Een pleidooi om de eeuwige zoektocht naar abstracte normatieve grondslagen te staken en op zoek te gaan naar de voorwaarden voor het ontstaan en voortbestaan van normatieve systemen vanuit een buitenstaandersperspectief dat conceptuele anayse verbindt met historische en sociologische inzichten.

Rundle criticizes the command conception of law by means of Fuller’s and Arendt’s concept of human agency. However, neither of these two authors derive law from human agency, as Rundle seems to think. Instead they stress that personhood can only be attributed to physical human beings on the basis of law. Moreover, their theories cannot be understood as answers to Rundle’s question – whatever that may be – but as answers to their own questions and concerns. In the case of Arendt and Fuller, these concerns were so different that the enterprise to reconcile them seems futile. Rundle’s approach can be understood as the attempt to deal with philosophy as if it were legal doctrine.

Reciprocity may serve to explain or to justify law. In its latter capacity, which is the topic of this article, reciprocity is commonly turned into a highly idealized notion, as either a balance between two free and equal parties or as the possibility of communication tout court. Both ideals lack empirical reference. If sociological and anthropological literature on forms of exchange is taken into account, it should be acknowledged that reciprocal relations are easy to destabilize. The dynamics of exchange invites exclusion and inequality. For this reason reciprocity should not be presupposed as the normative underpinning of law; instead, law should be presupposed in order to turn reciprocity into a desirable ideal.

Brouwer defended the view that the autonomy of the individual citizen is furthered by articulated, precise and clear legislation. The question arises whether all kinds of rules can be said to enhance such autonomy. It is argued that a distinction should be drawn between rules that dictate desirable outcomes, on the one hand, and rules that determine the way the game is played, on the other. Rules of the game often reflect the way they were drafted and can be seen as the embodiment of power relations between rule-makers. Rules that dictate outcomes, on the other hand, are often drafted by experts who analyse the goals to be reached. The view is defended that only rules of the game – potentially – enhance the autonomy of the citizen, whereas outcome-rules are potentially manipulative, tending to exclude those who are ill-equipped to realize the prescribed outcomes. The virtues of rules therefore do not merely reside in their clear and precise nature, but are largely derived from their capacity to regulate the relations amongst citizens who were included in the process of rulemaking.