"Historically, terrorism falls in a category different from crimes that concern a criminal court judge"
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Habermas is drawing a bright line that liberal democracies instinctively want to blur: terrorism is not just illegality, it is a political strategy aimed at the symbolic foundations of the state. Read literally, the claim sounds like a jurisdictional quibble. Its real provocation is deeper: treating terrorism as ordinary crime risks misrecognizing what terrorists are trying to do (communicate, recruit, polarize), but treating it as war or exceptional emergency risks granting them exactly the stage and escalation they seek.
The phrase "historically" matters. Habermas is a theorist of the public sphere and communicative legitimacy; he’s reminding us that terrorism emerges in distinct historical arrangements - anti-colonial struggles, ideological insurgencies, post-9/11 networked violence - where the act is calibrated less to win a battle than to fracture public consensus and force the state into overreaction. In that sense, the courthouse is almost the wrong theater: criminal law is built for individual culpability and proportional punishment, while terrorism exploits collective fear, media amplification, and the state’s temptation to suspend its own rules.
Subtext: democracies are vulnerable not only to bombs but to their own panic. Habermas is warning against two symmetrical mistakes. One is legal minimalism that pretends terrorism is merely another offense, detachable from politics. The other is securitarian maximalism - special tribunals, indefinite detention, expanded surveillance - that corrodes the very legitimacy the state claims to defend. His intent is to keep the response anchored in constitutional principles while acknowledging that the phenomenon targets the communicative and political order, not just bodies and property.
The phrase "historically" matters. Habermas is a theorist of the public sphere and communicative legitimacy; he’s reminding us that terrorism emerges in distinct historical arrangements - anti-colonial struggles, ideological insurgencies, post-9/11 networked violence - where the act is calibrated less to win a battle than to fracture public consensus and force the state into overreaction. In that sense, the courthouse is almost the wrong theater: criminal law is built for individual culpability and proportional punishment, while terrorism exploits collective fear, media amplification, and the state’s temptation to suspend its own rules.
Subtext: democracies are vulnerable not only to bombs but to their own panic. Habermas is warning against two symmetrical mistakes. One is legal minimalism that pretends terrorism is merely another offense, detachable from politics. The other is securitarian maximalism - special tribunals, indefinite detention, expanded surveillance - that corrodes the very legitimacy the state claims to defend. His intent is to keep the response anchored in constitutional principles while acknowledging that the phenomenon targets the communicative and political order, not just bodies and property.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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