NCJ Number
115721
Journal
Law and Society Review Volume: 22 Issue: 5 Dated: (1988) Pages: 945-948
Date Published
1988
Length
4 pages
Annotation
This article comments on Eder's critique (NCJ-115720) of Habermas's sociological view that modern law has an internal rationality based on moral principles that have lost their traditional foundations in a religious world view or some other metaphysical order.
Abstract
The author, an academic working in the common law tradition, is skeptical of both Eder's and Habermas's view that there can be an overall sociological theory of 'the law.' What Hebermas's views as 'the law' appears to the author as a jumble of relatively discrete topics. This skepticism also questions the utility of the specific concepts used in the tradition in which Habermas writes. Eder offers three such concepts: rationalization, materialization, and proceduralization. Part of the difficulty is that these concepts, which are central to the discussions in which Habermas is engaged, do not seem to the author to capture the central features of contemporary legal developments in the United States. The author agrees with Eder's suggestion that ultimately what is at stake in the discussions surrounding Habermas's views is not the sociology of law, understood as an effort to understand the law in action, but something akin to the sociology or history of ideas. The concepts discussed by Eder regarding operation of legal practices than they are in informing others about how certain segments of the intellectual community, and through them perhaps some portions of the general public, conceptualize the law. 6 references.