Democracy, Law and Governance

This book examines the transformation of the modes of governance of contemporary developed democracies and defines the conditions required for the promotion of public interest in these democracies' public policy. The work shows why a sound theoretical approach to the concept of law results in opening up the theory of law to the debate on governance in the social sciences. A second objective is to reconstruct the underpinnings of recent debate on governance, focusing on the pragmatist turn that has marked efforts to overcome the inadequacies of both the economic and the deliberative approaches. In fulfilling this second goal, the authors examine the advances yielded by the pragmatist turn as well as its limitations, and they propose a theoretical approach to dealing with its limitations. Thus the book applies recent research in both theory of law and theory of governance, and seeks to deepen the analytic impact of the recent pragmatist revival, which has had fruitful results but has not yet fulfilled its potential.