The autonomy of the political and the challenge of social sciences
| Author | Dimitrios Tsarapatsanis |
| DOI | 10.1177/1474885119857579 |
| Published date | 01 April 2021 |
| Date | 01 April 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Review Articles |
Review Article EJPT
The autonomy
of the political
and the challenge
of social sciences
Dimitrios Tsarapatsanis
York Law School, University of York, UK
Michael A Wilkinson and Michael W Dowdle (eds), Questioning the Foundations of Public Law, Hart
Publishing: Oxford and Portland, OR, 2018; 306 pp.: ISBN 9781509911677, £70 (hbk)
Abstract
In 2010, Martin Loughlin published his opus magnum Foundations of Public Law, the
culmination of years of intensive research on the topics of public law and constitutional
theory. In Questioning the Foundations of Public Law, Michael Wilkinson and Michael
Dowdle put together a rich collection of papers that probe deeply into various
facets of Loughlin’s work. In this review article, I critically examine an aspect of this
probing, articulated by Wilkinson, to do with the autonomy of the political as the
basis of political jurisprudence. I argue that both the probing and Loughlin’s response
articulate horns of a dilemma that points to a deeper issue: the epistemological reper-
cussions of the rise of the social sciences as forms of distinctively modern inquiry into
the causes of social phenomena, where these include phenomena such as the autonomy
of political power in modern states.
Keywords
Autonomy of the political, Martin Loughlin, political jurisprudence, political realism,
public law, social sciences
Corresponding author:
Dimitrios Tsarapatsanis, York Law School, University of York, Law and Management Building, York, YO10
5DD, UK.
Email: dimitrios.tsarapatsanis@york.ac.uk
European Journal of Political Theory
2021, Vol. 20(2) 355–365
!The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1474885119857579
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