Law

A Map of Misreading. Toward a Postmodern Conception of Law

Bibliographic Data

ID5773711
AuthorsBoaventura De Sousa Santos (0000-0003-3359-3626, corresponding author)
Year1987
Volume14
Issue3
Pages279-279
Publication date1987-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Law and Society (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0263-323X • E-ISSN: 1467-6478
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.2307/1410186
OpenAlexW2327916807
LanguageEN
Citations received314
References cited8

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra Nietzsche announced that the spirit has undergone three metamorphoses.' In the first one the spirit becomes a camel; then the camel becomes a lion; and finally the lion becomes a child. While a camel, the spirit allows itself to be loaded with any values or beliefs humanity wants to load it with. But while speeding into the desert the spirit undergoes a second metamorphosis and the camel becomes a lion. The lion is the animal in revolt against the values and beliefs it was loaded with before. The lion is the spirit of negativity that substitutes 'I will' for 'thou shalt'. But because it merely acts against, the lion is a purely negative being, incapable of creating new values to replace the old ones. In order to take this further step the spirit must undergo a third metamorphosis through which the lion becomes a child. As a child the spirit is innocent and forgetting, it is a new beginning, the creation of new values. Only then will the spirit will its own will and conquer its own world. I would like to suggest that law has also undergone three metamorphoses in the modern era. However, the sequence of the steps has been reversed. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries law started out as a child. The new theories of natural law and the liberal political philosophy were a magnificent new creation of values and beliefs that testified to the emergence and consolidation of bourgeois society. But as the nineteenth century wore on, the law became the lion of negativity. It was the time when law was resisting against the demands which the social question had given rise to and which were being pressed into the political agenda by emergent social and political forces. In the twentieth century, and particularly after the Second World War, the law underwent a third metamorphosis. It gave up resistance in docile submission to the whole range of values and beliefs sometimes complementary, sometimes contradictory that the different social and political

Indigenous Peoples' Rights and Law · Land Rights and Reforms · Law in Society and Culture

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