> On Mon, 17 Nov 2003 19:50:02 -0800, Eubulides
<paraconsistent at comcast.net>
> wrote:
>
> > Alan Hunt or Robert Hale, anyone?
> >
> > Ian
> Alan Hunt edited for Lawrence & Wishart, the UK publishing house for
the
> CPGB, a great volume, "Marxism & Democracy,
=======================
I was thinking more along the lines of the following:
Explorations in Law and Society Toward a Constitutive Theory of Law -- by Alan Hunt
From The Critics
Mark Cooney
Alan Hunt's new book is a collection of eleven papers published between 1976 and 1992 bounded by new introductory and concluding chapters. Arranged in chronological order, the essays address four broad issues. The first is the puzzle of the staying power of capitalism given its decreasing reliance on coercive mechanisms of social cohesion. Four chapters pursue this theme drawing on the concepts of hegemony and ideology.
The second topic, addressed in two chapters, is the politics of law. Here Hunt explores the compatibility of rights-based discourse with leftist, especially Marxist, theory. He advocates the involvement of Marxists in the politics of law (e.g., debates about crime control), and argues, citing Gramsci, that the pursuit of rights has transformative possibilities when it forms part of a larger set of counterhegemonic strategies.
A third issue, to which two chapters are devoted, is the theoretical underpinnings of the Critical Legal Studies movement. Hunt is a friendly critic of the movement, welcoming the advent of a leftist critique of law but urging a greater concern with theory.
The fourth theme -- evident in his more recent papers -- is a new perspective which he calls constitutive theory. This urges a relational view in which the component elements of social life are not individuals or institutions but combinations of economic, political, class, gender, and legal relations. Hunt argues that a major task of law and society scholarship is investigating the extent to which law constitutes social relations. This theme is explored in four chapters which deal, respectively, with G.A. Cohen's argument that the economic base of society is independent of its rules of property law, Marxism and law, Foucault's "expulsion of law", and, finally, "law as a constitutive mode of regulation". [snip]