The purposiveness of law: Two concepts of representation in the European Union

Law and Philosophy

Volumn 17, Issue 5-6, 1998, Pages 481-507

  Lindahl, Hans ^a  

^a TILBURG UNIVERSITY   (Netherlands)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0032277784     PISSN: 01675249     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3505186     Document Type: Article

References (34)

1. Neil MacCormick, "Sovereignty, Democracy, Subsidiarity", Rechtstheorie 25 (1994), p. 290.
2. N. MacCormick, "Democracy, Subsidiarity and Citizenship in the 'European Commonwealth' ", Law and Philosophy 16 (1997), p. 339.
3. N. MacCormick, "Sovereignty: Myth and Reality", in N. Jareborg (ed.), Towards Universal Law: Trends in National European and International Lawmaking (Uppsala: Justus Förlag, 1995), p. 236.
4. N. MacCormick, "Beyond the Sovereign State", The Modern Law Review 56 (1993) 1, p. 12.
5. N. MacCormick, "Sovereignty: Myth and Reality", op. cit., p. 235.
6. Jean Bodin, On Sovereignty, trans. and ed. Julian H. Franklin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 4.
7. This contradiction is already present in Dicey. According to classical British constitutional doctrine, "The principle of Parliamentary sovereignty means neither more nor less than this, namely, that Parliament . . . has, under the English constitution, the right to make or unmake any law whatever; and, further, that no person or body is recognised by the law of England as having a right to override or set aside the legislation of Parliament" (A.C. Dicey, Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982), p. 3). As this definition makes clear, Parliament's "sovereignty" is conferred or conditioned by the constitution.
8. Both Hart and Kelsen are wary of discussing the concept of law in terms of the relation between a manifold of norms and a purpose. In Kelsen's case, this move is explicitly motivated by the desire to avoid any form of legal foundationalism; despite significant differences between Kelsen's "basic norm" and Hart's "rule of recognition", the same motivation seems to govern Hart's analysis of the concept of law. The problem with this approach is, first, that law is a purposive order and, second, that the concept of legitimate power is conceptually bound up with the purposiveness of law. Rather than sidestepping this issue, a principal task for legal philosophy consists in giving a non-foundationalist account of legitimate power and of the law's purposiveness. Such, precisely, is the aim of this paper.
9. Extracts from "Brunner et al. v. The European Union Treaty", Common Market Law Review 31 (1994), p. 252. The complete translation of the decision is in CMLR 1 (1994), pp. 57 ff.
10. Extracts from "Brunner et al. v. The European Union Treaty", Common Market Law Review 31 (1994), p. 252. The complete translation of the decision is in CMLR 1 (1994), pp. 57 ff.
11. Ibid., p. 256. The English version inaccurately translates this expression as "principle of accountability." I shall not discuss here the similarities and differences between the Court's and Kelsen's employment of the term "imputation."
12. Ibid., p. 258. The English version incorrectly translates Staatenverbund as "federation of states." The inimitable German reads: ". . . keinen sich auf einer europäisches Staatsvolk stützenden Staat."
13. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Volume 1: Language, trans. Ralph Mannheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), p. 69.
14. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Volume 3: The Phenomenology of Knowledge, trans. Ralph Mannheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), p. 129.
15. E. Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Volume 1, p. 80.
16. Retrospectively, Cassirer's choice of the term "function" is unfortunate, as the contemporary reader is tempted to equate it with "functionalism" or "instrumentalism." This equation is mistaken, for Cassirer conceives the term function as being synonymous with relation. Significantly, Part I of Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff, the work in which he introduces this term, is titled "Thing-Concepts and Relation-Concepts."
17. Ernst Cassirer, Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff. Untersuchungen über die Grundfragen der Erkenntniskritik (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1994), p. 376.
18. As Wittgenstein puts it, "the difficulty arises in these cases through mixing up 'is' and 'is called'." (Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, trans. by G.E.M. Anscombe, ed. by G. H. von Wright, R. Rhees and G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978), p. 88.) Wittgenstein's views on rule-following and Cassirer's analysis of functions coincide in decisive aspects. In Het verdwijnpunt van de wet. Een essay over de symboolwerking van wetgeving (Zwolle, The Netherlands: Tjeenk Willink, 1997), Bert van Roermund has linked Wittgenstein's analyses of rule-following to Erwin Panofsky's studies on the "point of view" in art, which build on Cassirer's concept of functional representation.
19. As Wittgenstein puts it, "the difficulty arises in these cases through mixing up 'is' and 'is called'." (Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, trans. by G.E.M. Anscombe, ed. by G. H. von Wright, R. Rhees and G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978), p. 88.) Wittgenstein's views on rule-following and Cassirer's analysis of functions coincide in decisive aspects. In Het verdwijnpunt van de wet. Een essay over de symboolwerking van wetgeving (Zwolle, The Netherlands: Tjeenk Willink, 1997), Bert van Roermund has linked Wittgenstein's analyses of rule-following to Erwin Panofsky's studies on the "point of view" in art, which build on Cassirer's concept of functional representation.
20. E. Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Vol. 1, p. 86.
21. E. Cassirer, Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff, p. 343.
22. E. Cassirer, "Die Sprache und der Aufbau der Gegenstandswelt", in E.W. Orth and J.M. Krois (eds.), Symbol, Technik, Sprache (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1995), p. 122.
23. What Gadamer calls "application" in Truth and Method can be advantageously characterized as "representation."
24. Ernst Cassirer, "Die Sprache und der Aufbau der Gegenstandswelt", op. cit., p. 121.
25. Cassirer, Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff, p. 34. As will be clear from the following discussion, reifying the general also implies reifying the particular.
26. Compare this view with the hypothesis of a "dual interception of reference in narratives" elaborated by Bert van Roermund in Law, Narrative and Reality. An Essay in Intercepting Politics (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Press, 1997), p. 19 ff.
27. Brunner et al. v. The European Union Treaty, op. cit., p. 257.
28. See my "Sovereignty and Symbolization", to appear in Rechtstheorie 28 (1997), p. 3.
29. Case 294/83, ECR (1986), p. 1365.
30. R. Barents and L.J. Brinkhorst, for example, remark that the autonomy of European law "does not rest on determinate metajuridical conceptions about European unity, federal structures or something of the sort. On the contrary, the ECJ conceives its mandate as a call to interpret Community law in view of the far-reaching integration objectives set out in articles 2 and 3 of the Community Treaty" (Grondlijnen van Europees recht (Alphen aan den Rijn, The Netherlands: Samsom H.D. Tjeenk Willink, 1996), p. 242).
31. Case 26/62, ECR (1963), p. 12. Significantly, the Van Gend & Loos decision unfolds the two-way dynamic of representation: the Court derives its decision from the EC Treaty and it also ascribes a specific meaning to the Treaty.
32. E. Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Vol. 3, p. 299.
33. N. MacCormick, "The Maastricht-Urteil: Sovereignty Now", European Law Journal 1 (3) (1995), p. 265.
34. This, I think, is what Bankowski and Scott call "overlapping normative orders" in "The European Union?" in R. Bellamy (ed.), Constitutionalism, Democracy and Sovereignty: American and European Perspectives (Aldershot: Avebury Press, 1996). Although they understand such normative orders as incompatible with the idea of sovereignty, the coexistence in identical space of different normative orders presupposes the different viewpoints assured by sovereignty.