Anarchy in the System: Law and Power in a Global World

Anarchy in the System: Law and Power in a Global World critically engages the belief that the state and law can bring about peaceful order. Globalisation itself puts into question this belief, as it reveals the inability of these essentially modern mechanisms to address contemporary conditions of injustice and inequality. In response, this book develops a new account of 'global normativity'. Beginning with an interrogation of the foundations of modern law and politics, Francot and De Vries draw on the work of Luhman, Beck and Bauman in order to outline a critical theory of contemporary social systems. It is, they argue, in an opening - rather than a closure - to uncertainty that it is possible to elicit the basis for a contemporary 'anarchist' ethics: an ethics that is rooted not in the tired structures of law and of the state, but in the courage, and the responsibility, of individual moral autonomy.