The Rule of Law and Muggletonian Marxism: The Perplexities of Edward Thompson

Abstract

Like William Blake, Edward Thompson succeeded to think the coexistent 'contrary states' of law: as idealism and materialism, freedom and domination, community and alienation. He presented us with an enigma: how to reconcile both his idealization of the rule of law and his championing of antinomianism. Thompson himself did not deny their contrariness; he simply embraced it as a unity of opposites. The real dilemma which his writings expressed with such wit and passion was the relation between two ideals of political community: the community of law and the community of love.' It is this which lent his socialist humanism such qualities of richness and tension. In both its juridic and antinomian aspects, Thompson's approach to law was critical, subversive, brimming with bloody-minded distrust of power, and utterly dismissive of an authoritarian legalism which equates the rule of law with the will of government. The politics of socialist humanism, with its emphasis on the revolutionary and creative character of the struggles of the exploited and oppressed, provided the language to unite these two sides of Thompson's critique: its 'method' was to privilege the unity of experience over its logical segmentation. Thompson's quest to marry the 'contrary states' of law stands in stark contrast to the torn halves of contemporary political thought, divided between its Enlightenment, juridic wing, emphasizing rights and citizenship, and its Anti-Enlightenment, antinomian wing, emphasizing justice,