"In such declarations lies the core strategy of Between Facts and Norms. What they trace is the continual movement of a theoretical shuttlecock, from the optative to the indicative and back again, that never comes to ground at either end. If Habermas’s account of law and democracy is taxed with a fundamental abstraction from the empirical realities of a political order in which the formation of a popular will is at best fitful or vestigial, it can refer to its counterfactual vocation. If it is taxed with a complete lack of any specification of a desirable alternative, it can refer to the value of what already exists, in a bedrock of communication that only needs to be fulfilled. The result is a theory that answers to the responsibility neither of an accurate description of the real world, nor of critical proposals for a better one. It operates instead in a no man’s land between the two, in unwitting mimicry of the title of the book – not law as a mediation, but philosophy as a passe-passe between facts and norms. What actual criticisms of the social order issue from the ‘critical standard’ it offers? Where precisely are we to find the ‘efficacity’ of the idealizations it discerns in existing practices, and why are these ‘unavoidable’? Just how ‘partial’ is the inscription of norms in observable conducts, and how ‘distorted’? What proportion of reality do the ‘particles and fragments’ of reason add up to? Such questions are beyond the remit of the theory, which is designed to elude them. Its effect is apologetic. Our societies are better than we know."