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Politics and Research: Epistemological Moments

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Adelaide H. Villmoare
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Extract

In reading the essays by David M. Trubek and John Esser and Boaventura de Sousa Santos, I thought about what I call epistemological moments that have provided contexts within which to understand the relationship between social science research and politics. I will sketch four moments and suggest that I find one of them more compelling than the others because it speaks particularly to social scientists with critical, democratic ambitions and to Trubek and Esser's concerns about politics and the intellectual vitality of the law and society movement.

Type
Review Section Debate
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , Winter 1990 , pp. 149 - 154
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 1990 

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References

1 “‘Critical Empiricism’ in American Legal Studies: Paradox, Program or Pandora's Box?” 14 Law & Soc. inquiry 3–52 (1989).Google Scholar

2 “Room for Manoeuver: Paradox, Program, or Pandora's Box?” 14 Law & Soc. In quiry 149–64 (1989).Google Scholar

3 Certainly there are other “moments” than the ones I describe here. These are ones that I found especially resonant with these essays.Google Scholar

4 Trubek, & Esser, , 14 Law & Soc. Inquiry at 17 (cited in note 1). It is unclear what Trubek and Esser think about the relationship between interpretist and empirical research in part because their meaning of empirical is not spelled out. 1 agree with Christine Harrington and Austin Sarat that there is a significant distinction between the term empiricism and empirical; see Sarat's “Off to Meet the Wizard,” 14 Law & Soc. Inquiry 155 n.4. Trubek appears to use them synonymously in his “Where the Action Is: Critical Legal Studies and Empiricism,” 36 Stan. L. Rev. 575, 600 (1984), and he gives a broader meaning to empiricism than many scholars would. In discussing CLS, he acknowledges that interpretist work can be empirical (in the broad sense of the term as efforts to understand observable social and legal phenomena).Google Scholar

5 The Post-Modern Transition: Law and Politics” (paper presented to the Amherst Seminar, 1987).Google Scholar

6 In a footnote they do acknowledge that their sketch of the Amherst seminar “gives insufficient attention to such influences as poststructuralism.” More attention to this phenomenon would have expanded their vision on the possibilities for research that is critically interpretive. See Trubek, & Esser, , 14 Law & Soc. Inquiry 34 n.69 (cited in note 1).Google Scholar

7 Santos, 14 law & Soc. Inquiry at 155 (cited in note 2).Google Scholar

8 Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation” and “Science as a Vocation” in H. H. Gerth & C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber 77–156 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958).Google Scholar

9 See C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imugination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), for his discussion of “Grand Theory” and “Abstracted Empiricism.”.Google Scholar

10 In Santos's language, “universal science” is a monopoly of interpretation.Google Scholar

11 “Max Weber's Tragic Modernism and the Study of Law in Society,” 2 Law & Soc'y Rev. 573 (1986).Google Scholar

12 See Jurgen Habermas, “Between Philosophy and Science: Marxism as Critique,”Theory and Practice ch. 6 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973). Also Weber himself has insights into this view; see Jurgen Habermas's comments on Marcuse's view of Weber in Toward a Rational Society at 82 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971) (“Habermas, Toward a Rational Society”).Google Scholar

13 Emphasis in original. One-Dimensional Man at 166 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966).Google Scholar

14 Toward a Rational Society 112 (cited in note 12).Google Scholar

15 David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory 295 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).Google Scholar

16 Trubek and Esser do not explore these epistemologies, although Trubek does look at the relationship between CLS versions of interpretism and the first two scientific epistemological moments in his “Where the Action Is,” 36 Stan. L. Rev. (cited in note 4). Precisely how CLS work is postmodernist remains a question as does the role of postmodernist epistemologies in law and society research that concentrates on phenomena other than legal doctrine.Google Scholar

17 Recent work by Austin Sarat and William L. F. Felstiner can be seen within the postmodernist moments; see their “Law and Strategy in the Divorce Lawyer's Office,” 20 Law & Soc'y Rev. 93 (1986).Google Scholar

18 My emphasis. “The Post-Modern Transition” at 38 (cited in note 5).Google Scholar

19 “Postmodernism: Roots and Politics,”Dissent, Winter 1989, at 100.Google Scholar

20 Weber also believed passion to be necessary for politics; see “Politics as a Vocation,” where he writes that politics “takes both passion and perspective,” at 128 (cited in note 8).Google Scholar

21 “Postmodernism” at 107 (cited in note 19).Google Scholar

22 Seyla Benhabib, “On Contemporary Feminist Theory,”Dissent, Summer 1989, at 369; her reference is to Derrida.Google Scholar

23 Emphasis in original. Stanley Fish, “Is There a Text in This Class?”in Charles Kaplan, ed., Criticism: The Major Statements 636 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986).Google Scholar

24 If one were to separate out the methods and concepts of research from the content, as Trubek and her do in their discussion of the issue of universal scientism in the work of the Amherst Seminar, one could possibly conclude that all postmodernist approaches to research could be adopted for any political purposes. But such a separation would be myopic and deny the very spirit of this moment and its drive to understand research within the context of the political stance of the researcher and the subject and content of the research. This postmodernist research encourages the telling of contextually situated stories rather than isolating purposes from methods and contents.Google Scholar

25 See Elizabeth V. Spelman, Inessential Woman (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988), for a discussion of the importance of differences.Google Scholar

26 Some feminists argue that postmodernism cannot be genuinely feminist; see Benhabib above in note 22. While there is merit to the criticisms of feminist postmodernists, I think the arguments are more properly about differences among kinds of politics and research than about the absence of politics (or feminism).Google Scholar

27 “Room to Maneuver (f)or a Room of One's Own? Practice Theory and Feminist Practice,” 14 Law & Soc. Inquiry 144 (1989).Google Scholar

28 “Talking About Needs: Interpretive Contests as Political Conflicts in Welfare State Societies,” 99 Ethics 313, 311 (1989).Google Scholar

29 Id. at 306.Google Scholar

30 See Sarat, Austin & Silbey, Susan, “The Pull of the Policy Audience,” 10 Law & Soc'y Rev. 97 (1988), for a discussion of the sphere of discourse among experts.Google Scholar