Introduction

Abstract

The central position politics and the political discourse occupy in the modern legal theoretical discussion has been summarized as that:

“Virtually all of modern jurisprudence rests on a distinction between legal reasoning and politics. Legal analysis and reasoning, on the one end, and political argument or philosophy, on the other, are thought to be recognizably distinct discursive practices.”¹ However, the absence or presence of any general connection between law and politics and how this has been mirrored in legal theory obviously is not simply a recent phenomenon. Niccolò Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes stand out clearly for their early lucid and penetrating analyses of the law-politics issues in early modern times.² From the very birth of the nation state, and particularly after its transformation into the modern welfare state, attention has been specifically devoted to explaining the interrelationship of the legal and political phenomena. This theoretical interest has its roots in the fact as pointed out by Jürgen Habermas, that the very “complex of law and political power characterizes the transition from societies organized by kinship to those early societies already organized around states.”³