ABSTRACT
In his essay, The Plight of European Jurisprudence from 1950, Carl Schmitt makes use of the suggestive notion of the motorized legislator, by which he means the increasing volume and speed of introduction of new legislation, as well as the delegation of authority from the legislative to the executive and administrative bodies. This chapter introduces the concept of social acceleration as developed within contemporary social theory. Framework legislation is an example of the practice of the downward delegation of authority. The driving forces considered to be behind the use of framework legislation are similar to those that Schmitt singled out as being behind the trend towards motorized legislation. The notion of high-speed society neither implies that everything changes at the same pace nor that different social sub-systems undergo the same process of social acceleration.
