Author: Emanuele Castrucci
Title: Convention, Form, Potency. Essays on History of Ideas, Political Philosophy and Legal
Philosophy.
Year: 2003
ISBN: 88-14-10764-5
Editor: Giuffrè, Milano
Features: Essay in two volumes, pages IV - 514; 515 - 1118.
Keywords: Conventional legal order – Political and legal form – Potency (potentia).
Abstract
In this essay by two volumes, the author presents the results of his research developed among the area
of the history of ideas, philosophy of law and political philosophy over the last twenty years. Convention,
Form and Potency (potentia) are the guidelines of which the author traces the genealogical development
and states the theoretical interpretations, through a personal effort of synthesis.
Convention, id est «conventional legal order», is the term/concept that clarifies the manner by which the
European juridical rationality tackles the problem of the construction of a technical and artificial legal order,
not linked, per se, with the theological - or to a certain extent - absolute ideas which characterized the premodern
Natural Law.
The first part of the whole writing, «Conventional Order and Decisionistic Thought. The intellectual assumptions
of the modern state in 17th century France» reports history and theory of the «conventional order» built by the
juridical and political thought of the modern era, from the baroque 17th century to the European crisis
during the first decades of the 20th century.
In the second part, «Form and Decision», the philosophical classical idea of Form is described in contrast
with the modern idea of Decision. In particular, the «age of Form» is opposed to the «age of Decision»,
with a particular regard to the different areas of the European humanistic culture. From political
philosophy to ethics (without excluding literature), the author discusses the ideas of jurists, philosophers,
writers like Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Robert Musil, Paul Valéry, tempting to express, through their
voices, a concept of Form (and consequently of a political Form) elaborated as a critique of the formalist
and normativist philosophical interpretation coming from Kant.
The third part «Juridical paths of the concept of Form» presents some studies on the general theory of the
State developed by the German legal doctrine at the beginning of the 20th century: in particular, the author
analyses the writings of Erich Kaufmann and then he adds two essays, one on the constitutional law
doctrine, one on the concept of Nomos by Carl Schmitt.
In the last part, the author reports the problem of the theological origins of juridical and political
thought in the western society, recalling the roots of the modern scientific rationality within the Greek
classical thought (above all, Aristotle) and the theological medieval thought (Aquinas, Duns Scot and
Ockham). It is through the development of the metaphysical idea of Potency (potentia) that, according to the
author, the lines of a political anthropology anchored to individualist bases are traced. Moreover, by this
analysis, the author recognizes the problem of a material and symbolic identification of the individual in a
political community. Here, the author expressly refers to Spinoza’s and Nietzsche’s philosophical
anthropology. This guideline seems the task of an important research to be conducted within our
contemporary political philosophy.
At the end of the book, two wide appendixes contain interventions and notes devoted to particular
themes (e.g., the concept of «assignment of value» in the contemporary epistemology; a philosophical
criticism to the idea of modernity; the so called «myth» of the political decision) and the discussion of the
thought of other classic authors as Schopenhauer, Toennies, Kelsen.