Andityas Soares De Moura Costa Matos

Power, Law and Violence: Critical Essays on Hans Kelsen and Carl Schmitt Andityas Soares De Moura Costa Matos

Our time has been experiencing the most intense questioning of the capitalist global domination of the last fifty years. In this perspective, debates about the difficult relations between law and violence are retaken in order to ground a new nómos, which seems to materialise itself only through radical changes, able to deconstruct the whole Western political-juridical tradition. Is law just a form of violence? How to construct a knowledge of the juridical normativity that does not reduce itself to the mere facticity of power? Can political exception be compatible with legal norms? Which is the meaning of the democratic system, understood as constituted violence, in scenarios where violent popular constituent practices bloom? How can we criticize the action of economic violence over juridical institutions? Is it possible to think and to live a nonviolent law? Such questions are discussed in the seven essays of this book based upon the ideas of Hans Kelsen and Carl Schmitt, authors of Philosophy of Law who, despite having been on opposite sides in the struggle for the order during pre-nazi Germany, knew how to visualize the original anomy of violence that only law can challenge.