Law, Liberty and State

Oakeshott, Hayek and Schmitt on the Rule of Law

David Dyzenhaus, Thomas Poole

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781107093386
• eBook ISBN: 9781316310397
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Jurisprudence
• Index: Law

Oakeshott, Hayek and Schmitt are associated with a conservative reaction to the 'progressive' forces of the twentieth century. Each was an acute analyst of the juristic form of the modern state and the relationship of that form to the idea of liberty under a system of public, general law. Hayek had the highest regard for Schmitt's understanding of the rule of law state despite Schmitt's hostility to it, and he owed the distinction he drew in his own work between a purpose-governed form of state and a law-governed form to Oakeshott. However, the three have until now rarely been considered together, something which will be ever more apparent as political theorists, lawyers and theorists of international relations turn to the foundational texts of twentieth-century thought at a time when debate about liberal democratic theory might appear to have run out of steam.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Title page
• Copyright information
• Table of contents
• List of contributors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The mystery of the state: state concept, state theory and state making in Schmitt and Oakeshott
• 3 Law as concrete order: Schmitt and the problem of collective freedom
• 4 Nomos
• 5 Carl Schmitt´s defence of sovereignty
• 6 Schmitt, Oakeshott and the Hobbesian legacy in the crisis of our times
• 7 The mystery of lawlessness: war, law and the modern state
• 8 Reconfiguring reason of state in response to political crisis
• 9 The rules of the game: stochastic rationality in Oakeshott’s rule-of-law theory
• 10 Dreaming the rule of law
• 11 What, if anything, is wrong with Hayek´s model constitution?
• 12 Hayek and the state
• 13 Local and global knowledge in the administrative state
• Index