceduralist view, practical reason withdraws
from universal human rights or from the concrete ethical life of a
specific community into the rules of discourse.^32
Treating human rights as an example of excessive concreteness is
a striking feature of BFN and Habermas’s mature political thought
generally. It reflects his skepticism toward one version of human
rights politics, not human rights per se. Treating human rights as
a foundational moral a priori, beyond reflection, reifies them in a
manner Habermas finds unacceptable. Popular sovereignty, not(^29) Habermas, BFN, 486.
(^30) Habermas, “Testfall,” 53.
(^31) Habermas, “Reply to Symposium Participants,” 1481–2 (emphasis added).
(^32) Ibid. For Habermas’s definition of practical reason, see “On the Pragmatic,
the Ethical and the Moral Employments of Practical Reason,” in Habermas,
Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics, trans. Ciarin Cronin
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993 ); orig. Erläuterungen zur Diskursethik
(Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1991 ), 100–18.