ABSTRACT
A post-axiomatic stage might also act as a contextual category in which some of the tensions between conceptualism and realism are finally rethought. The civilians have provided Europe with the idea of a system of rules logically and coherently arranged and this notion of system will continue to play an important role in understanding a law of obligations.40 Yet, law is also about values.41 And these values might be said to be something which, in a post-axiomatic world, help endow the legal model with a ‘plurality of images by which today’s science can be represented, because of the presence here of different epistemological conceptions’. In turn, these might force one to accept ‘the full legitimacy of the existence of several methodologies’.42 This plurality of images can be found even within the class of lawyers themselves: for example the legal historian and the legal theorist may well have quite different conceptions of contract than the legal practitioner.43 On the other hand, whatever the conceptual differences between the common law and the civil law (or between sub-groups within the legal class), all systems recognise, for example, that people are more valuable than things. And, more technically, all member states, together with the EU as an institution, accept, say, that consumers need more protection than commerçants and professionnels (Chapter 8 § 4).
