Beyond Law and Revolution ― Sociality, Political Theology and the Modern Constitutional Imagination

In response to the rise of administrative rationality, this book draws on history, social anthropology and political theology, to examine the current crisis of faith in the legal and political constitutional imagination. An important body of law and society research has helped move jurisprudence beyond legal formalism. While the debt of law to more fundamental social and political phenomena has been established, the link between contemporary thinking of society, politics and law to pre-modern philosophical and religious metaphysics was and is still denied both by formalists and anti-formalist realists promoting the rise of social sciences in law. This book contests the premises of such secular optimism, arguing that modern constitutionality still involves legal and political values, rights entitlements and social formations that reflect the particular metaphysical postulates of a bygone era. Even as the constitution of world society is widely described as the result of fragmented and impersonal processes, the occidental fantasy of a sovereign power remains operative. Succinctly – and through a close reading of developments in crisis-stricken Greece and beyond – Marinos Diamantides maintains that the totalizing idea of an absolute but relational power of self-constitution applicable everywhere is the result, not of discarding but, attributing to man, the power of God. Forging a new vocabulary and new instruments by which to understand and respond to various crises in the contemporary state form, this book will be of enormous interest to scholars, students and others with an interest in current legal and political theory.