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With over a dozen contributions from scholars across a range of disciplines, this book revisits Jürgen Habermas’s defining text on legal and political theory, Between Facts and Norms.
The contributors interrogate the prospects for Habermas’s optimistic defense of liberal democracy in our current age of straining global capitalism and menacing authoritarian populisms. The authors arrive at different conclusions, with some contributors engaging directly with his theory while others assessing it through the prisms of political economy, the media, policing, employment discrimination law, international relations theory, social movements, democratic institutions and the historical context of Between Facts and Norms.
John Abromeit is Professor of History at SUNY, Buffalo State, the author of Max Horkheimer and the Foundations of the Frankfurt School (2011), and the co-editor of several volumes, including: Siegfried Kracauer: Selected Writings on Media, Propaganda and Political Communication (2022).
Matthew Dimick is Professor of Law and Director of the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy at the University at Buffalo School of Law, and the author of Ending Income Inequality (2025). His research addresses the law and political economy of income inequality, capitalism and the administrative state, and the historical epistemology of race and employment discrimination law.
Paul Linden-Retek is Associate Professor of Law, University at Buffalo School of Law. He writes and teaches in the areas of constitutional law, international human rights, and critical legal theory, with an emphasis on comparative law, European Union law, and refugee law.
Notes on Contributors
Notes on Editors
1 Introduction: the Pasts and Futures of Between Facts and Norms – a Critical Exchange
John Abromeit, Matthew Dimick and Paul Linden-Retek
Part 1: BFN and the Challenge of Neoliberalism and Political Economy
2 Historicizing Habermas’s Between Facts and Norms: a Critique from the Perspective of Early Frankfurt School Critical Theory
John Abromeit
3 Between Facts and Norms at 30: Habermas, Neoliberalism and Radical Democracy
Brian Caterino and Phillip Hansen
4 What’s Left? Democratic Theory in Between Facts and Norms after Three Decades
William E. Scheuerman
5 How the Legal Form Distorts Public and Private Autonomy
Matthew Dimick
6 Why Proceduralism Is Not Enough: Reading Habermas in an Age of Democratic Decline
Michael J. Thompson
Part 2: BFN and Political (and Legal) Theory
7 Democratic Theory’s Existential Crisis: between Discourse and Partisan Empowerment
David Ingram
8 Is Democratic Legitimacy Purely Procedural? An Institutional Account of the Legitimacy of Democratic Decision-Making
Cristina Lafont
9 In Search of Counter-Tendencies: on the Heuristic Potential of the Public Sphere in Habermas’s Between Facts and Norms Rúrion Melo
10 Between Facts and Norms Facing Pseudo-Democracy
Isabelle Aubert
11 Policing the Public Sphere
Erin R. Pineda
12 A Great Misrecognition: How Between Facts and Norms Was Conflated with (but Resists) the Cosmopolitan Moment in 1990s International Relations Theory
Matthew Specter
13 Afterword: the Specter of Popular Sovereignty in Habermas’s Between Facts and Norms After Three Decades
Seyla Benhabib