Paradigm Shift Of Administrative Law In The Context Of Postmodern Society: Towards Reflexive Administrative Law

In the tide of globalization, China and the world are all in the situation of coexistence of pre-modern, modern and postmodern. It has great academic and practical significance that we seek resource from the theories and the practice of western countries to construct a paradigm of administrative law, which can respond to the reality of postmodern society. The article analyzes and researches the difficult position of modern administrative law from three aspects of postmodern society such as postbureacracy society, risk society and information society, to show the necessity and possibility of paradigm shift of modern administrative law. The article constructs a theoretical foundation of new paradigm of administrative law by combing out, decomposing and recomposing three theories such as responsive law of Nonet and Selznik, community law of Unger and proceduralist law of Harbermas. A new comprehensive administrative law framework is introduced by method of penetrating the theoretical foundation into specific regulations of administrative law. The new administrative law is called reflexive law because of its reflexive rationality basis. It is pointed out that reflexive administrative law is basic paradigm of that in postmodern society, which shows future tendency of administrative law, and is not only suitable for western developed countries but also valuable for China in process of legal system modernization. This article is composed of preface and four chapters. In the preface, the origin of research, scope of research, present situation of research, academic and practical significance of research and train of thought and methods of research are elaborated in detail. After summarizing, evaluating and analyzing the present research situation the article points out that the leading theory in the field of the science of administrative law is founded on the social practice of western welfare state. However, there has been a great change in the western countries since 1980s.Today's welfare states are not the same as the old ones. The administrative law founded on the basis of old welfare state can not respond to the great social change. The article describes those great changes such as post bureacracy, risk society, information society as postmodern society. How does administrative law transform in the postmodern society? This is just the task of the research. Then academic and practical significance of the study are illustrated, which can both push academic research forward and offer a reference for the administrative legal system modernization of China. Chapter one mainly analyses the difficult position of modern administrative law in the background of postmodern society. Firstly the postmodern society is defined preliminarily, which means those circumstances derive from modern society but are not the same. So-called postbureacracy, risk society, information society, are just the different pictures for the same society. Postmodern society is the continuation and strengthening of modern society. In this chapter, the article concretely analyzes the difficult position of administrative law from three aspects of postmodern society, such as postbureacracy, risk society, and information society. Those give great shock and challenge on both constitutional foundation, such as the form of democracy, the content of human rights, the pattern of Check-and-Balance, and specific regulations of administrative law, such as administrative organization law, administrative procedural law and so on, which put modern administrative law is into crisis. Chapter two and chapter three are the key part of the article. Their major task is focused on constructing a theory of administrative law, which can respond to postmodern society. The main task of chapter two is to construct the theoretic foundation of postmodern administrative law. According to Kune's theory, the process of scientific development is a process when new paradigm replace old one. The crisis of modern administrative law results in r...