Austin John (1790–1859), English legal philosopher known especially for his command theory of law. His career as a lawyer was unsuccessful but his reputation as a scholar was such that on the founding of University College, London, he was offered the chair of jurisprudence. In 1832 he published the first ten of his lectures, compressed into six as The Province of Jurisprudence Determined. Although he published a few papers, and his somewhat fragmentary Lectures on Jurisprudence (1863) was published posthumously, it is on the Province that his reputation rests. He and Bentham (his friend, London neighbor, and fellow utilitarian) were the foremost English legal philosophers of their time, and their influence on the course of legal philosophy endures.
Austin held that the first task of legal philosophy, one to which he bends most of his energy, is to make clear what laws are, and if possible to explain why they are what they are: their rationale. Until those matters are clear, legislative proposals and legal arguments can never be clear, since irrelevant considerations will inevitably creep in. The proper place for moral or theological considerations is in discussion of what the positive law ought to be, not of what it is. Theological considerations reduce to moral ones, since God can be assumed to be a good utilitarian. It is positive laws, ‘that is to say the laws which are simply and strictly so called, . . . which form the appropriate matter of general and particular jurisprudence.’ They must also be distinguished from ‘laws metaphorical or figurative.’ A law in its most general sense is ‘a rule laid down for the guidance of an intelligent being by an intelligent being having power over him.’ It is a command, however phrased. It is the commands of men to men, of political superiors, that form the body of positive law. General or comparative jurisprudence, the source of the rationale, if any, of particular laws, is possible because there are commands nearly universal that may be attributed to God or Nature, but they become positive law only when laid down by a ruler. The general model of an Austinian analytic jurisprudence built upon a framework of definitions has been widely followed, but cogent objections, especially by Hart, have undermined the command theory of law. See also JURISPRUDENCE , PHILOSOPHY OF LA. E.L.P. J(ohn) L(angshaw) (1911–60), English philosopher, a leading exponent of postwar ‘linguistic’ philosophy. Educated primarily as a classicist at Shrewsbury and Balliol College, Oxford, he taught philosophy at Magdalen College. During World War II he served at a high level in military intelligence, which earned him the O.B.E., Croix de Guerre, and Legion of Merit. In 1952 he became White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford, and in 1955 and 1958 he held visiting appointments at Harvard and Berkeley, respectively. In his relatively brief career, Austin published only a few invited papers; his influence was exerted mainly through discussion with his colleagues, whom he dominated more by critical intelligence than by any preconceived view of what philosophy should be. Unlike some others, Austin did not believe that philosophical problems all arise out of aberrations from ‘ordinary language,’ nor did he necessarily find solutions there; he dwelt, rather, on the authority of the vernacular as a source of nice and pregnant distinctions, and held that it deserves much closer attention than it commonly receives from philosophers. It is useless, he thought, to pontificate at large about knowledge, reality, or existence, for example, without first examining in detail how, and when, the words ‘know’, ‘real’, and ‘exist’ are employed in daily life. In Sense and Sensibilia (1962; compiled from lecture notes), the sense-datum theory comes under withering fire for its failings in this respect. Austin also provoked controversy with his well-known distinction between ‘performative’ and ‘constative’ utterances (‘I promise’ makes a promise, whereas ‘he promised’ merely reports one); he later recast this as a threefold differentiation of locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary ‘forces’ in utterance, corresponding (roughly) to the meaning, intention, and consequences of saying a thing, in one context or another. Though never very stable or fully worked out, these ideas have since found a place in the still-evolving study of speech acts.
See also ORDINARY LANGUAGE PHILOSO- PHY , SPEECH ACT THEOR. P.He.