Book Review: Book Review
| Date | 01 June 2011 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663911401963 |
| Author | Cormac Mac Amhlaigh |
| Published date | 01 June 2011 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Book Reviews
Social & Legal Studies
20(2) 263–280
Book Reviews
ª The Author(s) 2011
Reprints and permission:
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663911401963
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PANU MINKKINEN Sovereignty, Knowledge, Law. Abingdon: Routledge, 2009,
x þ 178pp., ISBN 9780415472418, £80.00 (hbk).
The question of the relationship between power and law is one of the enduring controversies
of modern liberal political and legal theory. The struggle for supremacy between law and
power in modern society can be framed in a variety of ways including democracy versus
rule of law, security versus liberty and might versus right. This conflict also runs to the core
of the concept of sovereignty where it is expressed in the more abstract register of sovereign
power versus the sovereignty of the norm. More specifically, the tension in the register of
sovereignty represents rival attempts to give content to the notion of ultimate authority,
the hallmark of the concept since Bodin and Hobbes. In his recent book, Sovereignty,
Knowledge, Law, Panu Minkkinen interrogates the concept of sovereignty from both sides
of the tension, norm and power as well as, more abstractly, sovereignty as subjectivity.
In the first section of the book, the epistemic foundations of the supremacy of the
norm are investigated through a deliberate focus on continental, particularly Germanic,
legal theory. The first chapter is a study of the work of Hans Kelsen, who provided
perhaps the clearest modern account of sovereignty as norm through the concept of
the Grundnorm presupposed in relation to the Constitution. Kelsen famously equated
the state – and by implication sovereignty – with its legal system, rejecting the dualism
of juristic and sociological conceptions of the state common in contemporary legal
theory. What Minkkinen adds to debates on Kelsen’s work is an illuminating account
of Kelsen’s methodology in developing his pure theory of law. As Minkkinen empha-
sizes, Kelsen’s project of developing a legal science necessitated considerable ground-
work on a scientific methodology. This would then clear the way for a pure normative
science, a pure theory of law, cleansed of the impurities of political theory or sociol-
ogy. For Kelsen, Minkkinen concludes, the method of legal science was as important, if
indeed not more important, than its subject (p. 26).
This discussion of Kelsen is complemented in Chapter 3 with a discussion of Kant’s
critical philosophy, where Kelsen’s debt to Kant is made readily apparent. Reading Kant’s
philosophy of law as a ‘preamble to the law of knowledge in general’ (p. 45), Minkkinen
makes a convincing case in support of the contention that before...
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