Carl Schmitt's false trilemma and the compatibility between legal positivism and the ideal of constitutional democracy
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5007/1677-2954.2022e91778Keywords:
Legal positivism, Constitutional democracy, Rule of law, Normativism, DecisionismAbstract
In his work On the three types of juristic thought, Carl Schmitt presents legal positivism as normativistic in its structure but decisionist in its practical consequences. The way he suggested to avoid decisionism was to think of law not as an abstract system of rules but primarily as a concrete order. In this paper, we intend first to show that the three alternatives of legal theory described by Schmitt — namely, normativism, decisionism and his proposed theory based on the concrete order — are incompatible with the institutional realization of the ideal of a constitutional democracy as conceived by John Rawls. Then, with this problem in view, we construct a fourth alternative of legal theory from the work of H. L. A. Hart and Neil MacCormick, which is a kind of non-normativistic legal positivism that is free both from the decisionist implications of theories like Kelsen’s and from the dependence on anything like Schmitt’s concrete order. Our last step is to check the compatibility of this fourth alternative with the realization of the rawlsian ideal of constitutional democracy as well as the latter’s institutional viability.
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