Droit legislation et liberte

Click Image for Gallery

Description
Reviews (0)

Droit, législation et liberté (Law, Legislation and Liberty) est le magnum opus du « Prix Nobel » (en 1974) d'économie et philosophe libéral Friedrich Hayek. Publié en trois volumes en 1973, 1976 et 1979, il s'agit d'un ouvrage de philosophie sociale et non d'économie. Hayek y développe sa philosophie de la vie en société, approfondissant les principes qu'il avait déjà abordé dans La Constitution de la liberté et La Route de la servitude. Pour cela, il s'agit selon l'Encyclopædia Universalis du « véritable aboutissement » de sa pensée.

In Law, Legislation and Freedom, Friedrich Hayek presents two visions of society, one based on the "fabricated order", the other on the "matured order" 1. These two visions of society correspond to two visions of the law: respectively legislation or law. Defending the legal society, he opposed the supporters of the "social contract". For Hayek, law precedes and surpasses legislation. By basing himself on an epistemology which insists on the limitations of human knowledge, Hayek explains that the level of complexity reached by our societies has not been allowed by enlightened legislators but is on the contrary the product of spontaneous forces. He therefore defends spontaneous order and what he calls catallaxis. The free exchange between individuals by the market, the only way to coordinate without constraint the actions of people who do not know each other and share different objectives, is the best foundation of a free society: "everyone is driven, by the gain which visible to him, to serve needs that are invisible to him ”2. This order is necessarily based on abstract rules of law as opposed to the rules of narrow and primitive societies which defend concrete rules imprinting a collective end to the group. To respond to the possible excesses of democracy as "tyranny of the majority" in the name of "social justice", he proposed a political system which he called "democracy", close to liberal democracy. Writing Law, Legislation and Liberty took fifteen to twenty years for Hayek, mainly when he was at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau3. Unlike La Route de la servitude, this is not a book for the general public.