Abstract
It is often stated that ‘crisis’ serves as a chance for social change. This ‘crisis-chance’ theorem is a favored and often repeated notion of market fundamentalists or developmentalists. However, it is not productive to just criticize the ideological nature of the theorem. There is a positive side to ‘crisis’ as a chance out of which there may emerge new relations among unknown persons in the unknown situation as R. Solnit has pointed out.
This paper explains J. Habermas’s theory of modern society as a critical and reflexive attempt to formulate such a ‘crisis-chance’ theorem. Although Ch. Mouffe observed critically Habermas’s theory was so unpolitical that it overestimated people’s mutual understanding and agreement as a solution to the ‘crisis’ of the society, Habermas is more than a vulgar modernist. His communication theory does not underestimate non-knowing and disagreement. And his conception of ‘the unfinished project’ emphasizes the openness of the modern society towards the unknown. The modern society that includes constitutionalism as a core also has illegal elements as driving forces for self-change. According to Habermas, ‘crisis’ is a moment in which the deficiencies of the current legal system becomes important and is a chance for the people defined as illegal to define the unknown in the current legal system.
The “disaster utopia” that Solnit postulates appears to be based on a part of Habermas’s understanding of the modern society. It seems to be a space in which the illegality of the illegal minority is the most relativized and the arena in which the discursive possibility of agreement with the majority is opened.
