Hauke Brunkhorst

Abstract

The call to recognize the significance of normative progress through evolutionary mechanisms of adaptation and revolutionary moments of irruption is a key aspect of Hauke Brunkhorst’s oeuvre. His thesis is that the reinstatement of solidarity in modern times has ‘dialectically’ superseded the original limitations of this term by ‘cancelling’ its restrictive aspects and preserving its emancipatory aspects. Brunkhorst uses the term Aufhebung to conceptualize how moments of freedom within classical civic associations are preserved whilst their unequal distribution is cancelled, and how moments of equality in Christian brotherhood are preserved whilst their other-worldliness is cancelled. Brunkhorst is not faulted for demonstrating the concentration of normative learning processes in the constitutional revolutions of the modern age, but the question remains whether slippage occurs from the indispensable idea of normative evolution to an evolutionism in which the progress of law is presupposed.