Genealogies of Power Between Society and Law: Institutionalisation, Symbolic Forms, and Democratic Crisis

Abstract This essay draws attention to the social processes that shape law. It argues, therefore, that processes of political institutionalisation arise out of sociocultural conflicts resolved through force in favour of a single collective actor, albeit only in relative and historically provisional terms. This essay seeks to illuminate the nexus between politics and law by emphasising its symbolic dimension, on the understanding that the threats to freedom, which are intensifying amid the current crisis of liberal democracies, may be more fully grasped through a sociological discussion of representations of power and the cultural wars that accompany them. The first part of the essay focuses on the socially conflictual genesis of the state and its legal order, and thus on its politically inflected character, while the second shows how symbolic forms of legitimation exercise a lasting cultural influence.