A better world through law? The implications of the theories of Niklas Luhmann for green economics
This paper considers the implications of the theories of Niklas Luhmann for attempts at achieving social change through law. According to Luhmann, modern society consists of all that can be communicated and understood as having meaning. Such communications are structured according to functionally differentiated subsystems such as law, politics, science, economics and education. Luhmann applies the biological term, 'autopoiesis', to explain how social systems produce and reproduce themselves by the interaction of their own elements and in so doing, participate in society's construction of reality. Each system distinguishes itself from its environment through binary codes and then reconstitutes phenomena entering its environment by applying its own internal binary code (such as legal/illegal in the case of law). This normative closure means that direct or simple exchanges or communications between social systems, or between individuals and social systems, are impossible. We therefore need to abandon notions of 'steering' social systems in predetermined ways and bringing about social change directly through legal norms. Progressive change may occur but this will depend more on how events entering each social system are reconstituted by those systems, rather than on the motivation and planning of social campaigners. Luhmann offers a way of describing society that seeks to engage with, rather than avoid, the increasing complexity and contingency of modern society, and which enables us to see that whether law achieves 'justice' depends on the viewpoint from which law (or any other social system) is being observed.
Law as a Social System
Preface Introduction 1. The Location of Legal Theory 2. The Operative Closure of the Legal System 3. The Function of Law 4. Coding and Programming 5. Justice: a Formula for Contingency 6. The Evolution of Law 7. The Position of Courts in the Legal System 8. Legal Argumentation 9. Politics and Law 10. Structural Couplings 11. The Self-description of the Legal System 12. Society and its Law Index
Strategy and Manipulation in Medieval Elections
There are many goals in developing electoral protocols, including a desire for a system which is transparent, in that it is clear what the rule or procedure to follow is; nonmanipulable, in that it is not in a person’s best interest to misrepresent their preferences; honest, in the sense that it elects the ‘right’ candidate; and not open to strategizing, i.e., bribery or collusion. However, these desiderata are in tension with each other: Often, transparent electoral procedures are the least strategy resistant, and many honest procedures encourage manipulation. Thus a balance between these different goals must be sought. In modern times, since the seminal result on vote manipulation, the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem [5, 6], much attention has been devoted to developing voting rules where manipulation is never in the best interest of the voters [4] or which are computationally too complex for the average bounded agent to be able to manipulate [1]. This focus on computational aspects of electoral methods is one of the hallmarks of modern studies on voting. But pursuit of these goals is not restricted to modern times: Those participating in elections in the Middle Ages also sought transparency, non-manipulability, honesty, and strategyproofness in so far as these properties can be consistently expressed in a single procedure. However, given the lack of computational sophistication in the Middle Ages, alternate approaches were needed in order to promote honesty, discourage strategizing, etc. These approaches can be classified as either external (constraints introduced outside of the electoral procedure, such as incentives for coming to consensus quickly) or internal (constraints introduced within the electoral procedure, such as voting rules which cannot be manipulated without adverse effects, or which are too difficult for the average bounded agent to manipulate). Surveying examples of both approaches in the context of medieval ecclesiastical and secular elections provides an interesting comparison to modern electoral procedures. Elections in the Middle Ages were used for the same reasons that they are today: To select suitable candidate(s) for a particular office, duty, or obligation. However, it is important to note that the term electio was used in the Middle Ages in a broader sense than our modern ‘election’. Its primary sense was ‘selection’ or ‘choice’, and only secondarily ‘election’ in the modern sense. Thus, many records which purportedly discuss elections are not discussing elections of the type which interests us. We can identify four categories of medieval electoral processes: (1) Election by an external authority having no direct interest in the election; (2) Indirect election, where electors name other electors who then select or elect the officials; (3) Election by lot; and (4) Election by ballot. Elections of the first and third types are generally computationally uninteresting; the first type corresponds to dictatorial voting rules, and the third type collapses to probability theory. In general, interesting voting methods are found only in the fourth type, election by ballot, though they can also occur in indirect election.