‘Left or Rights?’
| Author | Costas Douzinas |
| Published date | 01 December 2007 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6478.2007.00407.x |
| Date | 01 December 2007 |
Review Article
`Left or Rights?'
Costas Douzinas*
RIGHTS: A CRITICAL INTRODUCTION by TOM CAMPBELL
(London: Routledge, 2006, 229 and xix pp., £17.99)
I first met Tom Campbell in 1984, I think, at a seminar organized by the late
Paul Hirst at Birkbeck College, a place I knew peripherally only at the time,
ensconced as I was in the rather cosmopolitan environs north of Waterloo
Bridge. Around the Aldwych campus, any relationship with the Bloomsbury
academic precinct was interpreted as a sure descent into little-englishness.
Nevertheless, the idea of Birkbeck College held a somewhat romantic
meaning for me. A night school for the working class would be a place of
progressive dissent, I fantasized, and its famous Marxist academics, the
brilliant crystallographer J.D. Bernal, the classicist and campaigner against
the Greek Colonels Robert Browning, the historian Eric Hobsbawm, and
Paul Hirst himself promised the bridging of radical theory and practice, a
permanent preoccupation of those years. Birkbeck was the appropriate place
to hold a seminar based on Tom's recently published book entitled Left and
Rights (interestingly, a title that does not appear in the current volume's
bibliography).
1
The book's title was bringing my two theoretical and prac-
tical preoccupations together in a rather neat conjunction which of course
highlighted their juxtaposition. The `LSE School of Public Law', to which I
declared qualified allegiance at the time (and whose principles Campbell
follows), was famous for expressing deep misgivings about rights,
particularly those which pass decisions from Westminster and politicians
to the high court and judges. Campbell's combination was promising some-
thing I deeply desired, as someone of the left who had spent his formative
undergraduate years in the Greece of the dictatorship.
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ß2007 The Author. Journal Compilation ß2007 Cardiff University Law School. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd,
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
* Birkbeck College, University of London, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX,
England
c.douzinas@bbk.ac.uk
1T.Campbell, Left and Rights (1982).
Left and Rights had proved somewhat disappointing. The `left' of the title
was a social-democratic welfare-state mild left, the kind of left destroyed by
the `winter of discontent' and the deluge of Thatcherism. Still, the prudent
commitment to collective social and economic rights of Left and Rights was
off the scale of the political spectrum in the Falklands triumphalism,
privatization hysteria, and `loads of money' culture of the Eighties. But
Campbell was onto something: he had anticipated the way that New Labour
would eventually adopt both the market and a limited project of re-
distribution. Campbell's advocacy of rights for the left was prophetic: it was
an early manifesto for a `third way' with a limited set of rights avant le mot.
Admittedly, Tom's `left' meant very little to those of us avidly imbibing at
the time the Prison Notebooks (Gramsci), Reading Capital (Althusser), The
State in Capitalist Society (where Ralph Miliband meticulously details the
failures and treacheries of the labour aristocracy and successive Labour
governments, a sobering warning for his two sons currently in the Cabinet)
and, more discreetly, Foucault's Discipline and Punish and The History of
Sexuality; or, proudly marching with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarma-
ment and (a little embarrassedly) mourning Tony Benn's defeat in the
Labour Deputy Leadership election.
The Birkbeck seminar compensated for the reservations the book had
generated. Tom was articulate, warm, funny, and batted well Paul Hirst's
acerbic cynical asides and consummate rejection of humanism. I did not
agree with many of Tom's arguments, but I was persuaded that his project of
constructing a theory of rights for the left was worthwhile and, more to the
point, doable. I could describe my academic life since that afternoon's
seminar as my `journey back to Birkbeck' or `following Tom's project': a
necessary and impossible attempt to marry socialism and rights with a large
dose of Nietzsche, Foucault, and Derrida thrown in. In the twenty-odd years
since I met Tom Campbell, I have been fighting the theoretical and political
struggle that he articulated first albeit from a rather different standpoint.
It was therefore with a degree of nostalgia and a mild sense of deÂjaÁ vue
that I turned to Tom's latest offering, Rights. This book is presented as an
`introductory' broad survey of the flourishing field of rights scholarship.
Tom Campbell is the most prolific of jurisprudential writers. Over a 35-year
writing career he has mapped all major topics of jurisprudence: justice,
positivism, morals, democracy, rights, human rights. It is to the abiding
credit of Tom Campbell, the great, generous, and occasionally dissident
cartographer of the normative jurisprudential tradition, that he can exhibit in
his Rights in just 200 pages and in some detail how the law of diminishing
returns operates in this extraordinary field of intellectual endeavour. Indeed
the sheer amount of brain power that goes into the mental exercises of
analytical or `normative' jurisprudence compared to its rather meagre results
has been a source of perpetual and bewildering amazement. Why is rights
theory so lamentably clicheÂd,soboring, to be honest, reminding us of
Kafka's quip that `reading lawbooks is like eating sawdust'? Campbell gets
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