Liberties in dispute: the reconstruction of private autonomy is Jurgen Haberman critical theory

Author(s)

Felipe Gonçalves Silva

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: Campinas, SP.
• Institution: Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas
• Defense date: 2010-09-04

Examining board members

Marcos Nobre; Yara Adario Frateschi; Ricardo Ribeiro Terra; José Rodrigo Rodriguez; Oscar Vilhena Vieira

• Advisor: Marcos Nobre

Abstract

This work aims to study the concept of private autonomy in Jürgen Habermas' Between Facts and Norms. The study was made in regard to the author's larger project of rearticulating critical theory under the intersubjective turn of his discourse theory, which led us to investigate the different steps of the reconstructive program developed in this work and the particular way the concept is discussed in each of them. We assume, hypothetically, the structure of the book as composed of three main stages - the "internal reconstruction", the "external reconstruction" and the intersection of these former perspectives made possible by the notion of "legal paradigm". In domain of the internal reconstruction, private autonomy is characterized as the normative requirement of equal individual liberties to all members of the legal community, providing them the freedom of choice and ethical freedom in boundaries defined democratically. In the external reconstruction the private autonomy's rights are considered to constitute a domain of social life characterized by communication forms of restricted access. The "private sphere" is considered here enrolled in the social processes of political will formation in its most distant points of the systemic decision-making institutions. Finally, in the scope of discussion involving the dispute of legal paradigms, the response to the impasse left by the liberal and the welfare state models will require to procedimentalize the choice about the meaning of equal legal treatment. From the viewpoint of a new procedural paradigm, the initial understanding of private autonomy is revaluated by the author and incorporates demands of material equality in the assumption of "equal individual liberties of action." At the end of the course, the structural hypothesis which allowed the development of the thesis is shown performatively proven. It allows to understand the changes undergone by the concept of private autonomy as a progressive reconstructive movement consisted of three principal steps, and to indicate changes related to other key concepts linked to it such as "public autonomy", "cooriginarity" and the "tension between facts and norms (AU)