Alexandre Lefebvre

The Gift of Law Greek Euergetism and Ottoman Waqf

Modern social and political thought has approached the questions of politics, law, and citizenship from the vantage point of a fundamental divide between the occidental and oriental, or archaic and modern, institutions. This article creates a concept, the gift of law, by staging two gift-giving practices as two historical moments: Greek euergetism and Ottoman waqf. While it is indebted to Mauss, our articulation of the gift of law also owes to the critical interventions of Jacques Derrida and Pierre Bourdieu, who emphasized non-voluntaristic and non-calculative aspects of the gift. We argue that both euergetism and the waqf enabled and substantiated legal subjectivities that allocated rights and obligations. Those gift-giving practices establish relationships between various groups and legal authorities that were crucial in the formation of cities as spaces of government, for both citizens and non-citizens alike. With the concept ‘gift of law’, categories ‘oriental’ and ‘occidental’ become problematic.

Bergson on Durkheim: Society sui generis

This paper contends that Henri Bergson’s The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1977 [1932]) is in pervasive and critical engagement with Émile Durkheim. We argue that both thinkers advance a sui generis concept of society that frames the organizing problem of their exchange: the relationship between society and biology. Our analysis traces the concept of society sui generis through Durkheim’s Division of Labor (1893) and Rules of Sociological Method (1895) to its reconfiguration in Bergson’s Two Sources. We argue that Durkheim’s concept of society sui generis avoids biological reductionism because it highlights the role of moral obligation in separating society from biology. Bergson assumes that social and biological life are inseparable and thereby disputes the privilege Durkheim gives to obligation. For Bergson, the sui generis nature of society is expressed by the singularity of human society in grasping the creative power of life.

The Time of Law: Evolution in Holmes and Bergson

Adjudication has an uneasy relationship with creativity in the common law tradition. On the one hand, the defining quality of the common law is that it is judge-made law. In a sense, adjudication is nothing less than the ongoing invention of law through litigation. On the other hand, there is a longstanding tradition in jurisprudence that regards judgement as the application of rules to cases. Here, the job of the judge is to subsume cases under rules. A significant consequence of identifying judgement with subsumption is that creativity becomes reduced to either judicial activism or judicial accident. In creating the law, either the judge appeals to extra-legal considerations such as policy or personal preference, or else the creation of law happens only by mistake such that the judge suffers a lapse of judgement. Whether creativity is commended or condemned, it is seen as something extrinsic to the law — it becomes something that could, if perhaps only in principle, be eliminated from it (see Lefebvre, 2008).

The Rights of Man and the Care of the Self

In this article, I claim that Mary Wollstonecraft and Edmund Burke both conceive of the rights of man as a medium for individuals to care for and cultivate the self. Beginning with Michel Foucault’s doubts that a concern with the care of the self can be found in modern political thought, I turn to Wollstonecraft and Burke in order to show that their debate turns precisely on the question of whether the rights of man enables or disables a care of the self. For Wollstonecraft, on the one hand, the rights of man provide women with a means to overcome a destructive set of virtues—such as beauty, chastity, and modesty—that leave them spiritually destitute and deeply unhappy. For Burke, on the other hand, such rights devastate the system of manners that had previously nurtured the self’s relation to itself. Regardless of this disagreement, my key claim is that both thinkers conceive of the rights of man not just as a juridical construction but also as a comprehensive way of life. In this way, I extend Foucault’s notion of the care of the self—along with his conception of ethics, conversion, and personal cultivation—to a foundational debate in the human rights tradition.

Mary Wollstonecraft's civic perfectionism

Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is a spirited defence of women’s natural rights and a disparaging critique of a society that regards weakness in women as a virtue. Her argument is so comprehensive that Miriam Brody (1992, p. 63) has suggested that ‘all feminists, radicals and conservatives who followed Wollstonecraft are her philosophical descendants’. It is an important book for citizenship studies for two reasons: first, it offers an early justification for women’s claims to full and equal citizenship, and second, it advances an understanding of citizenship that is rooted in the practice of private virtue. This first contribution is well-known, but the second has received less attention relative to the first. Recent movements in the field of citizenship studies, however, may change this. New work has developed the relationship between virtue and good citizenship in new and interesting ways. One reason for this shift is that citizenly virtue is no longer theorized strictly in relation to one’s status in a nation-state or public sphere. It is now recognized as a set of practices that guides virtuous conduct at the threshold of public and private life (Kingwell 2000, Fenton 2005, White 2006, Isin and Nielsen 2008). Another reason for the shift is that many conventional tensions between liberal and republican conceptions of citizenship have all but been defused. Received wisdom insists that liberals avoid imposing a conception of the good life onto their understanding of citizenship for fear of impinging on individual rights. Similar wisdom holds that republicans make a concern for virtue central to their understanding of citizenship. Recent work, however, has shown that the roots of liberal political thought are informed by a concern with citizenly virtue, the effect of which has been to reframe the terms of debate (Macedo 1990, Galston 1991, Sinopoli 1992, Dagger 1997, Berkowitz 1999). It is in this context that we focus on the relationship between private virtue and good citizenship in The Vindication of the Rights of Woman. We claim that the conception of good citizenship Wollstonecraft develops here is significant for two reasons. First, it functions as a standpoint from which to criticize society at the same time that it informs her recommendations for change. And second, it gives her a perspective from which to critique the debasement of society’s virtues and to identify the sources of their redemption. The outcome is a rich conception of citizenship that pairs a sense of disappointment

Critique of teleology in Kant and Dworkin The law without organs (LwO)

In the Critique of Judgment Kant proposes a unique and necessary presupposition of our faculty of judgment. Empirical nature, together with its diverse laws, must be judged as if it were a coherent unity. In a teleological judgment, we add that nature must be judged as if it were purposively designed for our faculty of judgment. In this article, I argue that Kants insights on reflective teleological judgment - the least commentedupon element of the Critical philosophy - are adopted by Dworkin towards a philosophy of law and adjudication. I claim Dworkins concept of ‘integrity’ strictly, but tacitly, partakes of the structure of Kants teleological judgment in its presumption of systematicity in juridical laws and unity of community which designs and abides its own principles. Throughout, I draw on Gilles Deleuze - a philosopher who complains of being ‘against judgment’ and wishes ‘to have done with judgment’ - to critique both the presuppositions and effects of such teleological judgment and the image of law it proposes. Using Deleuze I hope to characterize and criticize the teleological theory of judgment and also fruitfully engage Deleuze with problems of law scarcely addressed either by himself or by commentary.

Mary Wollstonecraft, Human Rights, and the Care of the Self

In this article I propose that Mary Wollstonecraft puts forward an original and powerful conception of human rights in Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Drawing on Michel Foucault’s later work on ethics and the care of the self, I argue that Wollstonecraft sees the great promise of human rights as helping individuals (and women in particular) to overcome their attachment to a culture that devastates any chance they may have to lead a happy, full life. Writing at the origin of the human rights tradition, she provides a clear and powerful account of how it is possible to conceive of human rights from an ethical perspective, as a device to cultivate and care for one’s own self.

Law and the Ordinary: Hart, Wittgenstein, Jurisprudence

It is often observed by H. L. A. Hart, and also by his friends and interpreters, that when he accepted Oxfords Chair of Jurisprudence in 1952 his field was in a bad way. Looking back in an interview, Hart remarks that at the time British jurisprudence “had no broad principles, no broad faith; it confronted no large questions…. It focused on technical, legal problems. There were no large-scale inquiries into the philosophical dimensions of law…. There was no legal philosophy. Jurisprudence had become a kind of closed subject, and very few people had ever thought of revising it.”1 Indeed, shortly…

Things Temporal Exposé, Passages from Benjamin

Nineteenth-century Paris was for Walter Benjamin the site of a singular historical event, the ur-form of bourgeois modernity. It was a “hellish” time disastrously bent on repeating itself and yet a threshold of great promise and possibility. By focusing on Benjamins 1935 and 1939 Exposés for The Arcades Project, my paper develops the keywords of the Exposés (Arcades, Fashion, etc.), and elaborates ways in which these objects articulate such different temporal possibilities. For example, “fashion” enacts an eternally recurrent and capital time, whereas “arcades” represent wish images of the past that might be actualized into utopian promises of the future. My argument develops Benjamins “objective” framing of temporality. In the Exposés specific and phenomenal things communicate temporalities specific to modernity. Objects not only communicate time but also enable the temporal experience of the modern subject. This reading challenges idealist interpretations of temporality grounded within an interiorizing subject. I do not argue that Benjamin privileges an objective temporal horizon “over” the subject but rather that he resituates dialectical possibilities of temporality in the engagement between subjects and commonplace objects.