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“Let Them Eat Cake”: Globalization, Postmodern Colonialism, and the Possibilities of Justice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Susan S. Silbey
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Abstract

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This essay presents three accounts or narratives of globalization. Each narrative describes the triumph of a central character or institution (science, markets, law) against its challenges or enemies (ignorance, regulated or planned economies, human caprice and unreason). The stories convey moral tales about what justice might look like and how social relations might be justly organized and governed. I argue that under the dominant accounts of globalization, the dynamics of power are obscured so that social relations seem to be produced by invisible or natural forces. When the operation of power is masked, I argue, justice, and efforts to confine and regulate power, is made less probable. Law and society scholarship can contribute to a critique of globalization by continuing to identify the ways in which law and power are mutually implicated and embedded in social relations. Rather than describe current forms of international social exchange as globalization, a seemingly neutral terms, the essay urges scholars to identify the role of power by naming global social exchanges as “postmodern colonialism.”

Type
1996 Presidential Address
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 31 , Issue 2 , 1997 , pp. 207 - 235
Copyright
Copyright © 1997 by The Law and Society Association.

Footnotes

This article was originally delivered as the Presidential Address at the annual meeting of the Law and Society Association in Glasgow, Scotland, on 13 July 1996. The research and writing were undertaken during a sabbatical leave from Wellesley College, supported in part by Wellesley College and by a fellowship from the American Association of University Women. I also relied on stimulating conversations with colleagues at the Rockefeller Study Center, Villa Serbelloni, Bellagio, Italy, and the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme and Maison Suger, Paris, France. Although I am responsible for the limitations of this essay, I am particularly grateful for the help provided by generous friends and colleagues who tried to educate me and protect me from my own errors: Patricia Ewick, Austin Sarat, Joel Handler, Felice Levine, Kristin Bumiller, Bryant Garth, David Kennedy, Harrison White, Stewart Macaulay, Kim Scheppele, Chantal Kourilsky, Magali Larson, Gabor Halmi, Martin Chanock, Robert Paarlberg, Rodney Morrison, Agnes Simonyi, Andre Jean Arnaud, Yves Dezalay, Maurice Aymard, Ramon Grossfogl, Ulrich Wegenroth, Wilhelm Streeck, and Hans Georg Brose. Finally, I thank my research assistant Bethany Hoffman without whom I could not have done this work while traveling so far from home.

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