Weber Reading Stammler: What Horizons for the Sociology of Law?

Abstract

This article asks whether the two studies by Max Weber that form his Critique of Stammler are by now only marginal to a study of Weber's work, of historical interest only, given that Rudolf Stammler has long since been relegated to almost complete obscurity. Or could they still lead to a better understanding of the thought of Max Weber? This article argues that the Critique of Stammler offers a still-relevant contribution to sociological reflection, particularly about law, and valuable guidance for distinguishing normative legal orders from empirical ones, and measuring the causal influence of the former on the latter. 356

Dismantling Managerial Values: When Law’s Ambiguity Meets Organizational Complexity

“…When this complexity meets the inherent ambiguity of legal devices, the shortcuts end up having the force of evidence. In other words, actors orient their behavior according to what they believe the formal rule is (Weber discussed by Coutu, 2013). By doing this, they actively participate in the construction of the empirical legal orders inside corporations (Belley, 1998).…”

Stammler, Rudolf

“…They are all connected to the central idea of Gesetzmässigkeit (see below): (a) what Stammler calls the "monism of social life," meaning the inevitable reduction of all knowledge of social life to a single regularity of the order of a "law"; (b) the "social ideal" which posits a unity of the goals of social life, which Stammler describes as a "community of free-willing men" (Gemeinschaft frei wollenden Menschen); (c) the theory of the just law where the social ideal is transposed to the level of positive law, and Stammler's critical theory also raises the issue of the justice of the existing law. Stammler is unsatisfied with the sole principle of legality as the criterion for evaluating the validity of juridical norms (Coutu 2013(Coutu , 2018.…”

Weber and Simmel on the formation of norms, rules and laws

“…The double meaning of ‘rule’ especially, as both a description of a process and a normative expectation, is (as simple as it might be) highly relevant to keep in mind in our period of a culturally changing Europe, where long-standing norms have to be renegotiated. Michel Coutu (2013) recently showed that Weber’s treatise on Stammler has had a considerable effect on the contemporary sociology of law. Simmel’s review (2000 [1896]) was a casual work that has been largely overlooked until today, and Weber’s review (2012 [1907]) is hardly accessible to today’s reader due to its form and style.…”