Asking the Right Question

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 world 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.