JU ̈RGEN HABERMASbasis of it. Instead, I will suggest that cultural and societal secularization should be under-
stood as a twofold learning process, one that requires both Enlightenment traditions and
religious doctrines to reflect upon their respective limits. With regard to post-secular
societies, the question finally arises: Which cognitive views and normative expectations
must the liberal state demand of its religious and nonreligious citizens as they interact
with one another?
Political liberalism (which I defend here in the special form of Kantian Republican-
ism^2 ) understands itself to be a nonreligious and postmetaphysical justification of the
normative foundations of the democratic constitutional state. This theory is part of the
tradition of rational law [Vernunftrecht], which does without the cosmological or divine-
historical [heilsgeschichtlich] assumptions found in classical and religious teachings of nat-
ural law. The history of Christian theology in the Middle Ages—particularly late Spanish
scholasticism—belongs, of course, in the genealogy of human rights. But the fundamental
principles that legitimize the ideologically neutral authority of the state are, in the end,
derived from the profane sources of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy.
Only much later did theology and the church come to terms with the intellectual chal-
lenges of the revolutionary constitutional state. If I understand correctly, however, from
the perspective of Catholicism, given its relaxed attitude toward thelumen naturale, noth-
ing in principle stands in the way of an autonomous foundation of morality and law—a
foundation independent of the truths of revelation.
The post-Kantian foundation of liberal constitutional principles has, in the twentieth
century, been forced to come to terms less with the painful aftermath of objective natural
law (such as material value ethics [materiale Wertethik^3 ]) than with historicist and empiri-
cist forms of critique. In my opinion, weak assumptions concerning the normative con-
tent of the communicative condition of socio-cultural forms of life are sufficient for
defending a nondefeatist notion of reason against contextualism and a nondecisionistic
concept of law’s validity against the positivism of law. The central task lies in explaining
the following:
- Why the democratic process counts as a legitimate legislative procedure: insofar
as the democratic process complies with the conditions of an inclusive and discursive
opinion- and will-formation, it justifies the presumption that the results are rationally
acceptable; and - Why democracy and human rights co-originally interpenetrate each other in the
process of drafting a constitution: the legal institutionalization of the procedure of demo-
cratic legislation requires thatbothliberalandpolitical basic rights [Grundrechte] be guar-
anteed simultaneously.^4
This grounding strategy refers to the constitution that the consociated citizens give
to themselves and not to the domestication of an existing state authority, as the latter
should be created only through the democratic drafting of the constitution. A ‘‘consti-
tuted’’ (rather than a merely constitutionally tamed) state authority is juridified [verrech-
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