In an article in The Owl of Minerva, 19 Shlomo Avineri shows very convincingly that Hegel's view was that the rational must inevitably triumph in history, but that the progress towards it would have to respect the
history of the particular society.
In the end I may disagree on the
desirability of the particular society and engineered earth - system that Morton portrays (both in his utopian scenario, and in the frames he reproduces), but I can celebrate the excellent job he has done of making the reader consider and envisage alternative futures in which both technology and society are transformed.
If the Court is proposing that law is an external condition for the existence of society, the
identity of a particular society being the result of its members observing a particular set of laws, then the law can not at the same time be a product of that society or an internal aspect of the identity of that society.
Aspects of the wider community have also been implicated, [52] including employment problems, socioeconomic inequality, lack of social cohesion, problems linked to migration, and
features of particular societies and cultures.
In this context, «society» is to be understood as a body of persons united in and by its acknowledgement and observance of a body of law and customs... To speak of rights and interests possessed under an identified body of laws and customs is, therefore, to speak of rights and interests that are the creatures of the laws and
customs of a particular society that exist as a group which acknowledges and observes those laws and customs.