The modes of political theory

Hegel and Hobbes on Institutions and Collective Actions

.  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is usually, and rightly, considered the foremost representative of the organistic conception of society. It is only natural to think that his view has nothing in common with the kind of individualistic outlook that dominates our legal and political thinking, and that I myself have tried to defend. I try to show why certain insights of Hegel are potentially important even for individualistic legal and political theories. First, I explicate some of the problems he struggled with, and compare his views with those of Thomas Hobbes. Next, I try to link his views to the modern theories of institutions and of collective action. The antidemocratic ideology expressed…

The Foundations of Legal Systems

The most important institution claiming political authority in modern societies is the State and its legal system. Both in legal and in political theory the questions which are traditionally held to be the most fundamental are centered around this claim.

The Concept of Authority

There is a general agreement that the concept of practical authority can be analysed as a right to impose obligations or commands on its subject and that this right is correlated with a duty to obey. Usually it is also implied that these rights and duties are mutually recognized. Thus authority is considered as a consensus-based notion. But it is important to notice that political authorities can have other functions, too. They can change the normative positions of their subjects by permitting, authorizing, delegating, exercising a veto, by declaring acts valid or invalid, etc. They can create and change definition rules, e.g. determine the values of units of payment. They are often authori…

Ronald Dworkin on Communities and Obligations: A Critical Comment

An Example: Money

The institution of money, like that of language, or that of the State, has often been seen to be based on some kind of contractual agreement. Aristotle describes the nature of money as follows: Money has become by convention a sort of representative of demand; and that is why it has the name ‘money’ (nomisma) because it exists not by nature but by law (nomos) and it is in our power to change it and make it useless. (Ethica Nicomachea, V.5.II33a) The word nomos is ambiguous: in another translation of Ethica it has been translated as “custom”. This ambiguity reflects a theoretical problem in the classical social theory: money has been seen either as a result of an act of will of the legislato…

Authority and Coordination

There are many possible starting points for attempts to link authority with the coordination of human interactions: the most famous forerunner here is of course David Hume with his theory of justice. I will, however, start from a more recent classic. Herbert A. Simon’s Administrative Behaviour (1945, 2nd ed. 1957) includes an important theory for the role of authority. It is an obvious sign of the lack of communication between different branches and traditions in social theory that many jurists and political theorists emphasizing the coordinative functions of authority have paid no attention to Simon’s classical book.

Is Political Theory Politically Interesting?

Game Theory and Mutual Beliefs

Conventional facts are based on mutual beliefs which work as reasons for actions. The question remaining is: How can other peoples’ beliefs in something, which leads them to act accordingly, be a reason for someone else acting in a similar way? What is the compelling force of conventional facts noticed by Durkheim?

Efficacy and Obligation

In spite of their differences, most modern legal theories seem to accept a common necessary (but not sufficient) condition for the existence of a legal system (LS). A system of rules is an LS only if it is generally efficacious and performs certain social functions. There is, however, no agreement on the definition of efficacy or on the nature of relevant social functions.

Social Choice in the Real World II: Cyclical Preferences and Strategic Voting in the Finnish Presidential Elections

The empirical relevance of the theoretical results of social choice theory is still unclear. The most radical thesis, put forth by William Riker, is that politics is a highly unstable process, characterized by preference cycles and strategic voting. This article - a continuation of an earlier article published in this journal - examines the Finnish presidential election in 1925, 1931, 1937 and 1982. The conclusion is that preference cycle and strategic voting have had a significant impact in the discussed cases. The relevancy of the social choice approach and its relation to historical research are discussed.

On the nature of social and institutional reality

The Philosophy of Democracy and the Paradoxes of Majority Rule

The Role of Force

Max Weber defined the state as an organization which successfully maintained the monopoly of legitimate violence over certain territory. This definition, simple as it is, raises several problems. Firstly, it should be noted that it is at best the definition of the modern State. There have been organizations which are, perhaps anachronistically, called states by historians or anthropologists, but which did not satisfy the definition.

Conventionalism and Law

The defining property of those theories which are usually collected under the label “legal positivism” is the thesis that certain social facts form a sufficient condition for the existence of law and legal systems. The acceptance or rejection of this thesis has important consequences, but there are other issues in legal theory which are of equal importance. Thus, the positivism-antipositivism issue is only one possible way of classifying different theories.