Governance und politisches Entscheiden

This book addresses the subject of how communicative interaction can help individuals to realise what courses of action are open to them and what their limits are so that they can take political action. In doing so, it relates this approach to a concept of knowledge, yet neither reduces communicative interaction to conflicts of interest or power, nor to a clarification of the validity of certain causal assumptions and normative developments which is independent of such conflicts. Instead, it calls for sensible deduction of what is worth striving for in a given context and what can be achieved in a certain way so that one can broaden one’s sphere of interests. It also contends that, at least in constitutional democracies, it has to be verified whether exercising power on the basis of causal assumptions really is effective in order to justify its use. Moreover, it maintains that the legitimacy of exercising power to achieve normative goals has to be proven.