Mundo da Vida, Ethos Democrático e Mundialização: A Democracia Deliberativa segundo Habermas

The article seeks to show to what extent the conception of deliberative democracy proposed by Jurgen Habermas’s discourse theory accounts for the problems of juridification and economic reductions inherent in globalization, regarded as a technical, systemic colonization of the lifeworld. By resorting to his conception of a transnational, democratic ethos grounded in popular sovereignty, Habermas’s theory succeeds in rescuing the normative thrust of globalization by means of irreducible human values, such as freedom, dignity, and human rights, intrinsic to different, incompatible self-understanding accounts of lifeworlds.