The liberal conception can justify rights against society, but it cannot justify obligations to the public realm. Habermas contends that the liberal tradition has misunderstood the nature of the argument for human rights. If they are pre-political, derived solely from the nature of philosophical argumentation, they function independently of the political process. Habermas solution is to rethink the relationship between law and politics with respect to human rights. Private and public autonomy, he argues, are co-original.
Private autonomy provides for the rights of the individual.
Public autonomy signifies what Europeans often call popular sovereignty or public will-formation. Departing from the tradition outlined by Kant and Rousseau, Habermas refrains from deriving rights from subjective liberties. Human rights, rather, are political from the outset, in the sense that they are derived from the intersubjective relations of citizens who would grant those very rights to one another through consent. Habermas co-originality thesis makes a definite accommodation to the classical republican attempt to anchor the claims of law and politics in a social, and not purely individual, context. It meets the criticism concerning the liberal dissociation between rights and responsibilities.