摘要：Taking the viewpoint of the civil law tradition, which has traditionally assumed that the legitimacy of the administration is state-derived, this text recognises the constant decline of state sovereignty in modern times and consequently the increasing diffusion of the state into society. At the level of state theory, this reflects a shift from the great philosophical ‘social contract’ to many small legal contracts as its functional equivalent. Dealing with this phenomenon, administrative law needs to address the fundamental question of how law can sustainably support the unity of a society where the state administration and the various parts of society it has to govern are strange to each other and at the same time depending on mutual ad-hoc cooperation time and again.
