The Cosmopolitan Local

This chapter highlights the creative tension between the two sides of the oeuvre of MacCormick the intellectual and the person: the local and the cosmopolitan. Neil's biography and convictions attracted him to the 'in-between', an orientation which helped shape and mould his intellectual world-view by rendering him sensitive to questions that tended to be ignored or sidelined in mainstream theories. This is the background against which MacCormick developed his many contributions to legal theory (his post-positivistic institutional theory of law), and political theory (his views on democratic nationalism and supranationalism), and which prompted him to analyse the pluralistic structures of the democratic constitutional political order (both at supranational and at infranational levels). This background helps us to come to terms with the actual implications and significance of MacCormick’s constitutional pluralism and to reconsider the tensions in MacCormick’s shift from radical to moderate pluralism.