The culmination of the project that Habermas began with The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere in 1962, it represents a lifetime of political thought on the nature of democracy and law.

Habermas contends that law is the primary medium of social integration in modern society, and is power that extracts obedience from its subjects.

As power alone cannot grant it its legitimacy in modern society, law derives its validity from the consent of the governed.

Only when various ethical traditions come into conflict with one another, as they inevitably do in a modern pluralist culture, do normative issues arise that have implications for everyone.

[2] Between Facts and Norms concludes with a proposal for a new paradigm of law that goes beyond the dichotomies that have afflicted modern political theory from its inception, and that still underlie current controversies between so-called liberals and republicans.