3. Classical legal positivism

2020 ◽  
pp. 74-96
Author(s):  
Raymond Wacks

This chapter examines the important theory of legal positivism that has long dominated jurisprudence. It explains the core ideas of the theory, and then considers the leading proponents of classical legal positivism, especially the leading nineteenth century philosophers, Jeremy Bentham and John Austin. Bentham is best known as a utilitarian and law reformer, but he insisted on the separation between the ‘is’ and ‘ought’ of law, or what he preferred to call ‘expositorial’ and ‘censorial’ jurisprudence, respectively. Austin was equally emphatic in maintaining this distinction, but his analysis is generally regarded as much narrower in scope and objective than Bentham’s.

Author(s):  
Raymond Wacks

This chapter examines the theories of the foremost legal positivists of the nineteenth century: Jeremy Bentham and John Austin. Bentham is best known as a utilitarian and law reformer, but who insisted on the separation between the ‘is’ and ‘ought’ of law, or what he preferred to call ‘expositorial’ and ‘censorial’ jurisprudence, respectively. Austin was equally emphatic in maintaining this distinction, but his analysis is generally regarded as much narrower in scope and objective than Bentham’s. A number of key concepts analysed by both of these theorists are examined and compared, including their definitions of law, commands, sovereignty, and sanctions.


Author(s):  
Neil MacCormick

H.L.A. Hart, Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford University, 1952–1968, is an outstanding representative of the analytical approach in jurisprudence and philosophy of law. He restated ‘legal positivism’ in the tradition of Jeremy Bentham and John Austin, differentiating between law’s existence and its moral qualities. But he rejected the Benthamite identification of law with a sovereign’s commands, advancing instead a theory of law as comprising a special, systematically organized, kind of social rules. He did this in a linguistic-analytical style, showing how attention to our way of speaking and thinking about rules can yield new insights into their nature.


Author(s):  
Elizabeth Renker

American literary histories of the post-Civil War period typically treat “poetry” and “realism” as oppositional phenomena. The core narrative holds that “realism,” the major literary “movement” of the era, developed apace in prose fiction, while poetry, stuck in a hopelessly idealist late-romantic mode, languished and stagnated in a genteel “twilight of the poets.” This chapter excavates the historical origins of the twilight narrative in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It shows how this narrative emerged as a function of a particular idealist ideology of poetry that circulated widely in authoritative print-culture sites. The chapter demonstrates that the twilight narrative was only one strain in a complex cultural debate about poetry, a debate that entailed multiple voices and positions that would later fall out of literary history when the twilight narrative achieved institutional status as fact.


Author(s):  
Mark Storey

This chapter employs recent approaches to the study of world literature to offer a new reading of nineteenth-century American regionalism. The huge body of texts usually included in the regional or “local-color” genre often take rural communities as both subject matter and foregrounded setting, communities that are held in a structurally “peripheral” position within the combined and uneven world economy of the late nineteenth century. This chapter argues that such a position is registered in the genre’s distinctive oscillation between realist and “irrealist” literary modes—between the professionalized and ascendant cultural standard of the core and the persistence of nonrealist generic devices and registers. Calling on two of the genre’s quintessential representatives, Hamlin Garland and Sarah Orne Jewett, the chapter ultimately makes a case for reading local-color writing as a form of (semi)peripheral realism within world literature’s expanded geographical and temporal horizons.


Author(s):  
BARBARA ARNEIL

Using two recently published folios by Jeremy Bentham, I draw out a fundamental but little-analyzed connection between pauperism and both domestic and settler colonialism in opposition to imperialism in his thought. The core theoretical contribution of this article is to draw a distinction between a colonial, internal, and productive form of power that claims to improve people and land from within, which Bentham defends, and an imperial, external, and repressive form of power that dominates or rules over people from above and afar, that he rejects. Inherent in colonialism and the power unleashed by it are specific and profoundly negative implications in practice for the poor and disabled of Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries subject to domestic colonialism and indigenous peoples subject to settler colonialism from first contact until today. I conclude Bentham is best understood as a pro-colonialist and anti-imperialist thinker.


2009 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 563-589 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raf Gelders

In the aftermath of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978), European representations of Eastern cultures have returned to preoccupy the Western academy. Much of this work reiterates the point that nineteenth-century Orientalist scholarship was a corpus of knowledge that was implicated in and reinforced colonial state formation in India. The pivotal role of native informants in the production of colonial discourse and its subsequent use in servicing the material adjuncts of the colonial state notwithstanding, there has been some recognition in South Asian scholarship of the moot point that the colonial constructs themselves built upon an existing, precolonial European discourse on India and its indigenous culture. However, there is as yet little scholarly consensus or indeed literature on the core issues of how and when these edifices came to be formed, or the intellectual and cultural axes they drew from. This genealogy of colonial discourse is the subject of this essay. Its principal concerns are the formalization of a conceptual unit in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, called “Hinduism” today, and the larger reality of European culture and religion that shaped the contours of representation.


2009 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
SUBHO BASU

AbstractThrough a study of hitherto unexplored geography textbooks written in Bengali between 1845 and 1880, this paper traces the evolution of a geographic information system related to ethnicity, race, and space. This geographic information system impacted the mentality of emerging educated elites in colonial India who studied in the newly established colonial schools and played a critical role in developing and articulating ideas of the territorial nation-state and the rights of citizenship in India. The Bengali Hindu literati believed that the higher location of India in such a constructed hierarchy of civilizations could strengthen their claims to rights of citizenship and self-government. These nineteenth century geography textbooks asserted clearly that high caste Hindus constituted the core ethnicity of colonial Indian society and all others were resident outsiders. This knowledge system, rooted in geography/ethnicity/race/space, and related to the hierarchy of civilizations, informed the Bengali intelligentsia's notion of core ethnicity in the future nation-state in India with Hindu elites at its ethnic core.


Humaniora ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 299
Author(s):  
Frederikus Fios

Fair punishment for a condemned has been long debated in the universe of discourse of law and global politics. The debate on the philosophical level was no less lively. Many schools of thought philosophy question, investigate, reflect and assess systematically the ideal model for the subject just punishment in violation of the law. One of the interesting and urgent legal thought Jeremy Bentham, a British philosopher renowned trying to provide a solution in the middle of the debate was the doctrine or theory of utilitarianism. The core idea is that the fair punishment should be a concern for happiness of a condemned itself, and not just for revenge. Bentham thought has relevance in several dimensions such as dimensions of humanism, moral and utility.  


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