Books dealing with issues of democracy and power and the problem of justifying action, written before Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine, read differently now. This also applies to the latest anthology by the 57-year-old Frankfurt philosophy professor and political theorist Rainer Forst, the most prominent Habermas student of the third or fourth (depending on how you count) generation of the Frankfurt School. The 16 essays deal with the approaches of different forms of critical theory as well as further developments on a theory of justice and the problems of justification that arise from it.
If one wanted to put a catchphrase on Forst’s concern, then “dialectics of democracy” would come into question. This includes the analysis of the symptoms of crisis in current democracies and their, as Forst writes, “structural” and “normative” problems. In his opinion, the future of democracy depends on regaining its social shaping power and on politics not just being limited to snagging a national place in the sun of the global economy: “Progressive politics must find ways to develop transnational democratic power and it would be good to start doing that, at least in Europe, and to form the relevant ‘party families’ into genuine transnational parties that redefine what the common good means.”
It is always about transforming power relations into relations of justification
However, emphatic statements like these are not in a vacuum for Forst, he has been trying to resolve the tensions between individuals and collectives through political theory for a good 20 years now. His major concern is to transform power relations into justification relations. For this he uses a concept of “normativity” that is as rich in content as it is often criticized – because it contains a lot of moral presuppositions: “It is and remains the task of democracy as a practice of collective justification to civilize and transform the forces and power relations that arbitrarily rule life of the people or at least are not sufficiently controlled in a way that is compatible with the common good. Democracy can only fulfill its purpose of justice if this transformation and control is successful.”
Rainer Forst: The noumenal republic. Critical Constructivism after Kant. Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin 2021. 360 pages, 22 euros.
According to Forst, concepts such as solidarity, tolerance, justice or freedom must first be neutralized in order to be able to play their stabilizing and demanding role in democracy. Of course, that makes Forst’s thing abstract and theoretical at first, but that’s exactly what it’s all about: For him, the terms have to be spared so that they can actually be effective when they are used.
Ultimately, he argues against a “promiscuity” of the terms. According to Forst, before concepts that have been refined in this way can be fed into the “dialectics of democracy”, one needs an ideal type and an idea of whether and how it will actually prove itself in the discourse. Forst’s methodical caution does not lead to suspicion of ideology in relation to the moral-philosophical tradition, rather it enables it to be reused because it aims at the concrete. The effectiveness of this construct is demonstrated particularly impressively in the book’s analysis of human rights.
The philosopher, clearly on the side of “solidarity as collective action”, writes: “The general concept of solidarity does not imply any specific measure of what solidarity requires in concrete contexts. This is determined by the different conceptions of collective connectedness , which form special contextual forms of solidarity.”
Thus the self-prescribed ground of “neutrality” is not left in the definition. And yet with “connectedness” – Forst defines it “as the motivating force” that can “prompt certain actions beyond the narrowly understood self-interest” – a term is inserted whose normative charge cannot be denied. At least one could understand Forst’s “conclusion” that “in the Kantian understanding, solidarity is only a virtue when it is based on practical reason, which is based on the best justification among people of equal status. Seen in this way, the question of solidarity refers to the broader question of how we should understand ourselves as moral beings.”
In other words: the new volume offers a good introduction to Forst’s political thinking, it proves the interest of the theorist in the political present and the historical and systematic references are always clear. The fact that he also opens up theoretical possibilities to move argumentatively in the new European reality is by no means his merit. “Connectedness” as a determinant of the “moral nature” of people – that is – if you look closely – a more radical, a more social approach that goes far beyond what many others dare to think at the moment.