In each political community, he thought, one will find a sovereign—a person or a determinate group whom the rest obey habitually, but who is not in the habit of obeying anyone else. The legal rules of a community are the general commands its sovereign has deployed.
Evidence
Boulainvilliers describes the phenomenon of power not in juridical terms of sovereignty but in historical terms of domination and the play of relations of force. — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 4931 (
#complicates, via linked claim)
Categorization
- corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim
- XREF: connects to: Legitimate political authority rests on an exchange of protection for obedience. — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 558; First, Austin’s key assumption that in each community a determinate group or institution can be found, which is in ultimate control of all other groups, seemed not to hold in a complex society. Political control in a modern nation is pluralistic and shifting, a matter of more or less, of compromise and cooperation and alliance, so that it is often impossible to say that any person or group has that dramatic control necessary to qualify as an Austinian sovereign.; Positivism has a few central and organizing propositions as its skeleton, and though not every philosopher who is called a positivist would subscribe to these in the way I present them, they do define the general position I want to examine. These key tenets may be stated as follows: (a) The law of a community is a set of special rules used by the community directly or indirectly for the purpose of determining which behavior will be punished or coerced by the public power. These special rules can be identified and distinguished by specific criteria, by tests having to do not with their content but with their pedigree or the manner in which they were adopted or developed. (+10 more)
Broader Connections
- Hart points out that Austin’s view that every rule is a general command obliterates the distinction between being obliged to do something and being obligated to do it. If one is bound by a rule he…
#qualifies(0.85) - A rule differs from an order, among other ways, by being normative, by setting a standard of behavior that has a call on its subject beyond the threat that may enforce it. A rule can never be…
#contradicts(0.85) - Domination and relations of force replace juridical sovereignty as the lens on power
#complicates(0.85) — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 4931 - In time, however, those who studied and tried to apply Austin’s model found it too simple. Many objections were raised, among which were two that seemed fundamental. First, Austin’s key assumption…
#responds-to(0.80) - Legal obligation differs from mere coercion by threat of force
#expands(0.70) — Ronald M. Dworkin, The Model of Rules, 40 - Reductionist legal theories obscure the diverse functions of rules within a social system
#complicates(0.60) — HLA Hart, The Concept of Law (Clarendon Law…, 649