Emancipation, Democracy and the Modern Critique of Law

This book focuses on Jürgen Habermas’ theorising on law, rights and democracy in light of the modern critique of law. The latter tradition, which goes back to Hegel and Marx, has addressed the limitations of rights as vocabulary of emancipation and law as language of autonomy. Since Habermas claims that his reconstruction of private and public autonomy has an emancipatory aim, the author has chosen to discuss it in the context of the modern critique of law. More specifically, the study addresses the need to consider the dialectic of law, in which law is both a condition for emancipation and domination, when discussing what law and rights permit. It will appeal to students and scholars across the fields of political theory, law and legal criticism, as well as sociology and sociology of law.

• Jürgen Habermas
• law and political theory
• human rights and political theory
• democratic theory
• sociology of law
• the dialectic of law
• The Theory of Communicative Action
• Between Facts and Norms
• Christophe Menke
• Welfare State Law
• private and public autonomy
• political philosophy
• political theory of Jürgen Habermas
• Habermas and the critique of law
• Modern Critique of Law
• Habermas and emanicipation
• democracy

• Department of Global Political Studies, Malmö University, Malmö, Sweden

  Mikael Spång

Mikael Spång is Associate Professor of Political Science at Malmö University, Sweden. He has published articles and books on political and social theory, in both Swedish and English. Among recent publications is Constituent Power and Constitutional Order (Palgrave, 2014).  

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