Description
Book SynopsisThe Bourgeois Charm of Karl Marx & the Ideological Irony of American Jurisprudence employs a well-known body of work, Marx’s, to explain the inevitable limits of scholarship, in hopes to encourage academic boldness, and diversity, especially within American jurisprudence. While scholarly meaning-making has been addressed in specific academic areas, mostly linguistics and philosophy, it has never been addressed in a triangular relationship between the text (T1) and its instigator (S1), as well as its subsequent interpellator (S2). Furthermore, while addressed as a result of difference, it has never been addressed for today’s liberal theory, which includes liberal jurisprudence, through the mirror of Marxist difference. Scholarship is the unique product of the instigator’s private and public subjectivity, as all theory is aimed to be communicated and used by the scholarly community and beyond. Understanding its public life, textual instigators (S1) aim to control its meaning employing various research methods to observe reality and then to convey their narrative, or “philosophy”. But meaning is not fixed; it is negotiated by S1 and those theories interpellate (S2), according to their own private and public subjectivity, which covers their ideology. Negotiated meaning is always a surprise to both S1 and S2, surprise which is both ironic and ideological. The book has ten chapters, an index and a list of references
Table of Contents Acknowledgments List of Illustrations Introduction 1Marx, Irony and Ideology – Negotiating Meaning 2Meaning as a Result of Textual Instigation and Interpellation 1Contextualizing Marx: Differentiating to Embrace or to Reject? 1Marx and Dewey 2Linguistic and Cultural Barriers to Marx’s Works 3Cultural Lifespan 4Marxian Ideology as Soviet, ergo, Undesired, Subjectivity 5Marx’s Un-American Attitude toward Religion 6Marx’s Human Progress and Self-Promotion 2Marxian or Marxism: Labels Differentiating Content or Fabricating Difference? 3Textual Differences and Marx’s Interdisciplinary Dialectics 1Dialectics and Ideology: Thinking, Researching and Incorporating Observations 2Marxian Interdisciplinary Dialectics 3Dialectics and Post-Marxian Scholarship 4Private Subjectivity, Alienation and Theory Production 1Alienation as Creative Reification 2Alienation and Ideological Resistance to Power Structures 3Karl Marx, the Alienated Alienating Intellectual 5Ideology as Public (Political) Subjectivity 1Ideology through the Ages 2Marxian and Marxist Views on Ideology 3Academic (Ideological) Purges? 4Marx and Ideological Identity 5Ideology and Ideological Propaganda 6Mass Media – Ideology Is the Message 6The Irony of Scholarship Production 1Encoded Irony in T₁ 2Dormant Irony as T₁ Textual Omissions 3Textual Irony and Rorty’s Intellectual Ironist 7Ideological Irony – S₂ Actuating T₁’s Meaning 1Irony and Direct Scholastic Criticism 2Scholarship as (Ironic) Polite Criticis 8The Bearable Lightness of Jurisprudential Irony 1Jurisprudential Irony as Inescapable Trade-Off between Scholastic Ambition and Reality 2Jurisprudential Irony and the Socratic Method of Teaching Law 3Jurisprudential Irony – Byproduct of Legal Hegemony 4Encoded Jurisprudential Irony 5United States Supreme Court Justices as Embodied Irony: The Late Justice Scalia and Justice Gorsuch 9Ironical Ideology, Difference of Meaning and Philosophical Camaraderie 1Plato’s Concepts of Just and Justice 2Aristotle’s Dialectical Universals 3Thomas Hobbes’ and John Locke’s Ideological Differences and Different Epistemological Conclusions 4The Intersection between the Abstract and Concrete Facets of the Law According to Montesquieu, Kant and Rousseau 5Jeremy Bentham’s Common Sense and Grotius’ Technocratic Approach to Law 6American Jurisprudence and Marx: Strange Bedfellows … Not 10Irony, Jurisprudential Meaning-Making and Ideological Camaraderie 1Classical Liberalism 2Law as Science or the Rejection of Ideology 3Formalism and Realism: Two Sides of the Same Coin 4The Limits of Rawls and Dworkin: Justice and Historical Contingency 5Critical Legal Studies and Marx 6Feminism and Queer Theory 7Intersectionality – Bridging the Gap between Theory and Reality Summary and Conclusion References Index
