Works community and workers' organization

Two types of recent contributions to the discussion of a ‘crisis’ in law recall issues in Weimar labour law. Wolfgang Teubner and others propound a ‘reflexive law’ patterned on the multiple constitutions of collective labour law; and American ‘critical legal studies’ dismiss legal reasoning and press for frankly ‘altruistic’ policy-making in the courts. The Weimar controversy over the extent to which ‘works-community’ supercedes the legal attributes of the employment relationship as specified by the older law of contract shows, first, that the characteristic collectivism and institutionalism of the socialist labour movement's legal strategy was premissed on a complementary political conception of the organization of labour, and, second, that Socialist lawyers defended a legal discourse which was critical of prevailing doctrine but grounded in its systematizations, as essential to their struggle against the amorphous, nominally altruistic reading of the employment relationships which the German courts and then the Nationla Socialist regime imposed upon labour. Their recognition of the problems posed by deficient or excessive politicization of law makes them again important, notwithstanding their political defeats, and their survivors' disillusionment

Collectivism · Comparative law · Doctrine · Individualism · Labour law · Legal doctrine · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · International Labor and Employment Law · Labor Movements and Unions · Social Policy and Reform Studies · Law

• Arbeitsmarkt, Verbände und Staat 1918-1933

  Hans-Hermann Hartwich, Georg Kotowski•Arbeitsmarkt, Verbände und Staat…•1967

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• The Social Significance of the Basic Laws in the Weimar Constitution

  Franz Neumann•Economy and Society•1981

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