Embracing Eclecticism

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S1059-4337(07)00001-4
• Pages: 1-18
• Date: 05 December 2007
• Published date: 05 December 2007
• Author: Patricia Ewick

EMBRACING ECLECTICISM

Patricia Ewick

ABSTRACT

Since its emergence as a field of study, law and society scholarship has

grown to encompass an array of disciplines, perspectives, methods, and

political orientations. A consequence of this disciplinary hypostatization

has been to produce a scholarly goulash which, while at times nourishing,

now faces the dual dangers of institutional fracture and intellectual

incoherence. The aim of this essay is to map a way to embrace the

eclecticism that characterizes the field and yet avoid the dangers of

dilettantism and to cultivate the interdisciplinarity its founders envisioned

without sacrificing a sense of shared purpose or abandoning the possibility

of collectively producing a better understanding of law.

‘‘An eclectic is always losing arguments. One lacks the closed-mindedness necessary to

treat others’ positions with the same contempt they so easily display for one’s own.’’

–Andrew Abbott (2001)

‘‘In this gaudy, all-licensed supermarket of the mind, any idea can apparently be

permutated with any other.’’

–Terry Eagleton (1999)

Special Issue: Law and Society Reconsidered

Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Volume 41, 1–18

Copyright r2008 by Elsevier Ltd.

All rights of reproduction in any form reserved

ISSN: 1059-4337/doi:10.1016/S1059-4337(07)00001-4

1

INTRODUCTION

Last March I was asked to comment on Marianne Constable’s remarkable

book Just Silences (2005) at the annual meetings of the Law, Culture and

Humanities Association at Syracuse Law School. After each of the three

readers delivered her comments, a lively and engaged discussion ensued

among the audience, the readers, and the author. It soon became apparent

that in that room of approximately 50 people I was the only sociologist

and perhaps (on this point I am unsure) the only person who would identify

as a social scientist. I was particularly conscious of that distinction since

much of the discussion focused on the dangers of sociological ways of

knowing law.

The discussion followed from Constable’s text. Just Silences is an

indictment of modern law, what Constable describes as law of technique, a

law that deals in what it construes to be fungible resources and the ordering

of life on the basis of instrumental rationality. Modern law organizes its

practices around market-based logics and the devolution of power to private

and quasi-public organizations trained in the skills of accounting,

evaluation, and management. But it is not just modern law that attracts

Constable’s disdain. She argues that the various projects of modern law are

enabled, or underwritten by, a ‘‘socio-logic’’ that prevails in the everyday

operation of law and government. In short, the techniques of knowing,

arranging, predicting and so forth that animate modern regimes of

governmentality are provided by sociology.

Constable claims that the sociological failure to understand justice – the

real subject of her analysis – is a result of the blindness of sociology to

anything that is not social; to its refusal or inability to imagine ways of living

and being that are not socially constructed; and thus, and most importantly,

to the sociological insistence on the contingency of justice. According to

Constable, constitutive theories of law and justice seem to posit an unreal,

apparent, spurious world; and, even more objectionably they posit a world

of contingency in which justice is not necessarily connected to law and thus

could be anything, or, for that matter, nothing.

For my part on that day, I defended sociology, social constructivism, and

the idea of contingency, although I am not sure I persuaded anyone in the

room. But my point in recalling this experience is not to reiterate that

defense. I describe this encounter because it illustrates a general process in

interdisciplinary knowledge formation that Abbott (2001) calls fractaliza-

tion, the process of creating a distinction and then repeating it within itself.

In this case, dichotomies that are used to distinguish (and divide) scholars

PATRICIA EWICK2