Democracy is power’s technical character normalized in moral terms

Evidence

To increase it makes more abstract decision-making criteria necessary and applicable. This brings us to the technical character of power and its rationality. In this sense the technical character of power can then be conceived of as democracy and be normalized and reformulated in moral terms in the premises of its construction. The presupposition for this is that the limitations on power are integrated into the conditions of compatibility with the structure of society. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 745

Categorization

• XREF: Links Luhmann’s power theory to institutional legitimacy — the mechanism by which faceless commitments become morally normalized and thus stevens-able. — connects to: Power-legitimation must come from within democracy itself once unifying worldviews fade — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 92; Technical progress produces a comfortable, democratic unfreedom — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 105; Habermas openly deployed ‘democracy’ as a radical normative measure unlike his predecessors — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2335 (+5 more)