ABSTRACT
In the above passage Durkheim emphasises the democratic force of the legal order relies on the implicit acceptance by the populace that the legal order reflects the natural order of things. Social cohesion cannot be founded on the impersonal rationality of law alone: it needs a ‘mystical’ support of legitimation; it needs a social psychology in which the state is imbued with a force over and above any mere show of violence. This is a dilemma for a pure theory of modern law: legal positivism, the belief that law is simply the law, and that the concept of law has no necessary connection with morality, is logical but inhuman; it cannot offer an imagination of law that would bind us together in any way. Hence the legal order needs to imbue itself with a cultural force. But does this cultural force need to be consistent? Need it amount to some overall coherent world view; some regime of virtue as Alisdair MacIntyre (1981) believes we need – while he argues our current situation is incoherent? Do we require a range of philosophers to interpret our legal system so that it is seen to be a coherent and morally principled universe of reason?
