ABSTRACT
The works of Jürgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann formed the two most salient and influential political outlooks of late twentieth-century Germany. At the heart of the works of Habermas and Luhmann are two sharply divergent analyses of the relations between law, politics, reason and metaphysics, and about the legal sources of legitimate political power. Habermas's critique of the metaphysical Enlightenment also contains an attempt to combine the theoretical strengths of, and ultimately to resolve, the two great antinomies of Western political reflection: Kantian liberalism and Aristotelian republicanism. Underlying all Habermas's work is therefore a strong legal humanism, which aims consolidate the claim of the Kantian Enlightenment that the human being is the source of determinately human laws, and that the human builds a universe of human freedom and human law through its acts of legislation.
