Home »Unlabelled » Law & Humanities Blog

Law & Humanities Blog

Law & Humanities Blog

Call For Submissions/Nominations: Julian Mezey Dissertation Award

Posted: 08 Sep 2011 01:56 PM PDT

From Professor Leonard Feldman, a Call For Submissions/Nominations

Julien Mezey Dissertation Award

The Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities invites submissions for its 2012 Julien Mezey Dissertation Award. This annual prize is awarded to the dissertation that most promises to enrich and advance interdisciplinary scholarship at the intersection of law, culture and the humanities.

The award will be presented at the Association's 2012 annual meeting, which will be hosted by Texas Wesleyan University School of Law on March 15‐17, 2012. The Association seeks the submission of outstanding work from a wide variety of perspectives, including but not limited to law and cultural studies, legal hermeneutics and rhetoric, law and literature, law and psychoanalysis, law and visual studies, legal history, legal theory and jurisprudence. Scholars completing humanities‐oriented dissertations in SJD and related programs, as well as those earning PhDs, are encouraged to submit their work. Applicants eligible for the 2012 award must have defended their dissertations successfully between September 1,
2010 and August 31, 2011. The deadline for nominations for the 2012 award is November 1, 2011. On or before that date, each nominee must submit the following: 1) a letter by the nominee detailing the genesis, goal, and contribution of the dissertation; 2) a letter of support from a faculty member familiar with the work;
3) an abstract, outline, and selected chapter of the dissertation; 4) contact information for the nominee.

All materials should be sent to:

Leonard Feldman, lfeldman@hunter.cuny.edu

Award finalists will be notified by December 1, 2011. Finalists must then submit an electronic version of the entire dissertation. The winner will be determined by early February and invited to the 2012 ASLCH annual meeting in Dallas.

ASLCH will pay travel and lodging costs.

Questions should be addressed to Leonard Feldman, lfeldman@hunter.cuny.edu

Hegel, the French Revolution, and the Concept of Liberty

Posted: 08 Sep 2011 09:14 AM PDT

Andrew Norris, University of California, Santa Barbara, Department of Political Science, has published The Disappearance of the French Revolution in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit as an APSA 2011 Annual Meeting Paper. Here is the abstract.

The French Revolution of 1789 is one of the central developments in the history of the concept and practice of political rights. Hegel recognized this, and so valued the Revolution that he claimed always to drink a toast to the storming of the Bastille on July 14th. Nonetheless, in both the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Philosophy of Right Hegel advances an enduring and influential attack upon the Revolution, one that, like that of Edmund Burke, links the Revolution's accomplishments inextricably with the Reign of Terror of 1793 and 1794. In each Hegelian text, the Revolutionary conception of liberty is presented as being so one-sided and extreme as to be incompatible with a stable polity, and to produce, of necessity, only "a fury of destruction" (P 436/359 and PR §5A). The central line of thought here is relatively clear. The French Revolutionaries enacted a reductive, "abstract" conception of freedom as grasped by the Understanding or Verstand; this "negative freedom" (PR §5A) or "absolute freedom" (P 431/355ff) entails the absence of restriction. When made into a social policy, this can never produce a stable set of institutions, but instead only the destruction of any potential restriction - including, ultimately, those presented by the citizenry themselves. The Revolutionary government was thus destined to descend into the fury of the Terror. In the essay that follows, I do not wish to fundamentally challenge this picture of Hegel's view. Instead, I will argue that Hegel's elaboration of it in the Phenomenology in particular is more complicated and nuanced than it initially appears to be, and that attending to the textual details of the Phenomenology's account allows one to see that Hegel is advancing a particular political diagnosis according which the first "victim" of the Revolution is the apparent agent of the Terror, the volonté générale or general will, a will that only "vanishes" in its own attempt to express itself in action, a vanishing that makes possible the factions, suspicion, guilt, and death of the Jacobins. In connection with this I will also propose that Hegel's account of the Terror there needs to be read as a response to the immediately preceding account of Utility (die Nützlichkeit), and that when it is so read it shows one of its sides to be a critique of the attempt to "master" a world in which everything is considered as an object of use, a critique that bears comparison with Heidegger's more famous reflections on the dangers of die Technik.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.

Tweet