Reviews for The Constitution of Interests

The average rating for The Constitution of Interests based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-03-02 00:00:00 Willis Riley Interesting Quotes: “Very few social changes or laws are agreeable to or advance the welfare of all individuals alike. Only laws which provide for the most elementary needs, such as police protection or roads, come near to this. In most cases the law provides benefits for one class of the population only at the cost of depriving others of what they prefer. Provision for the poor can be made only out of the goods of others; compulsory school education for all may mean not only loss of liberty for those who wish to educate their children privately, but may be financed only at the cost of reducing or sacrificing capital investment in industry or old-age pensions or free medical services. When a choice has been made between such competing alternatives it may be defended as proper on the ground that it was for the ‘public good’ or the ‘common good.’ It is not clear what these phrases mean, since there seems to be no scale by which contributions of the various alternatives to the common good can be measured and the greater identified.” -H.L.A. Hart, the Concept of Law "[S]urvival has still a special status in relation to human conduct and in our thought about it, which parallels the prominence and the necessity ascribed to it in . . . Natural Law. For it is not merely that an overwhelming majority of men do wish to live, even at the cost of hideous misery, but that this is reflected in whole structures of our thought and language . . . We could not subtract the general wish to live and leave intact concepts like danger and safety, harm and benefit, need and function, disease and cure; for these are ways of simultaneously describing and appraising things by reference to the contribution they make to survival which is accepted as an aim." -H. L. A. Hart, the Concept of Law

Review # 2 was written on 2011-10-18 00:00:00 Susan Johnson A good example of how books that aim to be introductory can also be deeply insightful by clearly stating the basic problems at play. Hart convincingly argues that law should be seen as much more collaborative than a simple series of imperatives. This is important from a left perspective because many radical views of the state rest on surprisingly conservative notions of law as a mask for class repression. The potential for law to be a collective and democratic project seems unlikely in a crude command theory wed to class repression but makes sense if law is produced through diverse social processes.