The dialogic community at dusk

This paper offers a critical response to Alan Brudner's magisterial Punishment and Freedom. Brudner’s Hegelian political theory of criminal law makes a significant advance over predominant moral theories. However Brudner misleads when he claims that the general part of the criminal law can be understood as a dialectical unity of three antithetical paradigms of individual freedom, a unity he calls dialogic community. The rise of preventive criminal law in the UK reveals that the tension between these paradigms has proved impossible to manage in practice. Brudner’s painstaking elaboration of the paradigms of liberal freedom nevertheless allows us to identify the source of the breakdown of the dialogic community, and to understand better the subsequent decay of liberal order.