scholarly journals New Legal Realism, Empiricism, and Scientism: The Relative Objectivity of Law and Social Science

2015 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 231-254 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANDREW LANG
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Empirical Knowledge ◽  
Legal Realism ◽  
The Social ◽  
Complicated Form ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Historical Accounts ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

AbstractIn this article, I suggest that one of the central characteristics of New Legal Realism is the productive tension between empiricist and pragmatist theories of knowledge which lies at its core. On one side, new realist work in its empiricist posture seeks to use empirical knowledge of the world as the basis on which to design, interpret, apply, and criticize the law. On the other, in its pragmatist moments, it explicitly draws attention to the social and political contingency of any claims to empirical knowledge of the world, including its own. As a consequence, it is distinctive of much scholarship in the New Legal Realist vein that it continually enacts creative syntheses of different philosophies of truth in an attempt to be, in Shaffer's words, ‘positivist . . . interpretivist, and legal realist all at once’. The first part of this article draws on existing historical accounts of legal realism briefly to trace the problematic and ambiguous place of scientism in the legal realist tradition. Then, in the second and more important part of the article, I argue that the ambivalence of the legal realists’ vision has left us, in certain contexts, with a complicated form of mixed legal-scientific governance which has proved remarkably and surprisingly resilient in the face of late twentieth century critiques of scientific objectivity. This may be one of the most enduring legacies of the ‘old’ legal realists for those today who work in the New Legal Realist vein.

Diaspora Capitalism and the Homeland: Australian Chinese Networks into China

1996 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 239-273
Author(s):  
Constance Lever-Tracy ◽  
David Ip
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Economic Development ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
The Other ◽  
The World ◽  
World Economic ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Opening Up

This article explores two new and related phenomena of the late twentieth century that will surely play a major role in shaping the world of the twenty-first: the economic development and opening up of China, and the emergence onto the world economic stage of diaspora Chinese businesses, producing a significant, identifiably Chinese current within global capitalism. Each of these has, we believe, been crucial and perhaps indispensable to the other.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 151-154
Author(s):  
Olivier Roy
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Public ◽  
Secular Culture ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Public Sphere

This concluding chapter discusses how values are returning today in the guise of dominant norms, both in the secular world and in religion. Today's crisis is not simply a crisis of values, but of referring to values at all. For what should values be founded on? On one hand, religions, which are no longer in sync with Europe's dominant cultures, are returning to the public sphere on behalf of a normative demand. On the other hand, the secular culture that professes freedom and rights is coming to a head in a burst of normative production. This is a normativity toward all forms of religion and religiosity, of course, but also normativity with respect to its own foundation, the social contract, and human nature, that of the desiring subject. Ultimately, the chapter argues that it is time to re-examine the question of values, to restore the particular cultural and social aspects of norms and to reinject them into society. In the face of globalization, the issue is at once to be more in touch with society and to act as a counterweight to other influences in the world: only Europe can meet these two objectives.

Competing for the Apocalypse

2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-28
Author(s):  
Erica Baffelli ◽  
Ian Reader
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
New Religion ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This article examines how one Japanese new religion shifted its orientations and perspectives– notably in millennialist terms – in the late twentieth century, and suggests this may have been influenced by the rivalries and conflicts it had with another millennialist movement in Japan. By examining the rivalry between Aum Shinriky? and K?fuku no Kagaku, and by examining how the activities of each impacted on those of the other, we can see how religious groups do not formulate policies and teachings, or amend their perspective on the world, in isolation. We argue that while looking at the prevailing religious trends of any era can help us understand the specific teachings of individual groups, we should also pay attention to the interactions between groups. It also suggests that when we discuss categories and types of millennialism, we should be aware that movements can encapsulate more than one form of millennialism at any one time.

The Social Identity of Hosts and Patrons

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christel Lane
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Organizational Identity ◽  
World War ◽  
Social Segregation ◽  
Social Mixing ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Post War ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This chapter analyses inns, taverns, and public houses in their social context, exploring their organizational identity and the social positions of their owners/tenants. It examines how patrons express their class, gender, and national identity by participation in different kinds of sociality. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century hostelries afforded more opportunities for cross-class sociability than in later centuries. Social mixing was facilitated because the venues fulfilled multiple economic, social, and political functions, thereby providing room for social interaction apart from communal drinking and eating. Yet, even in these earlier centuries, each type of hostelry already had a distinctive class character, shaping its organizational identity. Division along lines of class hardened, and social segregation increased in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, up to World War II. In the post-War era, increased democratization of society at large became reflected in easier social mixing in pubs. Despite this democratization, during the late twentieth century the dominant image of pubs as a working-class institution persisted.

Benson and Miller in Perspective

1979 ◽  
Vol 3 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 242-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Kuklick
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Applied Science ◽  
The Other ◽  
Social Knowledge ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The One ◽  
Stock Of Knowledge

Despite differences in coloration Miller and Benson are birds of a feather. Although he is no Pollyanna, Miller believes that there has been a modest and decent series of advances in the social sciences and that the most conscientious, diligent, and intelligent researchers will continue to add to this stock of knowledge. Benson is much more pessimistic about the achievements of yesterday and today but, in turn, offers us the hope of a far brighter tomorrow. Miller explains Benson’s hyperbolic views about the past and future by distinguishing between pure and applied science and by pointing out Benson’s naivete about politics: the itch to understand the world is different from the one to make it better; and, Miller says, because Benson sees that we have not made things better, he should not assume we do not know more about them; Benson ought to realize, Miller adds, that the way politicians translate basic social knowledge into social policy need not bring about rational or desirable results. On the other side, Benson sees more clearly than Miller that the development of science has always been intimately intertwined with the control of the environment and the amelioration of the human estate.

Europa 51: The Face of the Star in Neorealisms Urban Landscape

Film Studies ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-57
Author(s):  
Ora Gelley
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Social World ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Roberto Rossellini ◽  
The Face ◽  
Classical Style

Although Europa 51 (1952) was the most commercially successful of the films Roberto Rossellini made with the Hollywood star, Ingrid Bergman, the reception by the Italian press was largely negative. Many critics focussed on what they saw to be the ‘unreal’ or abstract quality of the films portrayal of the postwar urban milieu and on the Bergman character‘s isolation from the social world. This article looks at how certain structures of seeing that are associated in the classical style with the woman as star or spectacle - e.g., the repetitious return to her fixed image, the resistance to pulling back from the figure of the woman in order to situate her within a determinate location and set of relationships between characters and objects - are no longer restricted to her image but in fact bleed into or “contaminate” the depiction of the world she inhabits. In other words, whereas the compulsive return to the fixed image of the woman tends to be contained or neutralised by the narrative economy and editing patterns (ordered by sexual difference) of the classical style, in Rossellini‘s work this ‘insistent’ even aberrant framing in relation to the woman becomes a part of the (female) characters and the cameras vision of the ‘pathology’ of the urban landscape in the aftermath of the war.

Post-Yugoslav Serbian Literature and Its Roots in the Social and Political Changes

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-118
Author(s):  
Milan Orlić
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
The Other ◽  
Cultural Discourse ◽  
World Language ◽  
Cultural Paradigms ◽  
The Social ◽  
Post Modernism ◽  
The World ◽  
Socialist Realist ◽  
The One

Post-Yugoslav literature and culture came out of the stylistic formations of Yugoslav modernism and postmodernism, in the context of European cultural discourse. Yugoslav literature, which spans the existence of “two” Yugoslavias, the “first” Yugoslavia (1928–1941) and the “second” socialist Yugoslavia (1945–1990), is the foundation of various national literary and cultural paradigms, which shared the same or similar historical, philosophical and aesthetic roots. These were fed, on the one hand, by a phenomenological understanding of the world, language, style and culture, and on the other, by an acceptance of or resistance to the socialist realist aesthetics and ideological values of socialist Yugoslav society. In selected examples of contemporary Serbian prose, the author explores the social context, which has shaped contemporary Serbian literature, focusing on its roots in Serbian and Yugoslav 20th century (post)modernism.

Participation and Causality

2014 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 294-318 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory W. Dawes
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
Cognitive Dimension ◽  
Present Essay ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Modes Of Thought ◽  
Experimental Attitude

A recurring debate within discussions of religion, science, and magic has to do with the existence of distinct modes of thought or “orientations” to the world. The thinker who initiated this debate, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, distinguished two such orientations, one characterized as “participatory” and the other as “causal.” The present essay attempts to clarify what a participatory orientation might involve, making use of the social-psychological category of a “schema.” It argues that while the attitude to which Lévy-Bruhl refers is to be distinguished from an explicit body of doctrine, it does have a cognitive dimension and can embody causal claims. It follows that if such a distinction is to be made, it is not helpfully characterized as a contrast between participation and causality. A better distinction might be that between a mythical and an experimental attitude to the world.

Geographies of Global Change: Remapping the World in the Late Twentieth Century

1997 ◽  
Vol 73 (2) ◽  
pp. 256
Author(s):  
Frank Hodges ◽  
R. J. Johnston ◽  
Peter J. Taylor ◽  
Michael J. Watts
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Global Change ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

scholarly journals Realities to be-come: on Cosmopolitics

2013 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Schillmeier
Keyword(s):  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
The Other ◽  
Felix Guattari ◽  
Possible World ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Isabelle Stengers ◽  
Key Terms

To assume that all things we want to describe – humans and non-humans alike – can be done so properly only in terms of 'societies', requires a contrast – a momentum of cosmopolitics – to the very abstract distinctions upon which our classical understanding of sociology and its key terms rests: 'The social' as defined in opposition to 'the non-social', 'society' in opposition to 'nature'. The concept of cosmopolitics tries to avoid such modernist strategy that A. N. Whitehead called 'bifurcation of nature' (cf. Whitehead 1978, 2000). The inventive production of contrasts names a cosmopolitical tool which does not attempt to denounce, debunk, replace or overcome abstract, exclusivist oppositions that suggest divisions as 'either…or'-relations. Rather, as the Belgian philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers stresses, 'the contrast will have to be celebrated in the manner of a new existent, adding a new dimension to the cosmos' (Stengers 2011: 513). Cosmopolitics, then, engages with 'habits we experiment with in order to become capable of new experiences' (Stengers 2001: 241) and opens up the possibility of agency of the non-expected Other, the non-normal, the non-human, the non-social, the un-common. 'The Other is the existence of a possible world', as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1994: 17-18) have put it. It is 'the condition for our passing from one world to another. The Other (...) makes the world go by.'

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