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This Element aims to explore how the relation between societal organisation and legal orders - the question of materiality - has been investigated in philosophy of law. The starting point of the Element is that such relation has often been left invisible or thematised in poor and reductive terms. After having explained the main reasons behind this neglect, the Element provides an overview of the three main approaches to legal philosophy whose contributions, though not always effective, can still provide some insights for a contemporary analysis of legal orders' materiality: materialism, legal institutionalism, and the new materialism. The last section of the Element suggests looking for a footing for the study of materiality in two fields: the metaphysics of relations and the political economy of legal orders.

The reception and popularity of the work of Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès has gone through different and erratic phases. Nonetheless, in recent years there has been a remarkable revival of interest in the Abbé's thought. This book is intended to exploit this Sieyès-renaissance, proposing a reconstruction of the constitutional doctrine of the abbot in the light of the latest interpretative acquisitions. The guiding thread of the analysis is the acknowledgement that, underlying the main political-constitutional proposals of Sieyès, we can glimpse a profoundly rationalist philosophical substructure. After presenting the nucleus of this philosophical approach, the book proceeds to shed light on the coherence linking the main constitutional structures upon which the abbot was working in the course of the early years of the Revolution. It focuses in particular on the concepts that contributed to make up the basic grammar of modern and liberal constitutionalism: representation, citizenship, constituent power, rights of man, the division of the powers and the control of constitutionality. The idea is that, by pursuing this approach, it is possible to arrive at an overall picture of the constitutional doctrine of the abbot that reflects both its systematic quality and its originality. - La ricezione dell'opera di Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès ha conosciuto diverse ed alterne fasi. Nel corso degli ultimi anni, tuttavia, si è assistito ad un notevole ritorno di interesse per il pensiero dell'abate. Il volume intende inserirsi sulla scia di questa Sieyès-renaissance proponendo una ricostruzione della dottrina costituzionale dell'abate alla luce delle ultime acquisizioni interpretative. Il filo rosso che guida l'analisi è il riconoscimento che alla base delle principali proposte politico-costituzionali di Sieyès vada scorta un'impostazione filosofica profondamente razionalista. Nel volume, dopo aver presentato il nucleo di questo approccio filosofico, viene messa in luce la coerenza che lega fra loro i principali istituti costituzionali sui quali l'abate lavora nel corso dei primi anni della Rivoluzione. Il libro si concentra, in particolare, sui concetti che hanno contribuito a formare la grammatica di base del costituzionalismo moderno e liberale: rappresentanza, cittadinanza, potere costituente, diritti dell'uomo, divisione dei poteri e controllo di costituzionalità. Seguendo questo percorso, si intende restituire un quadro complessivo della dottrina costituzionale dell'abate che ne rispetti la sistematicità e l'originalità.

Michael Wilkinson's Authoritarian Liberalism puts forward a challenging and controversial claim: the history of European integration and the trajectory of the constitutional orders of the founding Member States have always been driven by authoritarian liberalism. This comment focuses on a certain slack, in Wilkinson's analysis, between the material constitution of European states and authoritarian liberalism as a form of government. More specifically, the comment highlights the need to retrieve a more conflictual relation between, on one hand, the material constitution of the welfare state and its industrial involvement, and on the other hand, the constitutional forms adopted by authoritarian liberalism.

Abstract:The article addresses the question of how to study global constitutional law by suggesting a material methodology. Drawing from previous studies of the notion of the material constitution, both from materialist and institutionalist types (Marx, Mortati, Poulantzas), the article proposes to look at the development of global constitutional law, in its many instantiations, in terms of its relation with the state. Accounts of the autonomy of global constitutional law are requalified in terms of relative autonomy. More specifically, global constitutional law is conceived as a legal construction functional to the transformation of the contemporary state. From the perspective of the material study of constitutional law, the state is still deemed to be the main unit of analysis, but, at the same time, state-centred accounts based on an exceptionalist understanding of sovereignty are rejected as reductive and, at times, inaccurate.