Reviews
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2230.t01-1-00284 |
| Date | 01 July 2000 |
| Published date | 01 July 2000 |
REVIEWS
Panu Minkkinnen,Thinking Without Desire: A First Philosophy of Law, Oxford
and Portland, Oregon: Hart Publishing, 1999, xii + 205 pp, hb £28.00.
Panu Minkkinnen argues that philosophy and the sciences originate in a desire, and
reveals at the very beginning of his book the driving-force of his own project: the
desire to discredit paradigmatic assumptions and methods of the sociology of law and
of the Critical Legal Studies movement. The book is seen in its best light as an attempt
to fulfill this desire. Minkkinnen is most convincing when he claims, on a number of
occasions throughout the book, that the Critical Legal Studies movement and the
sociology of law are largely blind to important aspects of the law. Law shares with
philosophy and the sciences a dimension of ‘scientificity’ and ‘correctness’. The
sociology of law reduces law from science to technology: ‘. .. the critic moves from
one political position to another, but the basic theoretical premise of the science of law
remains constant. It obliges the legal scholar to regard his science as part of a juridical
technology, as a preventive’ (p 119). Legal science is not a technology but engaged in
a pursuit of knowledge of right and wrong. While the desire for the Thing/Truth cannot
be satisfied, it animates the surrogate pursuit of knowledge and correctness. The
pursuit of knowledge on the part of philosophy and the sciences, including legal
science, is a religious quest for the elusive Thing. The Thing, which has been called
‘justice’, is the common ultimate goal of philosophy and the sciences.
Because its ultimate object is impossible, theoretical contemplation plummets into the
decisions and the judgements of practical thinking: ‘correctness’. If it can’t be the ‘true’
thing, it might as well be ‘correct’. But even so, ‘correct’ decisions are impossible without a
truth that sustains desire; ‘correctness’ in unthinkable without truth. Hence the irresolvable
aporia, an ‘aporetic’ structure. (p 4)
Measured in terms of correctness, or, rightness, all knowledge has a legal dimension.
The Law emerges in the absence of the Thing and organizes the production of
knowledge as an endless and futile attempt to approach the absent Thing. Law is the
essential form of every branch of knowledge. Minkkinnen’s theory of the Law is a
meta-theory (‘first philosophy’) of legal science as much as it is a meta-theory of
every other science. Minkkinnen does not discuss the possible claim that modern
science is rooted in the medieval revival of legal science, but makes a much more
general argument concerning the constitutive role of Law in the formation of
knowledge as such.
Minkkinnen’s claim that the sociology of law ignores the essence of legal discourse
as simultaneously scientific and theological – a claim which implicitly denies any
superficial analytical dissociation of law and morality – will convince many readers. It
is regrettable that this claim and its vast implications, though repeated a few times, are
not fleshed out anywhere in the book in a comprehensive manner. More problematic is
Minkinnen’s insistence on the metaphysical nature of his ‘first philosophy’ project.
His views on desire as the driving-force of the pursuit of knowledge make meta-
physics worldly and ‘cultural’ at least as much as they make law metaphysical. The
status of Minkkinnen’s own Lacanian epistemology does not seem to be metaphysical
and, at any rate, is nowhere brought up. Minkkinnen’s reading of Heidegger is
ßThe Modern Law Review Limited 2000 (MLR 63:4, July). Published by Blackwell Publishers,
108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. 623
To continue reading
Request your trial