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Passionate Kisses?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Extract

Marianne Constable's Nietzschean foray into American legal writing is a contribution simultaneously to both theory and history. The latter deserves special mention, for despite the very important legal theory currently being played in a Nietzschean key, legal history has largely remained immune, caught in a range of liberal and critical approaches. Constable in this essay takes a familiar body of thought and interrogates it with a stunningly new set of questions. What looks like the checkered career of “democratic culture” to a writer like Morton Horwitz becomes the descent into the lowest stages of hell for Constable, a journey to the deepest recesses of nihilism.

Type
Article Commentary
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 1994 

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References

1 Marianne Constable, “Genealogy and Jurisprudence: Nietzsche, Nihilism, and the Social Scientification of Law,” 19 Law & Soc. Inquiry 551 (1994).Google Scholar

2 The interest in governmentality has shown promise not only in writing intellectual history, as Constable does here, but also for legal and institutional history. See Francois Ewald, L'Etat providence (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1986); Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, & Peter Miller, The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).Google Scholar

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