DIALECTIC AND DIFFERENCE: DIALECTICAL CRITICAL REALISM AND THE GROUNDS OF JUSTICE by ALAN NORRIE
| Author | BILL BOWRING |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6478.2010.00518.x |
| Date | 01 September 2010 |
| Published date | 01 September 2010 |
DIALECTIC AND DIFFERENCE: DIALECTICAL CRITICAL REALISM
AND THE GROUNDS OF JUSTICE by ALAN NORRIE
(Abingdon: Routledge, 2009, xiii and 257 pp., £27.99)
The book under review is Alan Norrie's first monograph in ten years. For the
first time in Norrie's career, it is not a critical text on criminal justice, but a
work of philosophy. It is the result of some 30 years of engagement with the
`critical realism' of Roy Bhaskar, and of a year's sabbatical leave in which
Norrie wrestled with Bhaskar's Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom.
1
Without
doubt, this is the best introduction to Bhaskar's mature thought, and a
significant intellectual contribution in its own right.
Why Bhaskar? The publication in 1975 of Roy Bhaskar's A Realist
Theory of Science
2
was for me, and for many others, an intellectual
lightning-bolt. For those of us who had studied philosophy in England in the
late 1960s,
3
suffocated by a strictly imposed British empiricism, its use of a
transcendental argument from experimental activity to show that causation is
not (as Hume insisted) actual and contingent, but is necessary and real, was
indeed a bold challenge to orthodoxy. Its `transcendental realism', as
Bhaskar described it, now better known as `critical realism', was applied
with equal aplomb to the social sciences in 1979 with The Possibility of
Naturalism.
4
In the introduction to his From East to West (2000),
5
Bhaskar identified
five `moments' in the history of the development of his critical realist
philosophy, each of these in turn identified with his own seminal texts.
6
The
first was the `transcendental realism' of A Realist Theory of Science. The
second was the `critical naturalism' of The Possibility of Naturalism. The
third moment was that of `explanatory critique' and was marked by the 1986
book Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation.
7
Bhaskar's `turn to politics' came in the 1990s. With Hilary Wainwright,
Bhaskar played a key role in the Socialist Society Conferences, and edited an
influential volume, A Meeting of Minds: Socialists Discuss Philosophy ±
531
1R.Bhaskar, Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom (1993).
2R.Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science (1975).
3Istudied Philosophy at the University of Kent at Canterbury from 1968 to 1970, when
teaching was dominated by the British Empiricists (Berkeley, Hume, and Locke) and
by the later Wittgenstein. The most recent German philosopher available to students
was Kant, and the most recent French philosopher was Descartes. `Contemporary
European Philosophy' was most certainly not on the menu.
4R.Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism. A Philosop hical Critique of the
Contemporary Human Sciences (1979).
5R.Bhaskar, From East to West: Odyssey of a Soul (2000).
6 See, also, G. Potter, `Reopening the Wound: Against God and Bhaskar' (2006) 5 J. of
Critical Realism 92±109.
7R.Bhaskar, Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation (1986).
ß2010 The Author. Journal of Law and Society ß2010 Cardiff University Law School
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