On Lindahl's Authority and the Globalisation of Inclusion and Exclusion

The author argues that in Lindahl’s Authority and the Globalisation of Inclusion and Exclusion, and also in his Julius Stone Address “Inside and Outside Global Law”, one can find a) a great rebuttal to the once fashionable deconstructionist fantasies about “multitudes” (Hardt and Negri) and to a variously termed “community of difference” (Nancy, Blanchot, Esposito, Agamben) that excludes nothing and no one; b) an interesting concept of law as linked with collective action; c) an ingenious questioning of the vexed binary of representative and direct democracy. At the same time, Lindahl’s theory is argued to be susceptible of significant improvement if the central notion of a-legality were to be defined in a non-ambiguous way, if the presently unclear relation of his guiding principle of the “dutiful restraint of majorities” to political liberalism were to be spelled out, and if his counterintuitive blessing of a-legal conduct with the insignia of constituent power were to be backed up by a stronger justification