|
Yale Law Journal, April 1988, 97
Yale L.J. 757
CLS and a
Liberal Critic
By
Cornel West
The
battle now raging in the legal academy between the Critical Legal Studies
movement (CLS) and its critics has taken a decisive turn. Battles over
decisions not to hire or give tenure to scholars associated with CLS have
been front-page news in the academic community, and the tone of scholarly
discussion has become decidedly negative. Much of the criticism has been
aimed at one person often considered a guru to CLS, Roberto Unger. His
work has inspired sharply negative commentary both here and abroad, and
his most recent work, Politics, has received several scathing
reviews.
William Ewald's evaluation of Unger's philosophy is the latest salvo in
the offensive against Unger and, through him, against CLS. Ewald throws
down the gauntlet in the name of logical rigor and analytical precision,
historical accuracy and argumentative soundness, looking closely at
"'the sheer breadth of Unger's knowledge and the unrelenting force of
his analysis.' Neither," Ewald concludes, "is as great as his
followers believe." Consequently, Ewald argues, both Unger's
credibility as a scholar and the quality of his philosophical contribution
to CLS as a whole should be seriously questioned.
CLS is indeed in need of serious and thorough treatment by left, liberal,
and conservative legal scholars. The sooner, the better; the more, the
merrier. In the recent wave of commentary, unfortunately, hostile gut
reactions have replaced guarded respectful responses; passionate political
and cultural evaluations have supplanted balanced intellectual
assessments. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Ewald's essay.
The overall impression the essay leaves is not one of fruitful critique
but rather one of a mean-spirited academic putdown. This is apparent from
Ewald's strategy, which is to devote more than half of his long article to
a few pages of Knowledge and Politics. Ewald apparently believes
that Unger's work can be dismissed because a close reading of Unger's
first book, published almost thirteen years ago, discloses an
objectionable interpretation here and a contestable reading there. He then
proceeds to view Unger's later books through the narrow and often blinding
lens of this first youthful effort.
This fundamental mistake regulates Ewald's overall strategy: He
refuses to acknowledge the "epistemological break" between
Unger's first book (Knowledge and Politics) and his later
work (The Critical Legal Studies Movement and Politics).
By "epistemological break" (Gaston Bachelard's term popularized
by Louis Althusser's interpretation of Marx), I mean Unger's crucial
historicist turn in his work from a self-styled neo-Aristotelian
perspective (or a teleological and essentialist view) to a full-blown
anti-foundational orientation. This basic shift has three major
consequences in Unger's work. First, he gives up the unpersuasive talk
about "intelligible essences" and moves toward immanent
critiques of the rhetoric and practice of democracy and freedom in
contemporary societies. Second, he abandons "total criticism"
and links his immanent critiques to concrete historical investigations and
specific programmatic formulations. Third, he rejects his ahistorical
"trashing" of liberalism and puts forward his new project in the
name of super-liberalism.
Ewald's efforts are faulty in that they assume that there is a smooth
linear progression from the early to the later Unger. This unwarranted
assumption leads him to conclude that Knowledge and Politics is
the core of Unger's corpus and that the later works are mere
embellishments and elaborations of the early book. Ewald is blind to the
shift in Unger's work and adduces no textual evidence that this shift does
not occur. Therefore his detailed criticisms of Unger's early work are
interesting -- a few even convincing -- yet the grand claims he makes
about what these criticisms imply regarding Unger's overall philosophy and
project are bloated. The edifice Ewald believes he has dismantled is not a
palatial mansion in which CLS dwells but rather an old decrepit doghouse
abandoned by Unger long ago. If Ewald's criticisms are to have the broad
implications he wants to draw, he must engage in a detailed reading of
Unger's later philosophy with the same tenacity with which he examines
Unger's early philosophy and then show that Unger's own self-criticisms of
his earlier work do not prefigure the more significant points made by his
critics. Until Ewald puts forward such an account he commits the fallacy
he accuses Unger of: The fallacy of agglomeration, of treating clashing
and contradictory bodies of thought (i.e., early and later Unger) as if
they were a single body of coherent and consistent thought.
Ewald's essay not only fans and fuels an immobilizing ideological
polarization, but also hides the basic issues at stake between CLS and
mainstream legal scholarship. Ewald's dismissive approach -- that vents
its undeniable venom behind a "disinterested" critique of
microanalytic units of Unger's texts -- forces us to raise fundamental
questions regarding the complex relations between scholarship, ideology,
and philosophy in the legal academy. Within the limited confines of this
Comment, I shall address some of these issues.
[Click
here to download the full
article as a Microsoft Word document (60KB); click here
to download the full article as an Adobe PDF document (55KB).]
|
