Constitutionalism and the State of the ‘Society of Networks’: The Design of a New ‘Control Project’ for a Fragmented Legal System

Abstract

In this paper I focus on the transformation of the ‘knowledge base’ of society and as a consequence the shift from a ‘society of individuals’ via a ‘society of organisations’ to a ‘society of networks’. The first paradigm was based on the relative stability of experience and the ‘life world’ (Lebenswelt) that allowed for the presupposition of a distributed mode of knowledge generation and the construction of a variable architecture of practices, which could remain more or less unquestioned. The traditional liberal constitution (including the guarantee of civil rights) has drawn in an implicit way on this societal ‘infrastructure’. The rise of the organisation as the principal societal actor has already challenged the classic liberal conception of law that had to adapt to the welfare state. This challenge is exacerbated by the next evolutionary step, ie the emergence of the much more fragmented ‘society of networks’ that is based on an experimental mode of knowledge generation and that creates a closer link between societal self-construction (‘design’) and social action. This new paradigm asks for a new societal ‘control project’ that will be difficult to implement in a liberal constitution. However, the new type of social experimentalism needs as a consequence a more explicit institutionalisation of societal self-observation in procedures of evaluation and monitoring.

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