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The Quest To Reprogram Cultural Software: A Hermeneutical Response To Jack Balkin's Theory Of Ideology And Critique, Francis J. Mootz Iii
The Quest To Reprogram Cultural Software: A Hermeneutical Response To Jack Balkin's Theory Of Ideology And Critique, Francis J. Mootz Iii
Scholarly Works
Critical theory has lost the self-assurance that defined the heady days of Marxist economics and Freudian psychoanalysis. In his famous debate with Hans-Georg Gadamer thirty years ago, Jürgen Habermas argued that critical theory was a necessary corrective to the quiescence and conventionalism that followed from Gadamer's hermeneutic perspective. As the 1960s unfolded, the second generation of the Frankfurt School appeared poised to bring sophisticated techniques of social criticism to bear on the emerging postindustrialist system of global capitalism. But the promise of critical theory failed to materialize. Today, Habermas plays the role of the aging lion who refuses to accept …
Foreward, Symposium: Philosophical Hermeneutics And Critical Legal Theory, Francis J. Mootz Iii
Foreward, Symposium: Philosophical Hermeneutics And Critical Legal Theory, Francis J. Mootz Iii
Scholarly Works
This Symposium brings the considerable talents of a diverse group of scholars to bear on a pressing problem in legal theory: Whether critical theory is possible after the hermeneutical turn. All too often, this problem is framed to invite an “either-or” response. Either we reject the hermeneutical turn and hew to a traditional account of critique anchored by an unimpeachable standard (whether economic, historical, conceptual, cognitive, or otherwise), or we take the hermeneutical turn by embracing radical historical contingency and fluidity, thereby forsaking the possibility of critique and surrendering to conservative conventionalism or inviting postmodern chaos. This Symposium challenges this …
Critical Hermeneutics: The Intertwining Of Explanation And Understanding As Exemplified In Legal Analysis, George H. Taylor
Critical Hermeneutics: The Intertwining Of Explanation And Understanding As Exemplified In Legal Analysis, George H. Taylor
Articles
One of the most vexing questions in hermeneutics is whether it can be critical-whether it can engage in critique. In Part I of this Article, I show how within legal hermeneutics the element of critique is present even within those forms of legal interpretation most adherent to stances of "understanding." Here I concentrate on the work of Robert Bork and Justice Antonin Scalia and demonstrate how distance, separation, critique is present within their theories. In Part II, I reverse emphases and show how elements of "understanding" persist within legal theories most avowedly reliant on forms of "explanation." My exemplar here …