In Between Facts and Norms Jurgen Habermas works out the legal and politicalimplications of his Theory of Communicative Action (1981), bringing to fruition the projectannounced with his publication of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere in 1962. Thisnew work is a major contribution to recent debates on the rule of law and the possibilities ofdemocracy in postindustrial societies, but it is much more.The introduction by William Rehgsuccinctly captures the special nature of the work, noting that it offers a sweeping, sociologicallyinformed conceptualization of law and basic rights, a normative account of the rule of law and theconstitutional state, an attempt to bridge normative and empirical approaches to democracy, and anaccount of the social context required for democracy. Finally, the work frames and caps thesearguments with a bold proposal for a new paradigm of law that goes beyond the dichotomies that haveafflicted modern political theory from its inception and that
