9 - Conclusion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2009
Summary
The rhetoric and the rules of a society are something a great deal more than sham. In the same moment they may modify, in profound ways, the behaviour of the powerful, and mystify the powerless. They may disguise the true realities of power, but, at the same time, they may curb that power and check its intrusions. And it is often from within that very rhetoric that a radical critique of the practice of the society is developed …
E. P. Thompson, Whigs and HuntersThis chapter sums up. It briefly recapitulates the argument and evidence (the legacies of law). Then the chapter derives implications for the study of institutions, reflecting on the contending new institutionalisms in law and the social sciences, and elucidates the significance of my findings for the theory of democracy (the lessons of law). In this book I have argued, and tried to demonstrate, that
just as democratic legalism may be exploited to destroy democracies from within, authoritarian constitutionalism may be turned against dictatorships and may serve as a spring board for democratization, either by the incumbent regime or its democratic opponents.
Or, to paraphrase E. P. Thompson, I believe that the rhetoric and rules of law are “something a great deal more than sham.” In pursuit of this proposition I have revisited and reconfigured a theory of law developed by the German émigré Ernst Fraenkel for whom the United States, in the late 1930s, became a safe haven from the Nazi dictatorship.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Legacies of LawLong-Run Consequences of Legal Development in South Africa, 1652–2000, pp. 314 - 328Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008