ABSTRACT
In The Idea of Public Law, Martin Loughlin defends the argument that the political sphere is autonomous. He claims there are three orders of the political: at root the political itself is based on the antagonism between friend and enemy which finds its ultimate expression in violence; in turn, politics is the negotiation of conflict for the sake of the strength of the state; and finally public law is the prudential deployment of laws for the purpose of governing, ‘a form of political jurisprudence that incorporates no transcendental or metaphysical ideas of justice and goodness’.1 The art of governing and managing populations through the practice of ruling thus requires no necessary engagement with substantive principles of justice or democracy and instead operates according to the idea that the state acts for everyone’s benefit: salus populi suprema lex esto. There is no persuasive power in a transcendental rationalism for the justification of politics, or public law, nor for the possibility that law can be the foundation for politics. Indeed, the reverse is true: the state has its reasons, we might say, that reason – including legal reason – does not know.
