1. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 315-16, 320. In social-theoretical literature the same dichotomy surfaces in the contrast between "structure" and "event" as articulated by structuralist and poststructuralist writers. On this contrast see the comments by Michel Foucault and several interviewers in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 55-56, especially the following: "A whole generation was long trapped in an impasse, in that following the works of ethnologists, some of them great ethnologists, a dichotomy was established between structures (the thinkable) and the event considered as the site of the irrational, the unthinkable, that which does not and cannot enter into the mechanism and play of analysis at least in the form which this took in structuralism" (55).

2. Stanley Rosen, Hermeneutics as Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). For the distinction between ordinary and extraordinary hermeneutics see Rorty, Philosophy, 320-21, 360.

3. On classical Greek thought see Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953); see also Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), esp. 121-45. Regarding the transition from Greek to Hellenistic and Stoic thought, compare Foucault's comments: "You can see, for instance, in the Stoics, how they move slowly from an idea of an aesthetics of existence to the idea that we have to do such and such things because we are rational beings—as members of the (universal) human community we have to do them"; Foucault Reader, 354. In lieu of an "aesthetics of existence" I would prefer talking of a move from a "virtue ethics" to a deontological ethics. The notion of rule-governance is thematized by Foucault under the label mode d'assujettissement.

4. John Locke, Second Treatise of Civil Government (South Bend, Ind.: Gateway, 1955), 5-6, 109 (chap. 2, sec. 6; chap. 11, sec. 134).

5. Ibid., 110-14, 119 (chap. 11, secs. 135-37, 142).

6. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. Maurice Cranston (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 81-82 (bk. 2, chap. 6).

7. See Alan P. Grimes, American Political Thought (New York: Henry Holt, 1955), 108.

8. The Federalist (New York: Tudor, 1937), no. 78.

9. Marbury v. Madison, 1 Cranch 137 (1803).

10. See Friedrich Julius Stahl, Die Philosophie des Rechts nach geschichtlicher Umsicht (Heidelberg: Mohr, 1830-37), and Rudolf von Gneist, Der Rechtsstaat (Berlin: Springer, 1872).

11. Gottfried Dietze, Two Concepts of the Rule of Law (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1973), 10, 48.

12. Franz Neumann, The Rule of Law: Political Theory and the Legal System of Modernity (Dover, N.H.: Berg, 1986), 4. Compare also Hans Kelsen, Pure Theory of Law, trans. Max Knight (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967); and Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. Georg Schwab (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1976), and Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. Georg Schwab (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985).

13. Neumann, Rule of Law, 45. Intermittently, the study made a feeble attempt to escape the sketched antinomy. Thus, opposing Schmitt's radical decisionism Neumann argued (26-27) that "the abnormal cannot be the unique and essential element in a definition" of law. He also invoked a formula coined by Hermann Heller: "The normless will of Schmitt fails equally to solve the problem as the will-less norm of Kelsen"; see Heller, Die Souveränität (Berlin and Leipzig: de Gruyter, 1927), 26.

14. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Marianne Cowan (South Bend, Ind.: Gateway, 1955), 25 (art. 1. 22). The letter is quoted in Jean Granier, "Perspectivism and Interpretation," in The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, ed. David B. Allison (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), 197.

15. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Crossroad, 1989), 307-8. In the above and subsequent citations I have altered the translation slightly for purposes of clarity.

16. Ibid., 308-10, 324.

17. Ibid., 325-27. The reference is to Emilio Betti, Teoria generale della interpretazione, 2 vols. (Milan: Giuffré, 1955).

18. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 269.

19. Rosen, Hermeneutics as Politics, 7, 9, 87, 193. The notion of edification is borrowed from Rorty.

20. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 329, 332.

21. Ibid., 329.

22. Emilio Betti, Teoria generale della interpretazione, par. 62; the above passages are translated from the German edition: Allgemeine Auslegungslehre als Methodik der Geisteswissenschaften (Tübingen: Mohr, 1967), 659-60, 664.

23. Hegel's Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 259 (par. 141, addition; translation slightly altered).