Asking the Right Question: [Commentary

Abstract

Marianne Constable's essay, Genealogy and Jurisprudence,' brings the intellectual history of the law and society field within the framework of Nietzsche's six-stage history of metaphysics. Reorganized within that framework, the work of particular law and society scholars is seen to represent stages of thought about the relationship between the of appearances described in empirical research and the possibilities for human action. Successive movements among law and society scholars pass, like Nietzsche's history of metaphysics, through stages of error (positivism, empiricism, critical legal studies, interpretive studies, constitutive theory), moving closer to complete acceptance of the view that action need not follow either legal rules or empirically described patterns and, thus, can be free. Constable's essay advances what is now a long line of commentary questioning the role of empirical research in the law and society field. Her essay, more clearly than many recent contributions to this literature, surely asks whether empirical research now has any place in studies of law and society.2 She argues: The first five stages of Nietzsche's history can be taken to sketch the way in which jurisprudence, like metaphysics, has, through reason, long sought its foundations in the truths residing in a 'real world' . . . outside of, beyond ..., and even in opposition to, 'life' in this world (p. 555). She describes what she perceives as the progressive dethroning of reason in law and society studies. First, reasoned ideals were