Law, Ethics and Socio-History: The Case of Freedom

Abstract

What does the ‘socio’ in socio-legal studies denote? No doubt, it means different things to different people, and to some it is simply a portmanteau term. For many, it indicates a relationship between law and society, either narrowly in terms of empirical and pragmatic questions as to the impact of law and legal reform, or, more broadly, in theoretical terms as to how we understand both the nature of law and the relationship between legal forms and institutions and social relations. My work has been in the latter area, where one might expect the nature of the socio to have come under close scrutiny. I am not aware that it has, but it is an interesting and challenging question to think about what it denotes.

For not only the five senses but also the so-called mental senses, the practical senses (will, love, etc.), in a word, human sense, the human nature of the senses, comes to be by virtue of its object, by virtue of humanised nature. The forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present. (Marx, 1975, p. 353)

The historical animal is one who is constantly able to go beyond itself. (Eagleton, 2010, p. 17)