A Discourse on discours : Habermas, Foucault and the Political/Legal Discourses in China ; Un discours sur le discours : Habermas, Foucault et les discours politiques/juridiques en Chine

Abstract

The adaptability issues of Western democracy in the context of China have always been an important academic concern. This research was intended to study the adaptability of deliberative democracy in the Chinese context in terms of a normative perspective. At the beginning, this research focused on Habermas's Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, because it is one of the most discussed normative deliberative democratic theories in China today. Taking into consideration the normativity and ideality of Habermas's theory, Foucault's discourse theory of power relations is then introduced to illustrate the tensions between different Western discourse theories. In order to investigate the adaptabilities of these two discourse theories in the Chinese context, and to balance the tension between them, another normative concept, namely the Confucian Rationality, is then drawn upon from traditional Chinese cultural sources. Accordingly, these three dimensions of discourse theory, as well as the relations between them, are presented. The employment of some empirical descriptions of certain Chinese historical-political facts is also necessary to explain, to supplement, or to question this theoretic framework. Two tension perspectives are critical throughout the research: the tension between universality and particularity, and the tension between normative theories and social-political facts.Through the approaches of textual studies, aided by conceptual and empirical studies as complements, the research is conducted as following: Chapter 1 discusses the tension between Habermas's normative discourse theory of law and democracy and social facts; Chapter 2 analyzes the tension between Habermas's discourse theory and Foucault's discourse theory of power relations, and proposes to rethink the tension problems. Chapter 3 tries to search for the resources in traditional Chinese political cultures, and to put forward another normative discourse theory- the discourse theory of Confucian rationality- to balance the tension between the ...