Political Works

"Au niveau des individus, la violence désintoxique. Elle débarrasse le colonisé de son complexe d'infériorité, de ses atti­tudes contemplatives ou désespérées. Elle le rend intrépide, le réhabilite à ses propres yeux."

"The colonialist bourgeoisie is aided and abetted in the pacification of the colonized by the inescapable powers of religion. All the saints who turned the other cheek, who forgave those who trespassed against them, who, without flinching, were spat upon and insulted, are championed and shown as an example."

"The very same people who had it constantly drummed into them that the only language they understood was that of force, now decide to express themselves with force."

"Le militant nationaliste qui avait fui la ville, ulcéré par les manoeuvres démagogiques et réformistes des dirigeants, déçu par la « politique », découvre dans la praxis concrète une nou­velle politique qui ne ressemble plus du tout à l'ancienne. Cette politique est une politique de responsables, de dirigeants insérés dans l'histoire qui assument avec leurs muscles et avec leurs cerveaux la direction de la lutte de libération. Cette politique et nationale, révolutionnaire, sociale."

"The unemployed and the starving do not lay claim to truth. They do not say they represent the truth because they are the truth in their very being."

"Colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence."

"The colonial regime owes its legitimacy to force and at no time does it ever endeavor to cover up this nature of things."

"Lorsqu'un colonisé entend un discours sur la culture occidentale, il sort sa machette ou du moins il s'assure qu'elle est à portée de sa main. La violence avec laquelle s'est affirmée la suprématie des valeurs blanches, l'agressivité qui a imprégné la confrontation victorieuse de ces valeurs avec les modes de vie ou de pensée des colonisés font que, par un juste retour des choses, le colonisé ricane quand on évoque devant lui ces valeurs."

"The famous dictum which states that all men are equal will find its illustration in the colonies only when the colonized subject states he is equal to the colonist."

"Présentée dans sa nudité, la décolonisation laisse deviner à travers tous ses pores, des boulets rouges, des couteaux sanglants. Car si les derniers doivent être les premiers, ce ne peut être qu'à la suite d'un affrontement décisif et meurtrier des deux protagonistes. Cette volonté affirmée de faire remonter les der­niers en tête de file, de les faire grimper (à une cadence trop rapide, disent certains) les fameux échelons qui définissent une société organisée, ne peut triompher que si on jette dans la balance tous les moyens, y compris, bien sûr, la violence."

"L'Église aux colonies est une Église de Blancs, une église d'étrangers. Elle n'appelle pas l'homme colonisé dans la voie de Dieu mais bien dans la voie du Blanc, dans la voie du maître, dans la voie de l'oppresseur."

"The colonized can see right away if decolonization is taking place or not: The minimum demand is that the last become the first."

"Will we recover? Yes. Violence, like Achilles' spear, can heal the wounds it has inflicted."

"Cette nouvelle réalité que le colonisé va maintenant connaître n'existe que par l'action. C'est la lutte qui, en faisant exploser l'ancienne réalité coloniale, révèle des facettes inconnues, fait surgir des significations nou­ velles et met le doigt sur les contradictions camouflées par cette réalité. Le peuple qui lutte, le peuple qui, grâce à la lutte, dispose cette nouvelle réalité et la connaît, avance, libéré du colonialisme, prévenu par avance contre toutes les tentatives de mystification, contre tous les hymnes à la nation. Seule la vio­lence exercée par le peuple, violence organisée et éclairée par la direction, permet aux masses de déchiffrer la réalité sociale, lui en donne la clef. Sans cette lutte, sans cette connaissance dans la praxis, il n'y a plus que carnaval et flonflons."

"Today we are in chains, humiliated, sick with fear: at our lowest ebb. Fortunately for us, this is still not enough for the colonialist aristocracy: it cannot accomplish its rearguard mission in Algeria until it has first finished colonizing the French."

"Dans décolonisation, il y a donc exigence d'une remise en question intégrale de la situation coloniale. Sa définition peut, si on veut la décrire avec précision, tenir dans la phrase bien connue: « Les derniers seront les premiers. » La décolonisation est la vérification de cette phrase."

"Today whenever two Frenchmen meet, there is a dead body between them."

"Le frère, la soeur, le camarade sont des mots proscrits par la bourgeoisie colonialiste parce que pour elle mon frère c'est mon portefeuille, mon camarade c'est ma combine."

"Read Fanon: you will see that in a time of helplessness, murderous rampage is the collective unconscious of the colonized."

"The colonized protect themselves from colonial alienation by going one step better with religious alienation, with the ultimate end result of having accumulated two alienations, each of which reinforces the other."

"If the entire regime, even your nonviolent thoughts, is governed by a thousand-year-old oppression, your passiveness serves no other purpose than to put you on the side of the oppressors."

"United by profit, the metropolitans baptized their commonwealth of crimes Fraternity and Love."

"In some places the metropolis makes do with paying a clique of feudal overlords; in others, it has fabricated a fake bourgeoisie of colonized subjects in a system of divide and rule; elsewhere, it has killed two birds with one stone: the colony is both settlement and exploitation."

"The centred image of deliberative democracy implicitly thinks of the democratic process as one big meeting at the conclusion of which decisions are made, we hope justly. In contrast to this image, with Habermas I advocate a ‘decentred’ conception of politics and society. According to this concept, we cannot conceive of the subject-matter of democracy as the organization of society as a whole. Society is bigger than politics and outruns political institutions, and thus democratic politics must be thought of as taking place within the context of large and complex social processes the whole of which cannot come into view, let alone under decision-making control."

"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."

"In the final analysis, the legitimacy of law depends on undistorted forms of public communication and indirectly on the communicational infrastructure of the private sphere as well. This is the key to a proceduralist understanding of law. After the formal guarantee of private autonomy has proven insufficient, and after social intervention through law also threatens the very private autonomy it means to restore, the only solution consists in thematizing the connection between forms of communication that simultaneously guarantee private and public autonomy in the very conditions from which they emerge."

"The project of realizing the system of rights-a project specifically designed for the conditions of our society, and hence for a particular, historically emergent society-cannot be merely formal. Nevertheless, this paradigm of law, unlike the liberal and social-welfare models, no longer favors a particular ideal of society, a particular vision of the good life, or even a particular political option. It is "formal" in the sense that it merely states the necessary conditions under which legal subjects in their role of enfranchised citizens can reach an understanding with one another about what their problems are and how they are to be solved. The procedural paradigm is certainly connected with the self-referential expectation of shaping not only the self-understanding of elites who deal with law as experts but that of all participants. But this expectation does not aim at indoctrination and has nothing totalitarian about it-to anticipate an objection that, though far-fetched, is leveled against discourse theory again and again."

"Expressions like "social ideal," "social model," "social vision," and even simply "theory" have become generally accepted ways of referring to a social epoch's paradigmatic understanding of law. Such expressions refer to those implicit ideas or images of one's own society that provide a perspective for the practices of making and applying law. These images orient the project of realizing an association of free and equal citizens. However, the historical studies of changes in legal paradigms-as well as doctrinal contributions to the paradigm debate-are limited to professional interpretations of existing law. A paradigm is discerned primarily in important court decisions and usually equated with the judge's implicit image of society."

"The priority of the democratic constitution over private law meant that the normative content of basic rights henceforth had to unfold within private law itself through an active legislature and courts."

"Aware of, and referring to, changed contexts, such citizens want to overcome in practice the tension between social facticity and validity. Although legal theory cannot adopt this participant perspective as its own, it can reconstruct the paradigmatic understanding of law and democracy that guides citizens whenever theyform an idea of the structural constraints on the self-organization of the legal community in their society."

"Historical constitutions can be seen as so many ways of construing one and the same practice-the practice of self-determination on the part of free and equal citizens-but like every practice this, too, is situated in history. Those involved must start with their own current practice if they want to achieve clarity about what such a practice means in general."

"Most important, restrictions on the classical liberties in the "social" sphere (as distinct from broader or narrower private spheres) certainly cannotbe traced back to the interference of other legal principles (such as social justice or social responsibility). What appears as a restriction is only the flip side of the enforcement of equal individual liberties for all. This is because private autonomy, in the sense of this universal right to equal liberties, implies a universal right of equality, that is, the right to equal treatment according to norms that guarantee substantive legal equality."

"The system of rights calls for the simultaneous and complementary realization of private and civic autonomy. From a normative standpoint, these two forms of autonomy are co-original and reciprocally presuppose each other, because one would remain incomplete without the other. But how private and public powers and responsibilities must be divided up in particular cases in order to adequately realize civil rights depends on the historical circumstances and, as we will see, on perceived social contexts."

"One must investigate the degree to which, in particular, the power concentrated in social subsystems, in large organizations and public administrations, inconspicuously settles into the systemic infrastructure of the normatively regulated circulation of power, and one must investigate how effectively the unofficial circulation of this unlegitimated power encroaches on the constitutionally regulated circulation of power."

"Our differentiated model of discourse, though more abstract than the communitarian account of dialogue, preserves quite well the individual's embeddedness in the intersubjectivity of a prior structure of possible mutual understanding. At the same time, the reference to an ideal audience or an ideally inclusive community extending beyond the traditional contours of any particular community encourages participants to take yes/no positions that are free from the prejudicial power of the contingent language games and particular forms of life into which they have been socialized in a merely conventional way."

"The procedural principles tested and confirmed in practice and the maxims of interpretation canonized in textbooks on legal method will be satisfactorily captured in a discourse theory only when the network of argumentation, bargaining, and political communications in which the legislative process occurs has been more thoroughly analyzed than it has been to date."

"In summary, one can say that codes of procedure provide relatively strict rules for the introduction of evidence regarding what took place. Such codes thus define the bounds within which parties can deal with the law strategically. The legal discourse of the court, on the other hand, is played out in a procedural-legal vacuum, so that reaching a judgment is left up to the judge's professional ability."

"The communication structures of the public sphere are linked with the private life spheres in a way that gives the civil-social periphery, in contrast to the political center, the advantage of greater sensitivity in detecting and identifying new problem situations."

"The rationality of a specialized and competent fulfillment of tasks by experts is no protection against a paternalistic self ..empowerment and self-programming on the part of administrative agencies. The logic of separated powers demands instead that the administration be empowered to carry out its tasks as professionally as possible, yet only under normative premises not at its disposal: the executive branch is to be limited to employing administrative power according to the law."

"The logic of the separation of powers must then be realized in new structures, say, by setting up the corresponding forms of participation and communication or by introducing quasi-judicial and parliamentary procedures, procedures for compromise formation, and so on."

"Naturally, there are other ways in which issues develop, other paths from the periphery to the center, and other patterns involving complex branchings and feedback loops. But, in general, one can say that even in more or less power-ridden public spheres, the power relations shift as soon as the perception of relevant social problems evokes a crisis consciousness at the periphery."

"It is not just the legal form alone that distinguishes political from moral self-legislation, but the contingency of the form of life, of the goals and interest positions establishing the identity of the self-determining political will in advance."

"A paradigm of law draws on a model of contemporary society to explain how constitutional rights and principles must be conceived and implemented if in the given context they are to fulfill the functions normatively ascribed to them."

"The law presents itself as a system of rights only as long as we consider it in terms of its specific function of stabilizing behavioral · expectations. These rights can take effect and be enforced only by organizations that make collectively binding decisions. Conversely, these decisions owe their collective bindingness to the legal form in which they are clad. This internal connection of law with political power is reflected in the above-noted implications that "subjective" rights have for "objective" law."

"In short, the state becomes necessary as a sanctioning, organizing, and executive power because rights must be enforced, because the legal community has need of both a collective self-maintenance and an organized judiciary, and because political will-formation issues in programs that must be implemented."

"Norms appearing in the form of law entitle actors to exercise their rights or liberties. However, one cannot determine which of these laws are legitimate simply by looking at the form of individual rights. Only by bringing in the discourse principle can one show that each person is owed a right to the greatest possible measure of equal liberties that are mutually compatible."

"Communicative rationality is expressed in a decentered complex of pervasive, transcendentally enabling structural conditions, but it is not a subjective capacity that would tell actors what they ought to do."

"In contrast to sociological skepticism about law, philosophical theories of justice resolutely work out the moral content of modern legal orders. These rational constructions of law serve to justify principles according to which a well-ordered society should be set up. In the process, however, they lose touch with the reality of contemporary societies and thus have difficulties in identifying the conditions necessary for the realization of these principles."

"The conceptual framework of modern natural law, as developed in the tradition of the philosophy of the subject, blocks an adequate sociological perception of the cohesion of kinship societies through prepolitical institutions; in fact, the complex of law and political power was able to join forces with this prepolitical substratum for a long time. The phenomena that first consistently appeared in modernity-the conglomeration of administrative power, the positivization of law, and the emergence of legal authority conceal the beginnings of a kind of political authority that initially emerged in the context of traditional societies."

"The philosophy of history can only glean from historical processes the reason it has already put into them with the help of teleological concepts. By the same token, norms for a reasonable conduct of life cannot be drawn from the natural constitution of the human species any more than they can from history."