Solidarity: From Civic Friendship to a Global Legal Community by Hauke Brunkhorst
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.2006.00631_3.x |
| Author | Nathan Gibbs |
| Published date | 01 January 2007 |
| Date | 01 January 2007 |
Despite identifying somecommon features, the authors end byadmitting that
any hope of deriving universal principles from di¡erent jurisdictions is doomed
to failure.The di¡erences between civilianand common law systems remainpro-
found and‘‘there hasbeen l ittle cross-fertilisation let alonetransplantationof legal
concepts.’’ (p. 224). Nevertheless, the reasons for this are instructive, and form the
central theme of the book: the di⁄culty of reconciling the dignitarian interests
protected by privacy laws with the economic interests sought to be protected in
relation to publicity.
One minor comment relates to the typesetting, which could have been more
imaginative. For example, the comparison between the orthodox version of pas-
sing o¡ and theAustralian adaptation of it (on p. 34)is set out in rather dense text:
a table would have perhaps conveyed the information in a more understandable
and accessible way.That aside, this book is wel lwr itten and its thorough coverage
makes it a valuable point of reference for all further research and debate in this
area.
Gillian Black
n
Hauke Brunkhorst,Solidarity: From Civic Friendship to a Global Legal
Community,Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005, xxv þ336 pp, d27.95
Hauke Brunkhorst’s book (nowavailable in English as a result of this translation
by Je¡rey Flynn) is an important contribution to debates upon the question of
how to develop a normatively and functionally appropriate legal framework for
resolving regulatory problems at the global level. Brunkhorst argues that a global
legal community needs to be founded on an ethic of democratic solidarity. Such
an ethic is, in his view, one that is uniquely placed to solve the governance pro-
blems posed by the development of complex functionally di¡erentiated societies,
problems that are now global as well as national. His assessment of the current
prospects for institutions founded on democratic solidarity at the global level
focuses on the potential contribution of non-governmentalorganizationsto chal-
lenging what he regards as the non-democratically legitimate (orhegemonic) nat-
ure of current forms of global law.
Brunkhorst’s ¢rst major argument in this book challenges what he takes to be
the commonly held view that democracy is a‘procedure for majority rule’ and
that solidarity is either a ‘. . . social or socialist achievementof the general welfare’
(xxiii). Brunkhorst instead advances a conception of democracy as coincident
with the concept of solidarity. In part I of the book entitled Stages of Solidarity
Brunkhorst presents this idea of solidarity as the product of the development
and fusion of two distinct cultural strands. The ¢rst of these strands is the pre-
modern understanding of democracyi nwhich solidari tywas de¢ned as the ‘bond
of friendship’that existed between the e
Łlite citizens of the classical polis.The sec-
n
Universityof Edinburgh.
Reviews
170 r2007 The Authors. Journal Compilation r2007 The Modern Law ReviewLimited.
(2007) 70(1)MLR 161^174
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