Law, Ideologies, and the Political-Administrative System

The modern state is highly differentiated and highly complex. Its complexity is such that it is not easily captured in the languages we use to conceptualize this set of authority-structures. We may perhaps recognize the difficulty most clearly in the orthodox distinctions that are made between state and society, public and private, and planning and the market. But this problem may be seen not only in attempts to conceptualize the role of the state in modern society; it also exists in our characterizations of the internal complexity of the political-administrative system. The separation of powers doctrine, for example, does not accurately grasp the contemporary functions of our institutions of legislature, executive, and courts; the policy-administration distinction is an inadequate expression of the allocation of political and official tasks; and the vision of centralized, hierarchical authority conjured up by the concept of legal sovereignty is belied by any examination of the processes of public policy formation. We live in a world of disjuncture between social and political reality and the public languages through which we try to picture it. Perhaps the most important of these public languages are those of politics and law. And in both of these languages we can identify the strains arising from the changes of the twentieth century. During this century the rhetoric of political languages has certainly registered a collectivist note - one thinks here of 'One Nation' Toryism, the articulation of conceptions of 'positive liberty'