Justifying Contract in Europe answers on every page the ‘so what’-question of why one should care about European contract law. I thoroughly enjoyed reading the engaging analysis of the normative foundations of law through the lens of six strands of political theory: utilitarianism; liberal-egalitarianism; libertarianism; communitarianism; civic republicanism; and discourse theory. In this short reflection, I will concentrate on one specific question, which seem, however, relevant to the entire inquiry of the book: Does Justifying Contract in Europe honor its expressly stated commitment to radical democracy? How does it deal, in light of the growing dissensus in Europe, with the need to provide institutional arrangements that equip a political system to turn unproductive antagonism into productive agonism?

In this article I locate Justifying Contract in Europe’s most unique contribution in its rhetorical and methodological commitment to pluralism, which, although Hesselink may disagree, is also a normative and political commitment. Starting from this observation, I then discuss the normative implications of this type of pluralism for the ways in which different reasons are reconciled and reflected in the law. As I argue, it may not be necessary, desirable, or even possible to choose the precise reasons why we support a certain normative answer – say consumer protection is desirable – nor to discard all concerns coming from those supporting the opposite answer – no consumer protection. This implies that ‘reconciliation’ describes better than ‘compromise’ what we need to shape contract law in Europe. In the conclusions, I reflect on what this may mean for the EU and EU Law. As I suggest, the type of pluralism the book evokes and celebrates, if not explicitly theorizes, offers a powerful rejection of accounts that see EU law as dominated by a narrow set of values and normative commitments.

Justifying Contract in Europe has the ambition to contribute to the envisioning of more just alternative futures by highlighting the normative stakes of contract law questions. This contribution asks what sort of just futures can be envisioned, if and when we remain focused on justifications that make gender and racial injustice invisible in the context of contract’s normative stakes. In particular, in this response, I offer a critique of the structural absence of intersectional feminist engagements with ideas of justice, democracy and freedom in discourse on justice and contract in Europe. The absence of feminist intersectional analyses undermines the diagnostic processes to identify root problems and the potential for radical reconsiderations for contract in Europe.

This contribution questions the conception of normative theory that Martijn Hesselink seems to embrace in Justifying Contract in Europe. The question it asks is ostensibly simple and straightforward: what is normative theory? And: what does Hesselink mean when he speaks of normative theory? By connecting the method and approach of Justifying Contract in Europe to the question of delimitation, the article raises several concerns with the reasons Hesselink offers for excluding feminist and Marxist theory, including their heterogeneity and presumed hostility to normative questions and approaches. The article suggests that these reasons point to a broader and more profound difficulty with Hesselink’s understanding of normative theory, which rests on a problematic distinction between normativity and critique. To this, the article responds that critique and normativity (moral philosophy), properly understood, are intimately related – in fact: inseparable – and that one without the other leaves us with a significantly impoverished and unduly narrow understanding of both normativity and critique.

In his book, Hesselink measures European Contract Law against the standards of several classical so-called normative political theories. This gives an idea of how European Contract Law fits within a certain intellectual landscape, but there are two things it does not do: it does not tell us how European Contract Law relates to some of the burning issues of the day, and it does not tell us what consequences European Contract Law would actually have. In a time of crisis, should we celebrate the cool cerebral quality of the book’s analysis, or be frustrated that it does not tell us what to do?

While investigating ways to Justifying Contract in Europe, Martijn Hesselink leaves it to the interrogated theories to define the scope of its very inquiry – the reach and significance of contract itself. This leaves the question of what Hesselink sets out to justify quite open for the reader, who at the same time gets the distinctive idea that this delimitation has normative significance in the author’s own views. To the extent that we do, as a matter of justice, need to have contract law rules – then, these rules need to be just. The comment, thus, seeks to re-articulate Hesselink’s non-definition of (European) contract law, to try to delimit where we need such rules and test the boundaries of what rules we may in fact accept or even need as a matter of justice – what kind of rules we can, in Hesselink’s framework, ultimately set out to justify.

This article discusses the power of reasons in European private law. It does so in response to six articles written by critics, as part of a book symposium on Justifying Contract in Europe: Political Philosophies in European Contract Law (Oxford University Press, 2021). In particular, this contribution explores: the role of reasons in emancipatory political struggles; the meaning of reconciliation in pluralist societies; intersectional corrective justice through private law; the relationship between normative questions and critical theory; the priority of justice in times of crisis; and the politics of general private law theory.