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Continuing a prior rant with a bit of personal intellectual history:
I actually came to my present political-jurisprudential philosophy from an analysis of, of all people, Ronald Dworkin. I think Dworkin is mostly right that the positive law, in essence, rests on a substratum of morality which does more than just & #39;fill gaps,& #39; contra positivism.
However, I disagree with Dworkin that the right answer to legal questions can come from true morality itself. As I wrote in one of my SSRN articles--whose true morality? It& #39;s not like any of us have unprivileged access to the Good.
That& #39;s the puzzle I set out to solve when i was working on my LLM thesis circa 2013.
But if we don& #39;t have access to true morality itself, insofar as we are all members of a shared political and moral community, we all have more-or-less direct access to a shared body of norms, traditions, and institutions...
On the Ancient Greek understanding of poletia (constitution, form of government, or however you wish to translate it), it is *exactly this shared heritage which defines who we are as a political community.* You see this in Plato. You see it in Aristotle.
The question then emerges what happens when we move away from the shared tradition--to political and moral questions which cannot be answered through our (God help me) & #39;overlapping consensus& #39; on values. And that& #39;s where the engagement with literature on sovereignty comes from.
And it& #39;s engagement with that literature, on what everyone from Han Fei to Jeremy Bentham has had to say about the need to proffer authoritative resolutions to deep societal controversies, that I& #39;ve been buried in for about three years now.
Point being: Just *maybe* some of us who come to unorthodox views aren& #39;t disaffected young men, but scholars who have devoted their professional lives to exploring a set of fundamental philosophical questions which are at the heart of the western philosophical tradition.
End rant.
