Chapter 5 - Societal constitutionalism's grounding against relativism: from Weber's legal positivism to Habermas's communication theory

Summary

Taking stock and looking ahead

Unlike the principles underlying any other legal theory, Lon Fuller's principles of “procedural legality” are interrelated with the form of organization to which Talcott Parsons referred at various times as the “associational, ” the “ncwbureaucratic, ” and the “collegial. ” These Harvard colleagues team-taught a course at the law school during the 1966-67 academic year, and yet in two important respects Parsons's works remained unaffected by this “collaboration. ” First, he never drew any connection between Fuller's legal theory and his own explicit references to collegial formations, which began only in the late 1960s, (1969a) or after this “collaboration. ” Second, there is no evidence in Parsons's writings that he appreciated how incompatible conceptually Fuller's legal theory is with Weber's sociology of law.

Parsons had been citing and referring to Weber's sociology of law for four decades, and he continued to do so into the 1970s. Yet, in order to work the conceptual implications of Fuller's view of law into his mature theory, the AGIL schema, he would have had to stop this practice, and he would have had to alter many of his own most basic concepts. This move would have eliminated many of the most noticeable dead ends of his mature social theory. But by the late 1960s and early 1970s Parsons was turning seventy, and was far too committed in too many ways to initiate a project of literal conceptual renascence.