Foucault's Monsters and the Challenge of Law. By Andrew Sharpe
| Date | 01 July 2011 |
| Published date | 01 July 2011 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.2011.00865-2.x |
| Author | Ben Golder |
The author’s argument that increasing religious diversity is making it progres-
sively more di⁄cult to transcend rel igion in the public sphere is no doubt correct.
He is also correct thatthe historicalin£uence of Christianitymeans that apparently
neutral arrangements may indeed be less challenging to forms of Christianity
than other kinds offaith.The argument here would have been enhanced bymore
consideration of the relationship between religion and culture. Christianity has
had such an enormous impact on European culture that, if anyki nd of distinctive
collective values and arrangements are to be maintained by European states, such
values will inevitably be more accommodating towardsthose religious traditions
that have disproportionately contributed to their development. It would have
been interestingto know whetherRivers feels that the degreeof indirect religious
discrimination involved undermines the legitimacy of state institutions and
arrangements that re£ect a particular cultural heritage. In a similar vein, it would
also have been interesting toknow what conclusions Rivers drawsfrom the di⁄-
culty encountered by some faiths, whose large-scale presence in the UK is more
recent, in transcending religious di¡erences in the public sphere. Does the exis-
tence of such di⁄culties mean that attempts to separate religion and politics
should be abandoned in their entirety and that it should, for example, become
permissible to base laws on solely religious grounds or are the goals served by
the limitations on recourse to religion in certain areas weighty enough to out-
weigh any indirect discrimination?
None of this is to suggest that Rivers’s overall conclusions are necessarily the
wrong ones, but the arguments presented in their favour do need to take greater
account of the broader context of rights, duties a ndpr inciples of which freedom of
religion is but a part. In a world where one of the notable developments of debate
on religious matters has been the emergence of a vocalgroupof ‘newatheists’ as a
signi¢cant element of public debate, authors on religious issues cannot a¡ord to
assume that relativisation of religion will be seen by all readers as necessarily bad
or that the advocacy of rights of conscience limited to the religious can be justi¢ed
without justifying preferential treatment of religion from ¢rst principles.
Despite my reservations in relation to his normative argument, this book
remains an outstanding achievement. Rivers has managed to collate and analyse
a huge amount of law whose volume and complexityare immense. Hehas done
so in an engaging and enlightening way and his book represents an outstanding
achievement in legal scholarship.
Ronan M cCrea
n
Andrew Sharpe, Foucault’s Monsters and the Challenge of Law,Abingdon:
Routledge, 2010,199 pp, hb d75.00.
Andrew Sharpe has written a very erudite and impeccably serious book about
monsters. However, Sharpe’s thought-provoking book is not so much about the
n
School of Law,University of Reading
Reviews
639
r2011The Authors.The Modern Law Review r2011The Modern Law Review Limited.
(2011)74(4) 6 31^660
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