030457 VO Political Philosophy and Philosophy of Law: Current Challenges (2023W)

This lecture class explores three contemporary predicaments. The first is the unresolved crisis of legal thought. The intellectual merits of traditional legal scholarship have been seriously cast into doubt at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century. From this challenge, “legal science” has never intellectually recovered. What has happened, instead, is that the enduring crisis has been held latent by forces of commodification and disciplinary control. The second predicament is the odyssey of legitimacy. The authority underpinning law is no longer vested in the democratically elected legislature, but increasingly migrating into contexts of administrative problem-solving, judicial review and private dispute settlement. This is to be observed, in particular, in transna-tional contexts. Third, Western societies are currently going through a remarkable reevaluation of their foundational values. While the commitment to social equality becomes recast as the reiteration to include the “excluded”, social freedom is transmuted into a project of self-creation that regards everyone free to choose their own “unconditional” identity (e.g., gender or religion). Finally, the privileged condition of being human (“dignity”) is cast into doubt by intellectual currents such as post- and transhumanism.