Pigs and Positivism: Between Jurisprudence and Politics

Hendrick Hartog's Pigs and Positivism is well known as an investigation of legal pluralism. The legal pluralism angle of the article focuses on the multiplicity of legal sources. In that sense, it reads positivism through the sources thesis: the idea that only those social facts recognized by the legal system as sources of law can exert an impact on the validity of a legal norm. This Essay highlights a different aspect of the article, which is the "definition of law as an arena of conflict within which alternative social visions contended, bargained, and survived". Crucially, the alternative social visions at stake have different roles for the law itself. In other words, the conflict is not limited to a particular social arrangement (will there or won't there be pigs on the streets); it is at least in part a conflict over the question of how law will fit into social conflict, or politics.