Johan van der Walt offers a modest conception of liberal democratic law as a groundless modus vivendi, while at the same time backing up this conception with an ambitious inquiry into the long history of Western metaphysics and the ways in which it shaped legal imagination. There are two main dimensions to my criticism of Van der Walt’s work, and they exactly divide between its modesty and ambition. I contend that the understanding of liberal democratic law as a modus vivendi is too modest insofar as it avoids normative justification, whereas the philosophical storyline is too ambitious insofar as it amplifies the extent to which questions of legal and political theory are embedded in questions of ontology.
