The Rule of Law and Democracy in Robert Alexy’s Legal Philosophy

The paper is focused on the conception of relationships between the rule of law and democracy as one of the valuable products of Alexy’s systematic legal philosophy. The key concept used to explore this broad theoretical product of Alexy’s philosophy is the institutionalisation of reason as a tool for the reconciliation of the ideal or critical dimension of law with the factual or real dimension of it. The concept of the institutionalisation of reason finds full articulation in several features of Alexy’s legal theory. In particular, discursive constitutionalism in its political form emerges from the complex interconnections among all these elements. Indeed, they converge to form the existential core of a legal world inhabited by human beings conceived as autonomous subjects in the Kantian sense. This is the strong philosophical foundation that sustains the substantive conception of the rule of law and democracy that we find in Alexy’s philosophy.