Law, process philosophy and ecological civilization

The call by Chinese environmentalists for an ecological civilization to supersede industrial civilization, subsequently embraced by the Chinese government and now being promoted throughout the world, makes new demands on legal systems, national and international. If governments are going to prevent ecological destruction then law will be essential to this. The Chinese themselves have recognized grave deficiencies in their legal institutions. They are reassessing these and looking to Western traditions for guidance. Yet law as it has developed in the West, particularly in Anglophone countries, which has crystallized as the tradition of ‘liberal legalism’, is in a state of crisis. Rather than being taken as a cause for despair at the legal traditions of East and West, this challenge could be taken as an opportunity to fundamentally rethink the basis of the law and its role in society and civilization. To overcome the deficiencies in the theory and practice of law in so-called ‘liberal democracies’ I will argue here that it will be necessary to revive and develop the philosophies of law associated with the ‘Radical Enlightenment’. This is the tradition of thought that identified freedom and liberty with ‘autonomy’; that is, people giving themselves their own laws rather than having laws imposed upon them. To revive this tradition it is necessary to entertain a far broader perspective on the place of law in society than has been customary among legal theorists. It is necessary to understand the emergence and evolution of law from the beginnings of civilization. From this much broader perspective it will be shown that to achieve autonomy, as Aristotle and his followers argued, law cannot be separated from the cultivation of the virtues. To overcome the failures of ‘liberal legalism’ in the modern world, however, it will be necessary to look beyond Aristotelian virtues to the virtues cultivated in Chinese civilization. Reviving the Radical Enlightenment, a new synthesis is emerging in legal philosophy based on process metaphysics, a tradition of philosophy that has always been concerned to fuse Western and Eastern traditions of thought. Overcoming the deficiencies in the theory and practice of ‘liberal legalism’ to address the global ecological crisis while providing China with a framework for its legal system, is part of the process of creating an ecological civilization.