Law against Justice and Solidarity

Author(s):  
Michel Rosenfeld

Law and justice are in crucial ways against nature as well as against solidarity. As David Hume proclaimed, justice is an “artificial virtue” in contrast to the social bonds of family and community, which are affectively grounded in solidarity and manifestations of mutual sympathy. Law as a self-standing normative order propelled by its own inner logic remains too abstract to command heartfelt internalization or commitment. Moreover, law often stands against justice, as some laws are unjust and full justice ever elusive. Accordingly, difficult questions arise for jurisprudence. Derrida and Agamben confront these difficulties in the context of the nexus between the singular, the universal, and the plural. For Derrida, law cannot achieve justice, as there is tragically no way to reconcile the universal and the singular. For Agamben, in contrast, the gaps become masked by a ceremonial spectacle of religiously inspired harmony and acclamation by those subject to law and an unbridgeable gap between law and administration. This chapter situates and compares Derrida’s deconstruction of law with Agamben’s reconstruction, focusing on whether they complement one another and on whether they point to solutions that may open a way beyond despair or artifice.

2018 ◽  
Vol 65 (4) ◽  
pp. 531-537 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stacey E. McElroy-Heltzel ◽  
Don E. Davis ◽  
Cirleen DeBlaere ◽  
Josh N. Hook ◽  
Michael Massengale ◽  
...  

2007 ◽  
Vol 60 (3) ◽  
pp. 326-340
Author(s):  
Stephanie Smith

AbstractThis work critically examines the moral theology of Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II. In his writings as Wojtyla, and later as John Paul II, the theme of human dignity served as the starting point for his moral theology. This article first describes his conception of human dignity as influenced by Thomist and by phenomenological sources. The Thomist philosophy of being provided Wojtyla with an optimistic view of the epistemic and moral capacity of human persons. Wojtyla argued that because of the analogia entis, humans gain epistemic access to the normative order of God as well as the moral capacity to live in accordance with the law of God. Built upon the foundation of his Thomist assumptions, Wojtyla's phenomenological research enriched his insight into human dignity by arguing in favour of the formative nature of human action. He argued that human dignity rested also in this dynamism of personhood: the capacity not only to live in accordance with the normative order but to form oneself as virtuous by partaking in virtuous acts or to form one's community in solidarity through acts of participation and self-giving. After presenting his moral theology, this article then engages critically with his assumptions from a Protestant perspective. I argue that, while human dignity provides a powerful and beneficial starting point for ethics, his Thomist ontology of being/substance and the optimistic terms in which he interprets human dignity ultimately undermine his social programme. I propose that an ontology of relation provides a better starting point for interpreting human dignity and for appealing for acts of solidarity in the social realm.


1969 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-90
Author(s):  
C. R. Bawden

In general outline the pattern of government in Outer Mongolia during the Manchu dyasty in not unfamiliar and it is a well-known fact that there was no judiciary as such, the administration of justice being only one of the various duties of local officials at various levels. A certain amount of work has been done on problems of law and justice, but there remain many problems of detail to be both raised and commented upon. Two lines of inquiry are open. On the one hand it is instructive to see how the processes of investigation and trial worked—how an alleged offence came to offical notice, who investigated, how evidence was recorded, what instances a case passed through, and how, and on what legal basis, it was disposed of. Other closely related technical questions concern the form and language of official documents. On the other hand, examination of criminal cases will afford insight into the social status, living conditions, and perhaps the psychology, of the persons concerned. It is in fact largely through the medium of legal and other official documents that we shall glean whatever information there is to be had about the day to day lives of individual persons in Mongolia under the Manchus, since other sources of information—journalism, biography, fiction, letters, memoirs, and so on—are non-existent. Apart from reports of criminal cases, some of which have been dealt with in model fashion by Klaus Sagaster, much information can be found in other types of official document, such as complaints submitted by ordinary people against officials, but in the present article we shall be concerned exclusively with the report of one criminal case dating from the late eighteenth century.


2006 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 43-60
Author(s):  
Charlotte Bloch

Charlotte Bloch: Emotions and Social Bonds in Academia The purpose of this article is to expand our understanding of social relations in academia by examining the role that the emotional dimensions of these social relations play in academic life. It is based on the results of an interview study of emotions and emotional culture among people in various scholarly positions in academia. The article makes analytical distinctions between the structural conditions of emotions, the emotional culture of academia, lived or felt emotions and the management of emotions. And it identifies different ways of managing the emotions of uncertainty, shame, anger, pride and laughter. These feelings emerge from the structural conditions of the social relations in academic life, and the tacit rules of feeling in academic life define how these feelings are managed. Life in academia presupposes a certain amount of feeling labour and management of feelings. Thomas Scheff’s theory about emotions and social bonds is employed to identify what this management of feelings means for social relations in academia. Bonds in academia are stable and fluctuate between solidarity, isolation and engulfment, but primarily the last two. Loneliness, group conformity, absence of real cooperation, and weakening of individual and collective creativity are some of the consequences of this kind of social bond.


Illuminatio ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 162-209
Author(s):  
Ugo Vlaisavljević

The article considers two customs traditionally followed by Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina during Eid Al-Aḍḥā (‘Festival of Sacrifice’ or Kurban Bayram). These are, first, giving a small amount of money, so-called bayramlık, to children as a reward or gift in return for handing out Qurbani meat to neighbors, and, second, giving the meat to non-Muslims. The topic will be explored in the light of Marcel Mauss’s seminal essay on the gift, since Qurbani appears as a gift that identifies, marks and renews the social bonds not only of close relatives, but also of friends and neighbors. In this context too, we will meet what Jacques Derrida calls the aporia of the gift. The slaughtering of Qurbani animal is a true gift, precisely because it is an impossible gift. It may be considered as a giftless giving: although the sacrifice is unthinkable without the slaughtered animal, it cannot be a gift to God. However, after the human act of sacrifice is performed, it is God Who makes the gift to men - because He commands that the victim’s meat must be shared. It is then to be understood not as a returned gift, but as an act of God’s hospitality, which gives to men the very possibility of gift giving. It is argued that the two Bosnian customs draw their ultimate meaning from the divine hospitality vividly experienced in the ritual of sacrifice.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-78
Author(s):  
Tadeusz Paleczny

Cultural Heritage of Local Communities in Oral History. The Base of Constructing the Social Memory  Local communities construct their own cultural heritage on the base of speaking traditions means as oral history. Each small community protects its own set of symbols and elements of tradition, including belief, dialect and private stories and anecdotes. The oral history performs a function of a part of social memory and sustains close social bonds among members of small communities. The article concerns the oral history’s role in preserving the cultural identity of small local communities.


Author(s):  
Julia Lehmann ◽  
Katherine Andrews ◽  
Robin Dunbar

Most primates are intensely social and spend a large amount of time servicing social relationships. The social brain hypothesis suggests that the evolution of the primate brain has been driven by the necessity of dealing with increased social complexity. This chapter uses social network analysis to analyse the relationship between primate group size, neocortex ratio and several social network metrics. Findings suggest that social complexity may derive from managing indirect social relationships, i.e. relationships in which a female is not directly involved, which may pose high cognitive demands on primates. The discussion notes that a large neocortex allows individuals to form intense social bonds with some group members while at the same time enabling them to manage and monitor less intense indirect relationships without frequent direct involvement with each individual of the social group.


2021 ◽  
pp. 134-153
Author(s):  
Vadim V. Volobuev ◽  

The chapter describes the influence of the Roman Catholic Church on the domestic and foreign policies of Poland from the signing of the Treaty of May 1989 between the government and episcopate to the parliamentary elections of 2019. The author shows the interaction of the clergy and parties sharing the social doctrine of the church, in particular the Law and Justice Party, and the role of the personality and views of John Paul II in current Polish politics. Finally, the author considers the disputes and conflicts within Polish Catholicism.


2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 528-540
Author(s):  
Ubaldo Fadini
Keyword(s):  

The article focuses on Deleuze's analysis of the institution, which the French philosopher carries out starting from a close confrontation with that modern anti-contractualism of which David Hume is a very significant exponent. On this basis, using also the analytical of power outlined by Elias Canetti, Deleuze attempts to provide a less obvious image of the institution. In fact, he proposes it as an indication of a need for distance, however elastic, temporary, revocable, that is, connected to those that turn out to be the transformations, the metamorphoses, of the social.


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