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