Between norms and facts : the constitutional court's commitment to pluralism in South Africa's radically heterogeneous public schools

The concept of practical reason as a subjective capacity is of modern vintage. Converting the Aristotelian conceptual framework ... had the advantage ... of relating practical reason to the "private" happiness and "moral" autonomy of the individual. [P]ractical reason was thenceforth related to the freedom of the human being as private subject who could assume the roles of member of civil society and citizen, both national and global. Hegel remained convinced, just like Aristotle, that society finds its unity in the political life and organisation of the state. However, modern societies have since become so complex that these two conceptual motifs - that of a society concentrated in the state and that of society made up of individuals - can no longer be applied unproblematically. [I]n the Marxist concept of a democratically self-governing society ... both the bureaucratic state and the capitalist economy were [largely] supposed to disappear. Systems theory erases even these traces. The state forms just one subsystem alongside other functionally specified social subsystems. The development of constitutional democracy along the celebrated 'North Atlantic' path has certainly provided us with results worth preserving, but once those who do not have the good fortune to be the heirs of the Founding Fathers turn to their own traditions, they cannot find criteria and reasons that would allow them to distinguish what would be worth preserving from what should be rejected.