The Echo of a Sentimental Jurisprudence |
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Authors: | Ward Ian |
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Institution: | (1) Newcastle Law School, 23 Windsor Terrace, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, UK |
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Abstract: | This article revisits what the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge termed the ‘rage of metaphysics’, the grand intellectual engagement
that defined the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Enlightenment. It does so in order to retrieve an alternative
jurisprudence, one that described itself as much in terms of sentiment as of sense. It is suggested that one of the most striking
expressions of this jurisprudence can be found in Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments. This attempt to retrieve a sentimental jurisprudence chimes with a wider intellectual movement, headed by the likes of Richard
Rorty and Martha Nussbaum, which seeks to reinvest a ‘new’ humanism in both domestic and trans-national legal and political
order. It speaks more particularly to recent debates surrounding the nature of human and civil rights, and enjoys an added
resonance in the context of recent attempts to fashion a jurisprudence of ‘reconciliation’ in South Africa and elsewhere.
This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date. |
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Keywords: | Adam Smith human rights new humanism sentimental jurisprudence Truth and Reconciliation Commission |
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