Liberal democracy is in need of a defense or a rebirth if it is to survive. The practical challenges to it over the last forty years have been extreme, while the thought that underlies it has become in credible to most men living in liberal democracies. Historicism, cultural relativism, and the fact-value distinction have eroded the bases of conviction that this regime is good or just, that reason can support its claims to our allegiance. Hardly anyone would be willing to defend as truth the natural-right teachings of the founders of liberal democracy or of their philosophic masters, as many, for example, defend Marx. The state of nature and the natural rights deriving from it have taken their place beside the divine right of kings in the graveyard of history. They are understood to be myths or ideologies of ruling classes. One need only recall the vitality of the thought of liberal democracy’s great opponents, Marx and Nietzsche, and reflect on the absence of com parable proponents to recognize the magnitude of the crisis. A renewal in the light of these challenges, theoretical and practical, is clearly of the first importance.
(A Historical Critique of John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice: Failure to Communicate the Tradition by Jürgen Habermas from of series of lectures delivered in Frankfurt July 2003)