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What is Right with Ideology?

Bronwen Morgan

出版	SSRN, 2010
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=SwPtzgEACAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋

This is a review essay which engages with William Lucy's jurisprudential monograph, Understanding and Explaining Adjudication. Lucy's text argues that there are unexpected commonalities between critical legal studies approaches to jurisprudence and the 'mainstream' targets of their critique. He aspires to build bridges between these schools of thought, and in so doing, to build a further bridge between jurisprudence and the broader methodological conundrums facing the social sciences and humanities as a whole. My review essay begins by summarising the main claims of the book which take place on two levels: first, a descriptive account of the differing claims made by orthodox and heretical jurisprudence about the process and grounds of judging, and secondly, a critical-analytical account of the assumptions underpinning both orthodox and heretical jurisprudence in relation to method, accounts of causality and the place of values in adjudication. I then argue that despite achieving much in doing the above, Lucy sidesteps one of the key challenges of what he terms 'heretical' approaches to jurisprudence. This is because his preference for determinacy, closure and resolution causes him to reject any 'ground' for the claims of jurisprudence in a manner which grants contradictions and contingency rather than trying to eliminate them. In a sense, the terms of his argument devour, I would argue, the real challenge of heretics, by constantly eliminating contradiction and contingency. I elaborate my challenge in three steps: first, by exploring the way in which the concept of ideology is deployed by Lucy, second by suggesting that Lucy's emphasis on the distinction between critical and non-critical accounts of ideology is less salient than a distinction between epistemological critique and power critique that rescues ideology from redundancy. Thirdly, I present three ways in which ideology does active (and arguably distinctive, at least in comparison to orthodox) work in heretical jurisprudence. I conclude by suggesting that a fruitful way forward for reopening dialoguebetween 'orthdoxy' and 'heresy' in jurisprudence is to take a sociological rather than philosophical approach to the constitutive paradox that is core to deconstructionist strands of heretical jurisprudence.