Failures of comparability in global governance: Exploring the practical dimension of the redress of law

Abstract

AbstractIn The Redress of Law, Emilios Christodoulidis explores the philosophical foundations of market constitutionalism and shows how its embedded rationality shapes global governance. The author delves into critical phenomenology to lift the veil of ignorance on the fact that market constitutionalism has replaced political rationality with economic reasoning. By grounding its theory in the continental critical theory, ranging from Marxism to Weil’s existentialism and Luhmann’s systems theory, the book shows how the redress of law is also a practice that could radically transform the global political economy. However, the challenge is to displace the modern thinking of market constitutionalism that is rooted in functional differentiation and privileges constituted rather than constituent power. Such market thinking has allowed global governance experts to simplify and reduce to numbers complex polical, cultural and social phenomena embedded in constitutional legal regimes. The disembedding of law from society through functional differentiation, and the sole preoccupation of legal experts with constituted power, have contributed to the depoliticisation of constitutionalism as both theory and practice. A quintessential example of market constitutionalism in practice are global governance indicators. These indexes entail comparisons among legal regimes that empower private market rules as the final arbiter of local redistributive policies while bracketing historical, genealogical and reflexive connections to law’s social realities. The book offers several strategies of ‘redress of law’ such as rupture, contradiction and open dialectic, aiming to foreground political rather than market constitutionalism and to revamp the dialectic between constituted power exemplified by constitutional texts and constituent power, exemplified by strikes. This Article praises Christodoulidis’s sophisticated theoretical framework grounded in critical phenomenology, but at the same time pushes the author’s argument beyond the book itself. By questioning the practical implications of the redress of law, the focus on legal assumptions in global governance shows how legal experts in a variety of legal fields beyond constitutionalism have reproduced existing inequalities defined in terms of market, social and colonial hierarchies.