Law and the State

Datos Bibliográficos

ID9726196
AutoresHarold J Laski (autor de correspondencia)
Año1929
Número27
Páginas267
Fecha de publicación1929-11-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaEconomica (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0013-0427 • E-ISSN: 1468-0335
EditorialJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/2548277
OpenAlexW2335248903
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas6

EVERY state in the modern world is a territorial community in the name of which some agent or agents exercise sovereignty. By sovereignty is meant the legal competence to issue orders without a need to refer to a higher authority. The orders so issued constitute law, and are binding upon all who come within their jurisdiction. In some such way as this the modern analytical jurist defines the nature of the state for the purposes of his science. Any explanation of its character is, most usefully, of two kinds. It can be, on the one hand, historical. It is possible to trace the way in which the Respublica Christiawna of the Middle Ages was slowly transformed into the complex of states we know in the modern world, and to show how the demands of unity and order gradually and painfully resulted in the attribution to them of the quality we call sovereignty. Such an explanation has the value of enabling us to see that the modern state is not, either in its form or substance, anything permanent or eternal: it is simply a moment of historical time, obviously born of special needs, and, equally obviously, destined to transformation either when it has ceased to satisfy those needs or when the needs themselves have passed away. The historical study of the state has the great merit of showing us the essentially pragmatic character of all theories about its nature. They are born of the need to satisfy a particular environment, and they die when they cease to render that satisfaction. Alternatively, the jurist's explanation of the state may dwell in the realm of formal logic. Making entire abstraction of the facts of any given state, it may seek the quintessential form of which all states are more or less imperfect expressions. It may then say that where there is an authority which fixes the norms of all law, and beyond which, in the search for the origin of such norms, we cannot go, there we have a sovereign state. The content of the norms, or of the orders begotten legally of them, is

Character (mathematics) · Competence (human resources) · Economics · Jurisdiction · Law and economics · Order (exchange) · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Sovereignty · State (computer science) · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Law · Mathematics · Political Theory and Influence · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought