The Concept of Liberal Democratic Law

Johan van der Walt is Professor of Philosophy of Law, University of Luxembourg.

Preface

Introduction

1 Law, sovereignty and justice

2 Sovereignty and "correctness" or "rightness"

3 The symbolic and the real, conviction and opinion

4 Legal positivism

5 Re-reading twentieth century jurisprudence

6 Natural law

7 Critical theory and the theory of liberal democracy

8 From Böckenförde and Lefort to Agamben – a note on method and methodology

9 Outline

1 Nomos and nominalism – the Villey thesis

1 Philosophical beginnings: Plato and Aristotle

2 Aristotle and Roman law

3 From Roman law to Saint Augustine

4 Saint Thomas and William of Ockham

5 An anti-democratic thesis?

2 Nomos of the Earth – between Villey and Schmitt

1 Pindar’s poem: nomos as physis

2 Nomos as kosmos

3 Nomos as concrete political space and order

4 Nomos from Mytilene and Melos to Versailles

5 Nomos, force and violence under the Jus Publicum Europaeum

6 Villey and Schmitt

3 Nomos and physis

1 Two conceptions of nature

2 An irreversible fall from innocence

3 Antigone

4 Protagoras

5 The poetic and the political

4 Potentiality and actuality

1 Aristotle’s potentiality – actuality distinction

2 The unravelling of the potentiality-actuality distinction

3 Agamben’s Pauline reconstruction of the potentiality-actuality distinction

5 Auctoritas and potestas

1 The state or exception

2 Emperor, Pope And king

3 President, chancellor, Führer

4 Nomos and physis

6 From nomos to demos

1 The people?

2 The revolutionary deification of the people

3 The unfindable People

4 The general will of the People

5 Universal and particular – key coordinates of a bourgeois century

7 Economy, society and spiritual history

1 The utilitarian and economic unity of the people

2 The historico-spiritual and conceptual unity of the people – Kant, Hegel, Savigny

3 The social unity of the people: living law, Freirechtsbewegung and American realism

8 Rules, principles and political morality

1 Law as primary and secondary rules – Hart

2 Law as rules, principles and political morality – Dworkin

9 Legal normativity and spiritual culture

1 The normative integration of society – Kelsen

2 The cultural integration of society – Smend

10 Political antagonism and normative contradiction

1 Law as political antagonism – Schmitt

2 Law as fundamental contradiction – Duncan Kennedy

11 The distilled concept

1 Two concepts of Nature and Spirit

2 Distilling law from the metaphysics of life

3 Debunking nomos

4 Debunking demos

5 Divided life

6 Potentiality and actuality

7 Law as legislation

8 The distilled concept defined

Bibliography

Index