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

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