Many books seek to explain the general principles of the criminal law. Crime, Reason and History stands out and alone as a book that critically and concisely analyses these principles and comes up with a different viewpoint: that the law is shaped by social history and therefore systematically structured around conflicting elements. Updated extensively to include two new chapters on loss of control and self defence and with an extended treatment of offence and defence, this new edition combines challenging and sophisticated analysis with accessibility.
How does the human animal who thinks and loves relate to criminal justice? This essay takes up the idea of a moral psychology of guilt promoted by Bernard Williams and Herbert Morris. Against modern liberal society's 'peculiar' legal morality of voluntary responsibility (Williams), it pursues Morris's ethical account of guilt as involving atonement and identification with others. Thinking of guilt in line with Morris, and linking it with the idea of moral psychology, takes the essay to Freud's metapsychology in Civilization and Its Discontents. Two conflicting routes to guilt are noted in Freud, one involving internalisation of external anger to suppress destructive instincts, the other loving identification with others in the process of selfformation. This second route is developed through the psychoanalytic thought of Hans Loewald and Jonathan Lear. Following Loewald, the moral psychology of selfformation makes loving identification with others the root of responsibility, guilt and atonement. Following Lear, the moral psychology of guilt developed on these lines renders psychoanalysis part of a broadly understood philosophical project following Aristotelian and Socratic principles. Underlying Morris's account of guilt is the possibility of 'prospective identification', understood as the moral and psychological ground of guilt and reconciliation. This is the rational core of criminal justice, which maintains an uneasy relationship with law's 'peculiar' morality.
This article addresses the 'gap' between socio-legal studies and critical legal theory. Examining Derrida's 'Force of Law', it argues that the fault lies as much with the latter's marginalisation of the social and political character of the law as with the former's narrow, policy-oriented character. Despite such marginalisation, deconstructive concepts such as supplementarity and différance are important and ought to be preserved for a critical sociology of law. This becomes possible once Derrida's position is located within the modern dialectical tradition initiated by Hegel and developed by Bhaskar.Both Hegel and Derrida offer important dialectical concepts for the critique of social phenomena like law, but both in different ways surrender them through recourse to ethical standpoints which marginalise the significance of analysing law as a social and political phenomenon. Bhaskar's dialectical critical realism is presented as a way through the resulting impasses, specifically by virtue of his dialectical and sociological concept of 'entity relationism'. This is contrasted with the analytical concept of 'identity thinking' which lies at the heart of law and the idea of the legal subject.The article concludes by outlining how a dialectical approach can elucidate problems of subjectivity and responsibility in the criminal law. It contrasts formal legal conceptions of the subject, which seek to exclude relational issues, with moral SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 0964 6639 (200003) 9:1
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