Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-x4r87 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-25T11:03:17.929Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“Let Them Eat Cake”: Globalization, Postmodern Colonialism, and the Possibilities of Justice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Susan S. Silbey
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This essay presents three accounts or narratives of globalization. Each narrative describes the triumph of a central character or institution (science, markets, law) against its challenges or enemies (ignorance, regulated or planned economies, human caprice and unreason). The stories convey moral tales about what justice might look like and how social relations might be justly organized and governed. I argue that under the dominant accounts of globalization, the dynamics of power are obscured so that social relations seem to be produced by invisible or natural forces. When the operation of power is masked, I argue, justice, and efforts to confine and regulate power, is made less probable. Law and society scholarship can contribute to a critique of globalization by continuing to identify the ways in which law and power are mutually implicated and embedded in social relations. Rather than describe current forms of international social exchange as globalization, a seemingly neutral terms, the essay urges scholars to identify the role of power by naming global social exchanges as “postmodern colonialism.”

Type
1996 Presidential Address
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 31 , Issue 2 , 1997 , pp. 207 - 235
Copyright
Copyright © 1997 by The Law and Society Association.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

This article was originally delivered as the Presidential Address at the annual meeting of the Law and Society Association in Glasgow, Scotland, on 13 July 1996. The research and writing were undertaken during a sabbatical leave from Wellesley College, supported in part by Wellesley College and by a fellowship from the American Association of University Women. I also relied on stimulating conversations with colleagues at the Rockefeller Study Center, Villa Serbelloni, Bellagio, Italy, and the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme and Maison Suger, Paris, France. Although I am responsible for the limitations of this essay, I am particularly grateful for the help provided by generous friends and colleagues who tried to educate me and protect me from my own errors: Patricia Ewick, Austin Sarat, Joel Handler, Felice Levine, Kristin Bumiller, Bryant Garth, David Kennedy, Harrison White, Stewart Macaulay, Kim Scheppele, Chantal Kourilsky, Magali Larson, Gabor Halmi, Martin Chanock, Robert Paarlberg, Rodney Morrison, Agnes Simonyi, Andre Jean Arnaud, Yves Dezalay, Maurice Aymard, Ramon Grossfogl, Ulrich Wegenroth, Wilhelm Streeck, and Hans Georg Brose. Finally, I thank my research assistant Bethany Hoffman without whom I could not have done this work while traveling so far from home.

References

Appadurai, Arjun (1990) “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global and Cultural Economy,” 2 Public Culture 1–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Balbus, Isaac C. (1977) “Commodity Form and Legal Form: An Essay on the Relative Autonomy of the Law,” 11 Law & Society Rev. 571–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berman, Marshall (1988) All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New York: Penguin.Google Scholar
Bittner, Egon (1983) “Technique and the Conduct of Life,” 30 Social Problems 249–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Champy, James (1995) Reengineering Management: The Mandate for New Leadership. New York: Harper Collins.Google Scholar
Chase-Dunn, Christopher (1991) Globalization: Structures of the World Economy. Cambridge, Eng.: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Cushman, Thomas (1995) Notes from Underground: Rock Music Counterculture in Russia. Albany: State Univ. of New York Press.Google Scholar
Ewick, Patricia (forthcoming) “Punishment, Power and Justice,” in Garth, B. & Sarat, A., eds., Power and Justice in Law and Society Research. Evanston, IL: Northwestern Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Ewick, Patricia, & Silbey, Susan S. (1995) “Subversive Stories and Hegemonic Tales: Toward a Sociology of Narrative,” 29 Law & Society Rev. 197–226.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fantasia, Rick (1995) “Fast Food in France,” 24 Theory & Society 201–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Garland, David (1990) Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Giddens, Anthony (1990) The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Greenhouse, Carol J., Yngvesson, Barbara, & Engel, David M. (1994) Law and Community in Three American Towns. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Habermas, Jürgen (1983) “Modernity: An Incomplete Project” in Foster, H., ed., The Anti-aesthetic: Essays on Post Modern Culture. Port Townsend, WA.Google Scholar
Habermas, Jürgen (1992) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Burger, T.. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Hammer, Michael, & Champy, James (1993) Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution. New York: Harper Collins.Google Scholar
Hammer, Michael, & Stanton, Steven A. (1995) The Reengineering Revolution: A Handbook. New York: Harper Collins.Google Scholar
Harvey, David (1990) The Condition of Postmodernity. Cambridge, Eng.: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
Head, Simon (1996) “The Ruthless Economy,” New York Rev. of Books, pp. 47–52 (29 Feb.).Google Scholar
Heyzer, Noeleen, Nijeholt, Geertje Lycklama à, & Weerakoon, Nedra, eds. (1994) The Trade in Domestic Workers: Causes, Mechanisms and Consequences of International Migration. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Zed Books.Google Scholar
Kennedy, David (1994) “Receiving the International,” 10 Connecticut J. of International Law 1–26.Google Scholar
Kosai, Yutaka, Lawrence, Robert Z., & Thygesen, Niels (1996) “Don't Give Up on Global Trade,” International Herald Tribune, 30 April, p. 2.Google Scholar
Lasswell, Harold D. (1936) Politics: Who Gets What, When, How. New York: McGraw-Hill.Google Scholar
Marx, Karl, & Engels, Frederick (1993 [1848]) The Communist Manifesto. New York: International Publishers.Google Scholar
McCann, Michael W. (1994) Rights at Work: Pay Equity Reform and the Politics of Legal Mobilization. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Merry, Sally Engle (1990) Getting Justice and Getting Even: Legal Consciousness among Working-Class Americans. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Polanyi, Karl (1944) The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Postman, Neil (1986) Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York: Penguin.Google Scholar
Postman, Neil (1993) Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. New York: Vintage.Google Scholar
Reich, Robert (1983) The Next American Frontier. New York: Times Books.Google Scholar
Ropke, Wilhelm (1955) “Economic Order and International Law,” in Recueil des Cours 1954, Academie de Droit International. Leyden, The Netherlands: Sijthoff.Google Scholar
Samuelson, Paul A., & Nordhaus, William D. (1983) Economics. New York: McGraw Hill.Google ScholarPubMed
Santos, Santos Boaventura de (1995) Toward a New Common Sense: Law, Science and Politics in the Paradigmatic Transition. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Sarat, Austin D. (1990) ‘“... The Law Is All Over’: Power, Resistance and the Legal Consciousness of the Welfare Poor,” 2 Yale J. of Law & the Humanities 343–79.Google Scholar
Sarat, Austin D., & Felstiner, William L. F. (1995) Divorce Lawyers and Their Clients: Power and Meaning in the Legal Process. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sassen, Saskia (1991) The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Simmel, Georg (1971 [1903]) “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in Levine, D., ed., On Individuality and Social Forms. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Turner, Ralph H. (1969) “The Theme of Contemporary Social Movements,” 20 British J. of Sociology 300–315.Google ScholarPubMed
Weber, Max (1978) Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. G. Roth & C. Wittich. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.Google Scholar
White, Hayden V. (1987) The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: John Hopkins Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Woodiwiss, Anthony (1994) “Human Rights and Pacific Capitalism: Towards a New Mode of Governance?” Presented at American Sociological Association annual meeting, Los Angeles.Google Scholar
Young, Alison, & Sarat, Austin (1994) “Beyond Criticism: Law, Power and Ethics,” 3 Social & Legal Studies 323–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar