Genealogy and Jurisprudence: Nietzsche, Nihilism, and the Social Scientification of Law |
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| Authors: | Marianne Constable |
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| Affiliation: | Assistant professor in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley. The author thanks Philippe Nonet for the seminar in which he first suggested how Nietzsche's history of metaphysics is a history of jurisprudence. She thanks Linda Helyar for graciously providing the (unpublished) field statement in jurisprudence discussing that history further. She also thanks Frederick Dolan, Jill Frank, Bonnie Honig, Elizabeth Mertz, and the reviewers of an earlier version for their comments. |
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| Abstract: | In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche presents a history of metaphysics that can also be read as a history of jurisprudence. Nietzsche shows how—via Platonism, Christendom, Kantianism, and utilitarianism—the “real” or “true” world of ideals gives way to an “apparent” phenomenal world that is itself ultimately brought into question. This article shows how 20th-century legal thought, broadly construed, also moves away from “ideals” of law toward an understanding of law as observable social phenomena. It suggests that the move to the “apparent” world in legal thought raises questions similar to those raised by Nietzsche's work: Does sociological law point to a nihilistic destruction of the legal tradition or to a joyous possibility of overcoming that tradition? |
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