| Srl | Item |
| 1 |
ID:
150521
|
|
|
|
|
| Summary/Abstract |
Sometimes political theorists like to imagine that they are lonely humanists misplaced in social science departments. In fact, political theory was created as part of a political science composed of both humanistic and social-scientific elements. Rather than trying to locate political theory somewhere between the humanities and the social sciences, we should instead dismantle the boundary between the two and create a unified discipline of questioning that embraces both kinds of inquiry.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 2 |
ID:
113828
|
|
|
|
|
| Publication |
2012.
|
| Summary/Abstract |
A variety of theorists have emphasized the paradox at the center of democratic legal authority, viz., that it cannot be self-derived but must ultimately rest on some extra-legal phenomenon, usually an act of exclusion. John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance examines precisely this paradoxical situation and, I argue, actually suggests a novel response that has escaped theorists who have considered the problem in the past. The film's best-known line ("print the legend") in fact represents the opposite of its perspective-which is to carefully deconstruct and reveal (without debunking) the complicated interrelation of law and power in the formation of any state. Rather than undermining democratic authority, we can be strengthened, if sobered, by the revelation that law is not self-sustaining. By setting the facts alongside the legend, the film perpetuates the fortuitous moment of state formation. What constitutes the state, then, is neither law nor power, but rather the matrix of representation that creates the relationship between them-here a film, but perhaps, more generally, a sustaining narrative.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|