Mate Paksy

This special issue seeks to illuminate the social philosophy of John Stuart Mill by exploring its discursivity in two interconnected dimensions. On the one hand, we examine the discourses as _ intersubjective exchanges _ that shaped Mill’s intellectual trajectory, highlighting the influence of his private and public engagements on the development of his ideas. On the other, the essays collected here also consider _ the meta-discursive level _, analyzing how different philosophical and socio-political traditions—particularly those of the Anglo-American and French intellectual spheres—have interpreted and contested these influences. By pursuing this dual line of inquiry in the duality of the socio-cultural contexts, this issue aims to illustrate the _ dual dialectical interplay _ between competing discourses and meta-discourses, a dynamic that is characteristic of any major intellectual figure’s reception and legacy. At the primary level of discursivity—Mill’s own intellectual engagements—our Amer...

This paper addresses questions about the socio-legal context and mainstream political theories of the peripheral nation-building strategies behind the Ausgleich [viz. the Compromise] and the British North America Act of Canada, both entered into force in 1867. The importance of this research for contemporary political theorizing lies in the fact that at the outset the vocabulary of nationalism was developed in Central-Eastern Europe, and universalised by the new Canadian political science during the last decades of the twentieth century. The paper tackles the issue of the parallel vernacular national-building strategies as common denominators of Austria–Hungary and Canada as they came up in the Eastern-Central European region as well as in the North-American political community in statu nascendi, in order to determine that multicultural part of them which may be universal, and therefore available for both multi-ethnic countries. Although the Ausgleich neither substantiated the multicultural political philosophy nor restricted seriously the Hungarian self-determination, there is widespread disagreement about whether as such it was an expedient means to dismantle the nationalism in the Central-Eastern European region. The paper will maintain that the federalist idea was not applied entirely in Canada in 1867 and even less in the dual state of Austria–Hungary. It appears that nations’ rights as group rights rest on a demonstrable link between particular peoples, their traditional territories, and their living, land-based ethno-cultures in both regions of the world. Given that the Dual Monarchy collapsed after half a century, and given that the splintering was one of the direct and indirect causes of both the First and the Second World Wars, the Eastern-Central European way of dealing constitutionally with the multi-ethnic challenge is usually filed under ‘F’ for ‘Fiasco’. By contrast, ever since the BNA Act came into force, leaving aside for a moment the devastating effects of colonization on the First Nations population, the Canadian model has been one of the most attractive examples of how constitutional design can accommodate competing nation-building agendas within a single state. When exploring these fascinating stories of Canadian and Austro-Hungarian public laws and political theories, this paper will also develop a critical argument that the ethnic/civic distinction is unable to make evident the difference between the two countries in a comparative scrutiny.

Having been invited by editor-in-chief, Professor Anne Wagner, to edit the present special issue, we decided to fulfil a longstanding wish to provide a panorama about the Hungarian Language and Law. Along with other ‘law and …’ movements, Law and Language has attracted a great deal of attention from subsequent generations of Hungarian academic lawyers, because the political transition served as a wonderful subject and context for scholarly papers and text books, for examining the putative or real influence of this or that popular social scientist or for undertaking literature overviews. Unfortunately, there have been relatively few academic papers that have sought to draw general conclusions from empirically well-founded case studies. In order to fill that important gap, this special issue has taken the opportunity to select only those interdisciplinary papers whose goals include an analysis of Hungarian legal discourse written from a critical angle and using critical empirical methodology. At the very outset of the editing process—back in 2018—for the purposes of this special issue we defined as ‘empirical’ any sufficiently coherent fact-based research that reflects the language of legal discourse. And ‘critical’ means an engagement with the values of the Rule of Law. This double methodological and axiological feature is manifest throughout the selected papers classified as ‘law and language’.

The originality of Leibniz’s ontology rests on the fact that his legal philosophy consists of a great philosophical synthesis of legal humanism. As far as the question of delimiting the legal domain is concerned, “legal science” is actually ubiquitous in Leibniz’s metaphysical edifice: its omnipresence is evident not only when law and justice are referred to, but also in relation to the arguments on normative order. In our view, in Leibniz legal science does not constitute an autonomous field, clearly separated from other branches of the humanities. By its very subject –the order of legal rules as “truths”– legal science is inscribed perfectly in the idea according to which the subject of scholarly demonstration is truth. By virtue of this theory, Leibniz determines the elements of a legal system that exist as positive, and natural law as contingent (or historical) and eternal truths. We believe this theory of legal norms showcases the characteristics of a “hyletic” ontology. Leibniz’s doctrine of natural law is indeed tantamount to a mass of truths deemed “necessary”, but deprived of obligatory force; this is unlike voluntarist ontology, according to which the rules of law are equivalent to the commands of a hierarchically superior sovereign. One of the most interesting challenges in Leibniz legal scholarship lies in displaying the harmony between the rational legal system and the irrational perplexities.