Law and the Utopian Imagination (The Amherst Series in Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804790817 ISBN 13: 9780804790819

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

Law and the Utopian Imagination seeks to explore and resuscitate the notion of utopianism within current legal discourse. The idea of utopia has fascinated the imaginations of important thinkers for ages. And yet—who writes seriously on the idea of utopia today?

The mid-century critique appears to have carried the day, and a belief in the very possibility of utopian achievements appears to have flagged in the face of a world marked by political instability, social upheaval, and dreary market realities. Instead of mapping out the contours of a familiar terrain, this book seeks to explore the possibilities of a productive engagement between the utopian and the legal imagination. The book asks: is it possible to re-imagine or revitalize the concept of utopia such that it can survive the terms of the mid-century liberal critique? Alternatively, is it possible to re-imagine the concept of utopia and the theory of liberal legality so as to dissolve the apparent antagonism between the two? In charting possible answers to these questions, the present volume hopes to revive interest in a vital topic of inquiry too long neglected by both social thinkers and legal scholars.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. Lawrence Douglas is James J. Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought at Amherst College. Martha Merrill Umphrey is Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought and Chair of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought at Amherst College.

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Law and the Utopian Imagination

By Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas, Martha Merrill Umphrey

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8047-9081-9

Contents

CONTRIBUTORS, 
Law and the Utopian Imagination: An Introduction LAWRENCE DOUGLAS, AUSTIN SARAT, AND MARTHA MERRILL UMPHREY, 
The One and Only Law: Walter Benjamin, Utopianism, and the Second Commandment JAMES R. MARTEL, 
Law, Utopia, Event: A Constellation of Two Trajectories JOHAN VAN DER WALT, 
"What about Peace?": Cotton Mather's Millennium and the Rise of International Law NAN GOODMAN, 
Globus terraqueus: Cosmopolitan Law and "Fluid Geography" in the Utopian Thinking of Immanuel Kant and Joseph-Pierre Proudhon DIANE MORGAN, 
Dystopian Narratives and Legal Imagination: Tales of Noir Cities and Dark Laws SHULAMIT ALMOG, 
INDEX, 

CHAPTER 1

Law and the Utopian Imagination: An Introduction

LAWRENCE DOUGLAS AUSTIN SARAT MARTHA MERRILL UMPHREY

In 1922, toward the conclusion of his first book, Story of Utopias, the American sociologist Lewis Mumford wrote, "Our most important task at the present moment is to build castles in the sky." In 1929, in his classic work Ideology and Utopia, the German sociologist Karl Mannheim offered a similarly emphatic defense of the importance of utopian thinking: "The complete elimination of reality-transcending elements from our world," Mannheim wrote, "ultimately would mean the decay of the human will. ... The disappearance of utopia brings about a static state of affairs in which man himself becomes no more than a thing." A scant two decades later, a very different tone sounded in the pages of three of the most influential social thinkers of the midcentury. Writing independently, Karl Popper, Lionel Trilling, and Isaiah Berlin essayed critiques of utopianism that, taken together, delivered a broad indictment of utopian thinking. Far from locating in the utopian imagination a vital force for human betterment and social progress, these midcentury thinkers powerfully argued that utopianism paves the way to totalitarianism and that its logical endpoint is not the peaceful community of equals but the death camp. In particular, these thinkers laid bare the particular antagonisms between utopianism and liberal legality—finding in the former a dire threat to the salutary commitments of the latter.

Who, then, writes seriously on the idea of utopia today? The answer would seem to be: almost no one, and least of all scholars of the law. The midcentury critique appears to have carried the day, and a belief in the very possibility of utopian achievements—bracketing for a moment the question of their desirability—appears to have flagged in the face of a world marked by political instability, social upheaval, and dreary market realities. True, one can find in the manifestos of exuberant dot-commers elements or vestiges of utopian thinking—fervent expressions of belief in the Internet's promise of radical equality and unfettered self-expression. One can likewise locate aspects of utopianism in statements of the loose affiliation of groups associated with the "occupy Wall Street" movement. Still, it seems fair to say that utopianism finds itself in a generally moribund state—discredited by a series of critiques penned in the middle of the last century, and marginalized by the dislocations of current political and market processes.

This volume can be seen, then, as a project of exploration and resuscitation. Instead of mapping out the contours of a familiar terrain, our contributors seek to explore the possibilities of a productive engagement between the utopian and the legal imagination. Is it possible to reimagine or revitalize the concept of utopia such that it can survive the terms of the midcentury liberal critique? Alternatively, is it possible to reframe the concept of utopia and the theory of liberal legality so as to dissolve the apparent antagonism between the two? In charting possible answers to these questions, the present volume hopes to revive interest in a vital topic of inquiry too long neglected by both social thinkers and legal scholars.

* * *

The term "utopia" first appeared in Sir Thomas More's eponymous novel of 1516, but the concept predated More by two millennia, finding its first and most influential elaboration in the pages of Plato'sRepublic. Over the centuries the utopian imagination has produced a rich and varied literature, including such classics as Samuel Butler's Erewhon, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, and B. F. Skinner's Walden Two. Some of these works were no doubt meant to serve as criticism of existing social and political structures; to this day, scholars cannot agree on whether More intended utopia—Latin for "no where," a place the reader is guided through by a character named Raphael Hythloday, or "dispenser of nonsense"—as a bona fide vision or an ironic critique of Elizabethan institutions. Yet whatever the answer to this question, there is no denying that countless real-world social experiments have been launched under the capacious rubric of utopianism.

Our purpose here is not to inventory such experiments; our concern is with the nature of the utopian imagination that has endorsed and stimulated such ventures. In imagining an ideal or perfect community, the utopian imagination has typically eschewed nostalgia. It finds its ideal not in a prelapsarian, Edenic state of innocence; instead, the utopian imagination has tended to fix its gaze on the future, finding its realization not in the dissolution of social arrangements and institutions but in their dialectical transcendence or radical improvement. Certainly one can find aspects of prelapsarian thinking in the utopian imagination—More's vision of the abolition of private property harks back to Plato, just as Plato locates one model of utopia in the lost island of Atlantis—but still the larger fact remains that utopias are not points of return: they are destinations that must be fashioned and engineered. In More's novel, for example, Utopia is an island, but an artificial, not a natural one. Originally a peninsula, the island was created through an ambitious and arduous project of land removal, meant to insulate the community from threats—military and otherwise—from the mainland.

Such engineered communities assume a wide variety of forms in the utopian imagination; still, it is possible to speak of certain commonalities and shared features. Utopias are, first and foremost, communities of harmony and order. In Utopia and Its Enemies, political theorist George Kateb described utopias as sharing conditions of "perpetual peace, guaranteed abundance, and conditioned virtue." Work is rewarding and leisure is stimulating. There is no want, strife, or dissension. Virtuous behavior guarantees conditions of peace and plenty for all, while conditions of peace and plenty make possible the cultivation of virtue.

Perhaps the most remarkable example of utopian harmony is found in the pages of The Republic, where Plato famously defines justice as "minding ... one's own business" and performing "the one function in the community for which his nature has best suited him." Justice, in this account, is no more than the harmonious performance of tasks, as Plato posits an affinity between the structural harmony of the parts of the state and the internal equipoise of the well-balanced individual soul. Just as justice...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804790817
• ISBN 13: 9780804790819
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 200
• Herausgeber: Sarat Austin, Douglas Lawrence, Umphrey Martha Merrill
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Messaggerie Libri; ufficio.anagrafiche@meli.it; ; Via Verdi, 8; Assago Milano; Italien