From positivism to idealism: a study of the moral dimensions of legality

Sean Coyle0754623998, 978-0-7546-2399-1

Examining the emergence and development of legal positivism as a distinctive and particularly powerful tradition in legal thought, this book places particular emphasis on its relationship to traditional understandings of the common law and on forms of idealism. The focus throughout is on the consequences positivism holds for the idea of the rule of law and of law’s role in maintaining (and perhaps creating) conditions of stable social order. The book examines the shifts in thinking about the rule of law and the wider significance of law, brought about by changing conceptions of the nature of law: from an understanding of law in which the primary focus is on rights, to an articulation of the legal order as a body of deliberately posited rules and, finally, to an understanding of law as a corpus of systematic rules and principles, underpinned by an abiding concern with individual rights.

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Table of contents :
Contents……Page 6
Series Editor’s Preface……Page 8
Preface……Page 10
1 Reflection on Law’s Nature……Page 12
Jurisprudence and the Moral Life……Page 18
The Importance of a Historical Perspective……Page 25
2 Reason, Will and Law……Page 30
Morality, History and the Will……Page 31
Natural Law and Protestant Autonomy……Page 37
Historicism and Geist……Page 45
3 Doctrinal Scholarship and the Science of Right……Page 50
Rights and Forms of Justice……Page 51
Natural Right and Political Authority……Page 59
Natural Right, Juridical Reason and Legal Doctrine……Page 68
4 Legal Positivism, Doctrinal Science and Statist Conceptions of Law……Page 76
Doctrinal Science and Posited Rules……Page 77
Political Stability and ‘Top-Down’ Authority……Page 80
Posited Rules and Formal Authority……Page 85
Positivism and Statism……Page 90
Statism and its Limits……Page 94
Statist Impulses and Moral Visions……Page 99
5 The Changing Face of Positivism: From Hobbes to Hart……Page 102
Legal Science in the Century after Hobbes……Page 103
The Nature of Positivistic Legal Science……Page 108
Social Order and the Significance of ‘Rules’……Page 111
The Limits of Legal Positivism……Page 119
Validity and Recognition……Page 122
Recognition and its Limits……Page 127
Recognition and Construction……Page 129
From Positivism to Idealism……Page 135
7 Beyond Positivism and Idealism……Page 138
The Character of Legal Reflection……Page 141
Legal Reason……Page 150
The Withering of Ideals……Page 155
8 Liberal Politics and Private Law……Page 158
Rights, Interests and Legal Doctrine……Page 159
Private Law, Powers and the Will……Page 163
Individualism and Autonomy……Page 171
9 The Moral Nature of Law……Page 174
Morality and Identity……Page 175
Constructing the Ideal……Page 183
Legality, Theory and Geist……Page 188
D……Page 192
I……Page 193
L……Page 194
N……Page 195
R……Page 196
U……Page 197
W……Page 198