In the meantime... questions concerning the "impotence of the ought" have again become urgent in the normative discourse. Such questions once motivated Hegel to study Adam Smith and David Ricardo in order to assure himself that the conflict-ridden market society could be conceived as a moment in the actuality of the ethical Idea. In light of this, John Rawls's interest in the conditions for the political acceptance of his theory of justice, a theory first developed in vacuo, likewise appears as the return of a repressed problem. At stake is the old problem of how the rational project of a just society, in abstract contrast to an obtuse reality, can be realized after confidence in the dialectic of reason and revolution, played out by Hegel and Marx, as a philosophy of history, has been exhausted—and only the reformist path of trial and error remains both practically available and morally reasonable.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1996. Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy. Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought. MIT Press.
Cards on the table moment for Habermas's conception of social progress
