The regulations and laws of the state are therefore misconceived when they are viewed as commands.
John Dewey
The Public Record
John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer. He was one of the most prominent American scholars in the first half of the twentieth century.
gutenberg.org
If a will is the origin of the state, then state-action expresses itself in injunctions and prohibitions imposed by its will upon the wills of subjects.
Sooner or later, however, the question arises as to the justification of the will which issues commands.
Why should the will of the rulers have more authority than that of others?
The logical conclusion is that the ground of obedience lies ultimately in superior force.
In fact the idea of authority is abolished, and that of force substituted.
The alternative to one or other of these conclusions is surrender of the causal authorship theory and the adoption of that of widely distributed consequences, which, when they are perceived, create a common interest and the need of special…
Rules of law are in fact the institution of conditions under which persons make their arrangements with one another.
They are structures which canalize action; they are active forces only as are banks which confine the flow of a stream, and are commands only in the sense in which the banks command the current.
If individuals had no stated conditions under which they come to agreement with one another, any agreement would either terminate in a twilight zone of vagueness or would have to cover such an enormous amount of detail as to be unwieldy…
There are many transactions in which the thing of chief importance is that consequences be determinate in some fashion rather than that they be determined by some inherent principle to be just such and such.
If one wishes to realize the distance which may lie between “facts” and the meaning of facts, let one go to the field of social discussion.