Book Review: SCOTT VEITCH, Law and Irresponsibility: On the Legitimation of Human Suffering. London: Routledge-Cavendish, 2007, 157 pp., ISBN 10: 0415442503/442510, £85.00 (hbk)
| Published date | 01 June 2009 |
| Date | 01 June 2009 |
| Author | Nicola Lacey |
| DOI | 10.1177/09646639090180021003 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
SCOTT VEITCH, Law and Irresponsibility: On the Legitimation of Human Suffering.
London: Routledge-Cavendish, 2007, 157 pp., ISBN 10: 0415442503/442510, £85.00
(hbk).
Through the course of modern western history, forests have been sacrificed to the
analysis of the concept of responsibility. And in this diverse tradition, across many
disciplines, it is fair to say that responsibility has had, on the whole, a good press. As
a normative device put to use in the constraint (and legitimation) of some of the more
dangerous forms of state power, notably criminalization; as an ideal of rational and
autonomous human life; and in a variety of other ways, responsibility – yet more than
rights, perhaps – approaches the status of the ‘apple pie’ of modern moral and politi-
cal philosophy.
In Law and Irresponsibility, Scott Veitch imaginatively turns this tradition on its
head. The impetus of his inquiry is an obvious yet neglected puzzle: how can it be that
our world is filled with instances of avoidable human suffering – suffering, moreover,
the cause of which is often clear – yet for which it turns out that no one is respon-
sible? The solution, Veitch suggests, lies in seeing that each delineation or ascription
of responsibility – whether legal, political or moral – brings with it a terrain of
‘irresponsibility’: in defining our duties and liabilities, legal responsibility practices in
particular create zones beyond responsibility. And in doing so, Veitch argues, modern
law – in a nice inversion of the economist’s notion of ‘spontaneous order’ – ‘organ-
izes irresponsibility’ and creates an ‘asymmetry’ between the delineation of respon-
sibility and the acknowledgment of suffering. Responsibility and irresponsibility are
therefore ‘symbiotic mentalities’. Moreover, law is more effective in ‘disappearing’
responsibility than in creating it, not least because of its capacity to displace overall
responsibility within a structure of fragmented and circumscribed obligations, and
because of the way in which the zone beyond responsibility is obscured by being
‘naturalized’ rather than recognized as the product of contingent acts of law making
and interpretation. This argumentative move is nicely conjured up by Brecht’s
metaphor, quoted at the outset, of our view of a flowing stream as ‘violent’, while the
containing river bed is ‘termed violent by no one’. The argument is further illustrated
and made vivid by a set of examples, particularly in the field of international law:
sanctions and military interventions on allegedly humanitarian grounds; post-colonial
practices such as ‘truth and reconciliation commissions’ and the reinterpretation of
‘native title’; the legality of nuclear armaments.
The argument is far-reaching but its main burden has to do with law under modern
conditions. It is therefore worth looking in more detail at Veitch’s case for arguing
that modern law in particular is complicit – and makes its subjects complicit – in
avoiding or denying responsibility for large tracts of human suffering. Moving beyond
broadly similar positions such as radical criminological analysis of the marginalization
of the ‘crimes of the powerful’, Veitch argues that the source of modern law’s de-
responsibilizing capability lies not so much in the ill will or lack of foresight of the
powerful interests which shape its content, but rather reaches deep into its concep-
tual structure. In a move reminiscent of feminist and other forms of ‘critical’ legal
theory, he seeks to illuminate what it is about the form of modern law which facili-
tates the ‘disappearance’ of responsibility. In doing so, he draws on sociology and
modern social theory, to argue that macro-forces such as the emerging division of
labour, the rise of individualism and the dominance in political discourse of econ-
omics and utilitarian reasoning conduce to restricted, ‘compartmentalized’ responsi-
bilities tied to particular roles rather than to an overarching sense of virtue or good,
and hence to the dispersal, fragmentation or transference of responsibility.
Each of these socio-historical qualities maps in turn onto law, in which restricted
role-based responsibilities abound, displacing the appraisal of any broader notion of
270 SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 18(2)
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