The Health of Nations: Society and Law Beyond the State

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Cambridge University Press, 2002 M10 31 - 436 pages
The human world is changing. Old social structures are being overwhelmed by forces of social transformation which are sweeping across political and cultural frontiers. A social animal is becoming the social species. The animal that lives in packs and herds (family, corporation, nation, state) is becoming a member of a human society which is the society of all human beings, the society of all societies. The age-old problems of social life - religious, philosophical, moral, political, legal, economic - must now be addressed at the level of the whole species, and the level where all cultures and traditions meet and will contribute to an exhilarating and hazardous new form of human self-evolving. In this book Philip Allott explores the social and legal implications and potentialities of these developments in the light of the general theory of society and law which is proposed in his groundbreaking Eunomia: New Order for a New World.

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Contents

The will to know and the will to power Theory and moral responsibility
5
The phenomenon of law
36
Deliver us from social evil International criminal law and moral order
37
The emerging universal legal system The law of all laws
56
Deliver us from social evil International criminal law and moral order
62
Globalisation from above Actualising the ideal through law
70
The nation as mind politic The making of the public mind
97
New Enlightenment The public mind of allhumanity
132
The concept of European Union Imagining the unimagined
229
The conversation that we are The seven lamps of European unity
263
International society and its law Can humanity think of itself as a society under law?
287
The concept of international law
289
International law and the idea of history
316
Intergovernmental societies and the idea of constitutionalism
342
International law and the international Hofmafia Towards a sociology of diplomacy
380
International law and international revolution Reconceiving the world
399

European society and its law Can nations and states transcend themselves through law?
159
European governance and the rebranding of democracy
161
The crisis of European constitutionalism Reflections on a halfrevolution
182

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