The rational training of opinion and will in the philosophy of Jürgen Habermas

Abstract

The notion of public opinion as a process cannot be limited solely to the empirical basis of a theory, it must also focus on the position that this notion occupies with respect to the interpretation of society. Jürgen Habermas's approach to public opinion stems from his classic work on Bourgeois Advertising. Habermas constructs the Normative Theory of Democracy, which is based on the communicative conditions in which a Discursive Formation of the Opinion and Will of a public formed by the citizens of a State can take place as an unfolding of the analyzes about the public opinion. In this argumentative way, Habermas takes up the historical-philosophical project of modernity, attributing to the public opinion the function of legitimizing the political domain through a critical process of communication based on the principles of a rationally motivated consensus. The scope of this article is to make explicit the constitutive elements of the habermasian reflections on the Rational Formation of Opinion and Will, since it is from this primordial concept that we can understand the legitimation of the Rule of Law. We will trace what led the habermasian reflection to seek the conditions of an authentic participation of individuals in a public space, where there is responsibility and solidarity in the execution of the solutions of the problems of a community, and its consequent unfolding that leads to the theory of political power.