Présentation de l'éditeur

This book offers a social theoretical analysis of imaginaries as constituent social forces of positive law and politics.

Constitutional imaginaries invite constitutional and political theorists, philosophers and sociologists to rethink the concept of constitution as the normative legal limitation and control of political power. They show that political constitutions include societal forces impossible to contain by legal norms and political institutions. The constitution of society as one polity defined by the unity of topos-ethnos-nomos, that is the unity of territory, people and their laws, informed the rise of modern nations and nationalisms as much as constitutional democratic statehood and its liberal and republican regimes. However, the imaginary of polity as one nation living on a given territory under the constitutional rule of law is challenged by the process of European integration and its imaginaries informed by transnational legal and societal pluralism, administrative governance, economic performativity and democratically mobilised polity. This book discusses the sociology of imagined communities and the philosophy of modern social imaginaries in the context of transnational European constitutionalism and its recent theories, most notably the theory of societal constitutions. It offers a new approach to the legal constitutions as societal power formations evolving at national, European and global levels.

The book will be of interest to scholars and students interested in constitutional and European law theory and philosophy as much as interdisciplinary and socio-legal studies of transnational law and society.

Jiří Přibáň is Professor of Law, Cardiff University, UK. He graduated from Charles University in Prague (1989) where he was appointed professor of legal theory, philosophy and sociology in 2002. He was also visiting professor or scholar at European University Institute in Florence, New York University (Prague Office), University of California in Berkeley, University of San Francisco, University of Pretoria, The Flemish Academy in Brussels and University of New South Wales, Sydney.

Sommaire

Part I: Constitutional Imaginaries and Transvaluation of Values

Chapter 1: Constitutional Imaginaries: on potentia, potestas and auctoritas

Chapter 2: Transcendental Apparatus of Constitutional Values

Part II: Out of the Topos-Ethnos-Nomos Unity

Chapter 3: Out of Topos: The Nation State Imaginary in Post-National Society

Chapter 4: Out of Ethnos: Imagined Nations and Post-National Rights Culture

Chapter 5: Out of Nomos: The Circularity of Moral Universalism and Legal Particularism

Part III: European Constitutional Imaginaries

Chapter 6: The Imaginary of Legal Pluralism

Chapter 7: The Imaginary of Administrative Calculemus

Chapter 8: The Imaginary of Prosperous Imperium

Chapter 9: The Imaginary of Mobilised Communitas

Présentation de l'éditeur

How did representative institutions become the central organs of governance in Western Europe? What enabled this distinctive form of political organization and collective action that has proved so durable and influential? The answer has typically been sought either in the realm of ideas, in the Western tradition of individual rights, or in material change, especially the complex interaction of war, taxes, and economic growth. Common to these strands is the belief that representation resulted from weak ruling powers needing to concede rights to powerful social groups. Boucoyannis argues instead that representative institutions were a product of state strength, specifically the capacity to deliver justice across social groups. Enduring and inclusive representative parliaments formed when rulers could exercise power over the most powerful actors in the land and compel them to serve and, especially, to tax them. The language of rights deemed distinctive to the West emerged in response to more effectively imposed collective obligations, especially on those with most power.

Deborah Boucoyannis teaches Comparative Politics at George Washington University. This book is based on a dissertation that received the American Political Science Association's Ernst Haas Best Dissertation Award in European Politics and the Seymour Martin Lipset Best Dissertation Award from the Society for Comparative Research. She has published in Perspectives on Politics, Politics and Society, and other journals.

Présentation de l'éditeur

Im Verlauf der jüdischen Emanzipation in Deutschland vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg entschieden sich viele jüdische Studenten für Rechtswissenschaft. Das Fach bot Zugänge zu diversen Tätigkeitsfeldern, und es enthielt ein freiheitliches Versprechen auf Gleichberechtigung. Allerdings erfüllte sich dieses Versprechen bis 1914 nur langsam und wurde vom nationalsozialistischen Deutschland gebrochen. Solange aber die Aussicht auf Emanzipation noch realistisch erschien, erwiesen sich einige Teilgebiete der Rechtswissenschaft als besonders attraktiv, etwa Römische Rechtsgeschichte, Rechtstheorie und Rechtsvergleichung, Handels- und internationales Wirtschaftsrecht, nicht zuletzt auch das neue Arbeits- und Sozialrecht. Die Beiträge dieses Bandes, Ergebnis einer Tagung am Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften in Bad Homburg im Mai 2019, versuchen, den Gründen für diese Präferenzen nachzugehen.

Présentation de l'éditeur

With the publication of the pamphlet The Situation of European Jurisprudence, Schmitt reinvented himself as an author after 1945 and prepared the ground for his work The Nomos of the Earth, which appeared a few months later. The following book offers a productive approach to this hermeneutically demanding and strategic text by providing a translation of the 1950 version and commenting on its historical and philological context. This book then offers plural confrontations, adaptations, and transformations that Schmitt’s text implies for European jurisprudence today. It thus departs from the usual form of a commentary by clearly separating explication and transformation and proposes to employ an actualisation for the twenty-first century.

With contributions by Adeel Hussain, Reinhard Mehring, Michael Stolleis, Christian Tomuschat, Armin von Bogdandy and Lewald Water.