This paper addresses the concept of legal originality through the philosophical framework of Alasdair MacIntyre to demonstrate its relevance to contemporary legal theory. It identifies a contronymic split in the concept of originality, between a modern and individualist understanding as subjective novelty, and a tradition-constituted that sees it as a return to source and origin. I contrast MacIntyre’s teleological epistemology with Mathias Siems’s descriptivist methodology on the issue of legal originality, arguing that Siems’s taxonomy of originality is constrained by an emotivist and managerial framework under the guise of descriptive objectivity. Deconstructing the modern pretence of liberal neutrality, the paper challenges the idea of a radical separation between ethics and legal thought, evaluates current alternatives and places a MacIntyrean hypothesis as a viable solution. I propose the recovery of a narrative and practical approach to legal theory. Within it, originality is understood not as a subjective endeavour but as a community and tradition-constituted participated approach, that implicitly aligns with a natural understanding of human telos. I suggest this movement towards a teleological foundation and legal prudence for a proper understanding of law.
This study examines the normative grounds for criticising double standards in human rights as practised by public authorities—an issue arguably more complex than direct violations, yet no less intolerable. It begins by distinguishing between two types of double standards—those involving fundamental interests and those that are more contested—as well as between their agents: individuals and institutions. Building on this framework, the study explores the conditions under which hypocritical blame may be criticised, first in the case of individuals and then in that of institutions. First, even when an authority retains the standing to invoke human rights norms, institutional double standards are shown to undermine its legitimacy by violating two core principles of the rule of law: non-contradiction and congruence. Second, the study reconstructs institutional obligations from a role-based perspective, offering a new theoretical justification for the criticism of hypocrisy in the human rights context. It argues that the hypocrisy of role-holders may be condemned not only on grounds of personal integrity and obligations to others, but also as an abuse of shared values. Ultimately, it demonstrates that even if a hypocritical authority retains the standing to criticise, their double standards undermine the values they purport to uphold and thus deserve normative condemnation.
The culture of justification has become one of the most refined languages through which liberal constitutionalism understands its own legitimacy. Its central promise is that public power should be answerable to those whom it burdens, especially through rights-based proportionality review and a deeper right to justification. This article reconstructs that promise in its doctrinal and philosophical forms and then subjects it to an immanent critique. The argument is that the justificatory paradigm tends to stage power as a discrete, attributable act that can be contested by an addressee before an institution capable of receiving reasons. That staging has considerable normative force, yet it leaves a residue: forms of structural and economic domination that are legally produced without appearing as particular justificatory events. Property, contract, corporate form, and market architecture frequently operate as background conditions of reason-giving, while the paradigm more readily interrogates the later public act that interferes with them. A more adequate culture of justification would have to treat legal structures themselves as objects of contestation and connect public reasons to the social positions from which reasons can be demanded, supplied, and refused.
This review essay examines three interconnected works addressing the relationship between ideology, governance, and the conceptual foundations of legal and constitutional order: Nicholas Barber’s “What is Constitutional Ideology” (ICON 2024, Vol. 22 No. 3, 653–679), Carl Ritter’s “Understanding Cosmopolitanism: A Morphological Approach” (Journal of Political Ideologies 2025, Vol. 30 No 1, 98–117), and Joseph Marko’s “Human and Minority Rights Protection by Multiple Diversity Governance” (Routledge 2019). While differing substantially in scope and disciplinary orientation, the three texts collectively challenge the assumption that legal and political categories constitute neutral and self-evident frameworks of governance. Barber’s analysis structurally reconstructs the nature and contents of constitutional ideology, demonstrating how constitutional interpretation is grounded in broader ideological formations. Ritter’s morphological approach conceptualizes cosmopolitanism as a flexible and internally contested ideological configuration built around layered and non-exclusive forms of political belonging. Marko’s monograph synthesizes broader methodological and conceptual debates into a comprehensive interdisciplinary theory of minority governance and political coexistence, centered around his critique of the “monist-identitarian nation-cum-state paradigm” and the proposal of “multiple diversity governance.” Read together, the three works reveal the extent to which constitutionalism, minority protection, and cosmopolitanism remain embedded within historically contingent ideological structures. At a moment marked by renewed contestation over identity, sovereignty, and national and ethnic belonging, these texts collectively contribute to the broader reconsideration of the conceptual foundations through which political order and governance are imagined.
The concept of progress constitutes one of the most controversial philosophical legacies of the Enlightenment, especially for the tradition of critical theory. Recently, Jaeggi has vindicated its validity as a thick, normative-descriptive concept and suggested that progress had been developed in these terms in the philosophies of history of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. In the essay, I take up this insight and ask when this became so, tracing the birth of the critical force of the concept of progress in the transition between Hume’s and Kant’s different accounts of how history unfolds. Using Habermas deconstructionism/reconstructionism distinction as a framework, I argue that Hume presents a primarily descriptive and naturalistic account of social development where critique plays a negative role. Conversely, Kant distinguishes civilisation from moralisation, identifying a normative gap within history itself. From this perspective, progress becomes a practical idea, and critique takes a more directive role: social agents consciously act toward the progressive moralisation of history through their critical capacities.
