Between Facts and Norms - Contributions to a ... - Blogs Unpad

46Chapter 2-- -- -- -- - - -- - ---modern law-and reduced this law to an epiphenomenon. Withthis, the market mechanism that was discovered and analyzed bypolitical economy also took the lead in social theory. The realisticmodel of an anonymous, unintentional sociation taking placebehind the actors' backs replaced the idealistic model of anassociation that legal subjects intentionally bring about and continuouslysustain.Marx, however, still held to a classical concept whose influenceextends from Aristotle to Hegel, that of society as totality. He simplytook the apex and center of the social whole, into which individualsare incorporated as parts, and turned them right side up. Themanifest unity of a legally constituted political order was replacedby the systemically produced, latent unity of capital's self-valorization.As a negative totality, the latter was still related to its opposite,the preserved classical image of a consciously produced totality.Mter thinkers from Vico to Condorcet shifted the teleology ofnature into the dimension of history,5 society could be conceivedas a developing self-referential totality that realizes its telos ofintentional association only in the course of the historical process.Specifically, it realizes its essence in the future association of producerswho, freed of the commodity fetish, will have brought the. conditions of the material life process under their common control.Other objections aside, this precarious construction could withstandneither the critique leveled against its teleological backgroundassumptions nor the doubts cast on the holistic concept ofsociety. However, the strictly objectivating approach favored byMarx, which examines mechanisms of integration from an externalperspective, has successfully worked its way into various theoreticaltraditions. From this perspective, the image of social integrationoccurring through values, norms, communication, and even lawdisintegrates into mere illusion. Once the last hopes of the philosophyof history disappeared from Marxist functionalism, society leftbehind the dynamics of history and, gripped by the repetitioncompulsions of a self-accelerating and all-pervasive process ofaccumulation, became a frozen world of reified social relations.6This brand of systems theory owes its melancholic sense to the factthat it still secretly refers to a totality, now negatively construed as