Party Autonomy in Global Context

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to contribute to transdisciplinary dialogue on a defining paradox within the classic liberal meta-discourse that still seems to determine structures of thought right across the social sciences. Profound transformations linked to the global legal turn have meant that while state-centered liberalism continues to define contemporary paradigms in legal thinking, it does so according to a curiously abridged or truncated version, which in turn affects the shape of the social, political, or economic “reality” that it purports merely to govern. The ensuing distortion is of very specific relevance in what is known as private international law—the part of the law that provides the legal framework for late capitalism, or, in different terms, the informal normative infrastructure of the global economy.