Book review: ALAN NORRIE, Dialectic and Difference: Dialectical Critical Realism and the Grounds of Justice. London: Routledge, 2010, 257 + xiv pp., ISBN 9780415560668, £27.99 (pbk)
| Date | 01 December 2010 |
| DOI | 10.1177/09646639100190040703 |
| Published date | 01 December 2010 |
| Author | Eric Heinze |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
theorists investigating the relation between law and morals, but also to practitioners
encountering moral dilemmasthat everyday legal practice is rich in. In that respect, Mem-
ory, Imagination, Justice: Intersections of Law and Literature is a rewarding read. As
well as taking a further step on the path of the open-ended relation between law and lit-
erature, the book also invites us to cast fresheyes upon the moral controversies on which
law is destined to have the last word.
Haris Psarras
University of Edinburgh, UK
ALAN NORRIE, Dialectic and Difference: Dialectical Critical Realism and the Grounds of
Justice. London: Routledge, 2010, 257 þxiv pp., ISBN 9780415560668, £27.99 (pbk).
‘Judgement’, according to Alan Norrie, ‘involves placing oneself in the position of the
other and committing to advice relating to [the other’s] concrete singularity. Judgement
is assertoric rather than categorical or hypothetical’ (p. 221). That view is not without
surface problems. One may wonder whether ‘categorical’ condemnation is precluded for
Soviet purges and gulags, Pol Pot’s killing fields, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, Mao’s
Great Leap Forward, Hutus upon Tutsis, Dred Scott, or Auschwitz. Yet Norrie aims to
navigate between the Scylla of moral absolutism contained in the categorical judgement,
and the Charybdis of the tentative, relativist, hypothetical judgement. He peers beneath
the contradictions inevitably entailed by traditional ethical and legalist discourses.
Dialectic and Difference explores the philosophy of Roy Bhaskar, particularly as set
forth in such works as Bhaskar’s Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom (1993) or Plato etc.
(1994). Bhaskar is a difficult writer, but has maintained a loyal following. His ideas have
become central to the school of thought known as critical realism. Although Norrie
explores Bhaskar in the context of contemporary ethical thought, his aim is not to stake
out a distinct position, so much as to expand on Bhaskar’s core ideas. Norrie locates the
Scylla of the categorical judgementin a Western tradition that Bhaskar traces back to Par-
menides and Plato. It is they, Bhaskar claims, who place Western thought on its path
towards an impoverished concept of being. Our dearth of constructive concepts of
absence, negativity and non-being has diminished our capacity for both ontological and
ethical reason. It forever generates contradictions characteristic of Western rationalist
ethics. Empiricism divorces justice from ontology; Bhaskar claims to reunite them. That
project recalls Heidegger’s challenge to ‘Sein als Anwesenheit’ (‘being as presence’)
(Heidegger, 1979: 25), but Bhaskar and Norrie will seek a different ontology and ethics.
Meanwhile, the Charybdis of the contingenthypothetical judgement has its own long his-
tory, which Bhaskar and Norrie trace from Heraclitus’ ‘everything is in flux’ through to
the post-modern theories of Derrida and Deleuze.
Bhaskar’s prime target is Hegel. Hegel’s dialectic proceeds through the triad of iden-
tity, negativity and totality. The final term yields a closed system, famously culminating
in the ‘end of history’. That dialectic straitjackets the concepts subjected to it,
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