Restorative justice as communicative action: balance between system and world of life

Abstract

This scientific article aims to investigate how Restorative Justice and consensus act to mitigate the systemic crisis in criminal law. Through a dialectic and qualitative method, by bibliographic research, and using Jürgen Habermas’ work “The Theory of Communicative Action” as the main theoretical framework, it seeks to demonstrate that, by approaching the ideal situation of speech, the restorative procedure would help to balance the disengagement between penal system and world of life and, therefore, would mitigate criminal systemic crisis. This paper begins by weaving clarifications on the concepts of system and world of life, demonstrating how it was colonized by the latter through modern society evolution. Then, criminal system crisis will be addressed, analyzing, in particular, prison system overcrowding and violence rates in western world. Subsequently, types of social action, difference between strategic and communicative action will be presented to ultimately highlight communicative rationality as a way to overcome systemic crisis. Finally, theoretical aspects of Restorative Justice will be explained, such as a new way of seeing crime, the active subject and justice itself, which will be confronted with the postulates of the ideal situation of speech, concluding that, through this postulates, restorative processes catalyze the ideal situation of speech, being, therefore, a way to bring the balance between world of life and system.