Various contemporary legal theorists have turned to ‘imagination’ as a keyword in their accounts of law. This turn is fruitfully considered as a potential response to the modern condition diagnosed by Max Weber as ‘disenchantment’. While disenchantment is often seen as a symptom of a post-metaphysical age, it is best understood as the consummation of metaphysics and not its overcoming. Law’s participation in disenchantment is illustrated by way of Holmes’ parable of the dragon in ‘The Path of the Law’, which (...) illustrates the rationalization and demystification of law. Four ideal–typical turns to ‘imagination’ are identified: the theoretical, the progressive, the transformative and the nostalgic. Most of these turns to imagination remain complicit with disenchantment. ‘Imagination’ often appears only to be harnessed in the service of more conventional keywords of legal thought: theoreticians turn to imagination as synthesis to serve as a form of super-reason; progressives turn to imagination as empathy to make law a more effective instrument; transformatives turn to imagination as invention to serve as a form of super-will. By turning to imagination as attunement, nostalgics come closest to accepting a world that is not masterable, i.e. they come closest to accepting an enchantment that is a gift and not the product of our imaginations. Indeed, modern imaginations are themselves symptoms of disenchantment. If Weber’s diagnostic calls for a human response, it cannot be one of overcoming disenchantment by imaginative re-enchantment: it belongs integrally to enchantment to exceed any and all human capacities. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Research on political ideology in law and psychology can be fruitfully applied to the question of whether business ethics is ideological, and, if so, what response is warranted. I suggest that legal and psychological research streams can be drawn upon to create a new genre of critical business ethics that differs from normative and empirical business ethics. In psychology, Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) suggests how the mainstream ideology within an academic field can be criticized as a reflection of a self-righteous, (...) us-them mind-set. In law, Critical Legal Studies (CLS) suggests how a field’s mainstream ideology can be criticized as a rationalization of the status quo. I suggest that the MFT and CLS criticisms of ideology can be joined to develop a critical approach to business ethics that seriously examines science on normatively charged topics, such as liberal-conservative differences and implicit attitudes, and that frames it in terms of alternative narratives. (shrink)

Positive arguments on behalf of passion are scarce in liberal political theory. Rather, liberal theorists tend to push passion to the margins of their theories of politics, either by ignoring it or by explicitly arguing that passion poses a danger to politics and is best kept out of the public realm. The purpose of this essay is to criticize these marginalizations and to illustrate their roots in impoverished conceptions of passion. Using a richer conception of passion as the desire for (...) an envisioned good, I argue that it is neither possible nor desirable to eliminate passion from politics. Passion should therefore be established as a central category of analysis in political theory alongside other key concerns. Key Words: passion • reason • politics • liberalism • eros. (shrink)

Prescriptive political and moral theories contain ideas about what human beings are like and about what, correspondingly, is good for them. Conceptions of human “nature” and corresponding human good enter into normative argument by way of support and justification. Of course, it is logically open for the ratiocinative traffic to run the other way. Strongly held convictions about the rightness or wrongness, goodness or badness, of certain social institutions or practices may help condition and shape one's responses to one or (...) another set of propositions about what people are like and what, in consequence, they have reason to value. (shrink)

Is romantic love a particularly Western and modern phenomenon, as many social theorists argue, or a universal experience, as sociobiologists claim? This article argues that both these approaches err in taking sexual attraction as the essential characteristic of romance, whereas historical and personal accounts stress idealization of a particular other. Romantic love is properly defined as an experience of transcendence and is elaborated in cultural configurations of three basic types. The first is in hierarchical and internally competitive societies where marriage (...) is a political matter and romantic relations are always adulterous and often non-sexual; the second is in individualistic, fragmented and fluid societies where love and marriage go together; the third is in highly structured disharmonic societies where romantic ties between youth are severed by arranged marriages. (shrink)

Whilst it has long been established that there are significant, if complex links between the New Left and Critical Legal Studies, the relationship of CLS to ‘the movement’ has not been properly understood. CLS inherited the New Left’s fraught relationship with race and gender and splintered in the face of Feminist and Critical Race Theory critiques just like the New Left before it. This essay argues that it is more accurate to see CLS/new Left thinking actually continuing into Feminism and (...) CRT. This is not to repeat a variation on the argument that ‘good’ left critique turns into ‘bad’ identity politics; rather, that CLS, CRT and Feminism wrestle with the same ongoing problematic of radical community. (shrink)