Texas Law Review

69 TXLR 1985 FOR EDUCATIONAL USE ONLY Page 1
69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985

(Cite as: 69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985)
Texas Law Review

June, 1991
Beyond Critique: Law, Culture, and the Politics of Form -- Papers

*1985 WHAT'S LEFT?
Guyora Binder [FNa]
Copyright 1991 by the Texas Law Review Association; Guyora Binder
Introduction: Confronting Post-Radical Chic .............................. 1985

I. A Critique of Revolution ............................................ 1988
A. The Revolutionary Model of Radical Change ........................ 1989
B. Revolution as a Legal Concept .................................... 1995
C. Critical Legal Studies and Revolution ............................ 1999
D. The Incompatibility of Radical Politics with the Pursuit of
Revolution ............................................................. 2008
II. Radicalism Reconstructed ............................................ 2012
A. A Cultural Concept of Radical Change ............................. 2012
B. Radicalizing Human Nature ........................................ 2014
C. The Practical Possibility of Radical Change ...................... 2019
III. Defending Radicalism Against Deconstruction ......................... 2022
A. Deconstruction and Democracy ..................................... 2023
B. Deconstruction and Community ..................................... 2029
C. Deconstruction and Human Nature .................................. 2031
D. Deconstruction and Cultural Identity ............................. 2035
IV. Conclusion: Between Revolution and Critique ......................... 2040
© 2010 Thomson Reuters. No Claim to Orig. US Gov. Works.

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985
Introduction: Confronting Post-Radical Chic
In positioning its participants "beyond critique," this symposium rightly acknowledges the distance
that has opened between the radical political aspirations and the deconstructive methods of "critical"
scholarship in law and literature. But it wrongly suggests that in a race between political commitments
and intellectual fashions, politics has left method in the dust. American radicalism is now one generation
removed from the Port Huron statement. In that time, its adherents have moved "beyond" structuralism
and "beyond" modernism, into a textual world they aspire not so much to change as to review.
Radical theory's recent preoccupation with critical technique represents a strategic retreat from
political engagement. No longer hoping to *1986 influence events, "progressive" intellectuals resigned
themselves to keeping ahead of them. And as the tide of battle turned, the first to declare victory and flee
the field could claim the honor of the avant-garde. When critical theory now advertises itself as "post"-
structuralist or "post"-modern, it makes a claim to currency rather than courage; it boasts of being the
latest item to appear on the shelves. This is how one persuades consumers, not citizens. But the trendy
packaging cannot conceal the fact that the product itself has fallen out of fashion. Straddling the
widening gap between "radical" and "chic," critical theorists are increasingly tempted to turn the cutting
edge of critique against radicalism itself. Bernard Yack, a "deconstructive" [FN1] critic of radical
theory, diagnoses this post-radical condition in the following terms:
In recent years the New Left's intoxication with Marxist theory has given way to a rather painful
hangover. In the cold light of dawn, many radicals have begun to take a second, more critical look at
the theories that once inspired them. As a result, we now find radical theorists taking the lead in
attacking totalistic theories of human emancipation. This stunning reversal of sentiment has . . .
eroded their revolutionary spirit and sense of common purpose. They can all agree that we must
subvert modern social and political institutions. But why we must do so and for what alternative are
questions that . . . they seem reluctant to discuss. . . .
. . . [Instead their] current obsession . . . [consists in] deconstructing all positive theoretical
claims. [FN2]
This diagnosis portends the death of the patient. Finally realizing that any constructive theory of
human emancipation is totalitarian, Yack implies, radicals have abandoned constructing such theories.
With no constructive theory of human emancipation to implement, radicals must abandon their
characteristic activity of making revolution.
This Article will challenge the reduction of radical theory to recipes for revolution, and the related
assumption that any vision of human emancipation leads to totalitarian rule. The deep problem with this
sort of critique of radical theory is its instrumental conception of the relationship between theory and
political experience. [FN3] The point is not that in identifying philosophy as the source of revolution, we
put the train in *1987 front of Marx's "locomotive of history." [FN4] The point is that, whether we see
politics as an instrument of theory or theory as an instrument of politics, we wrongly assume that
political values can be defined apart from the processes that realize them. [FN5]
Political values do not determine politics from the outside--they emerge already embodied in

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985
political experience. Thus we should not accept the testimony of revolutionaries that revolution is an
instrument for the implementation of a theory. Instead, revolutionary movements are one type of social
setting for the construction and articulation of political values. As a result, the pursuit of revolution has
itself been a particular way of developing visions of human emancipation; and because it can be a
particularly instrumental way of envisioning human emancipation, I will argue that the pursuit of
revolution reinforces instrumentalism. The transcendence of instrumental culture would represent a
much more radical emancipation.
I have argued that such a vision of human emancipation as the transcendence of instrumental culture
is implicit in much critical legal scholarship. [FN6] This challenge to instrumentalism provides the basis
for a critique of the revolutionary focus of radical theory, which I present in Part I of this Article. I first
identify radical politics with the aspiration to transform human nature. I then argue that, as a matter of
history, radicals have generally identified the radical transformation of human nature with revolution--
but, to the extent that radical revolutionaries have accepted a positivist conception of revolution as a
change of legal systems, they have been misled into assuming that human nature can be legislated. The
inevitable frustration of this assumption in the experience of revolution engenders an impulse to restrict
authority to an ever narrower circle of the virtuous. In this way revolutionary politics tend to become
focused on the instrumental control rather than the emancipation of society.
My purpose in presenting this critique of revolution is by no means to undercut the possibility of

radically transforming human nature. By emphasizing the cultural construction of preferences my
critique of instrumentalism reaffirms the possibility of radical change through the development of
cultures of democratic participation. In Part II, I offer a conception of emancipation as collective self-
realization through democratic *1988 participation in community life. I explain why I think such
collective self-realization would require cultural change and why I think such cultural change should be
viewed as radical change--as a change in human nature.
The reconstruction of radicalism I sketch in Part II depends on four concepts that post-structuralist
critics have attempted to "deconstruct": participation, community, human nature, and culture. Seeing all
communication as the consumption and transmission of "scripted" discourse, [FN7] deconstruction
presents direct democracy as impossible and its edifying effects as illusory. From this perspective
community is impossible, and its pursuit entails a totalitarian suppression of "the difference between
subjects." [FN8] Similarly, the concepts of human nature and cultural identity may be seen as
authorizing efforts to purify society of unnatural or inauthentic elements. And, if we cannot legitimately
identify distinct cultures, we cannot hope to radically improve society by changing its cultural identity.
Underlying each of these particular critiques is an image of radicalism as a pathological yearning for a
simpler world, purged of heterogeneity. For deconstructive critics, a radical is one who longs for fusion
with others, but, fearing that any relationship will change her, annihilates anyone she cannot absorb.
In Part III, I show how this critique distorts radicalism and I defend the concepts of participation,
community, human nature, and culture against representative "deconstructions." I demonstrate that the
project of transforming human nature through participating with others in democratic communities
depends on heterogeneity. Participation in a community enables us to be challenged, developed, and

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985
changed because it requires that we interact with people different from ourselves. Community is not a
ruse for fixing and insulating a presocial self--it is the pursuit and development of a social identity.
I. A Critique of Revolution
In this Part, I argue that the pursuit of revolution is incompatible with radical politics. "Revolution"
has come to signify an impossibly complete break with the past. Revolutionary efforts to expunge all
trace of the past engender cycles of purgation and exclusion that prove incompatible with participatory
democracy, an important value in the radical tradition.
*1989 I develop this argument in four steps. First, I offer an historically grounded definition of
radicalism as the aspiration to transform human nature, and explain how this goal came to be identified
with revolution. Second, I show that revolution has generally been conceptualized as a legal
phenomenon, an abrupt hiatus between legal orders. Third, I show how the indeterminacy critique
developed by critical legal studies undermines any such concept of revolution by denying the
distinguishability of discrete legal orders. Fourth, I argue that the equation of radical change with
revolution rests on an impoverished conception of human nature and discourages the widespread
participation in politics that radicals have traditionally seen as the means to transforming human nature.
A. The Revolutionary Model of Radical Change
We tend to equate radicalism with the urge to break with the past, to be thoroughly up to date. Yet
radical political theory is linked to classical political thought by their common aspiration to fulfill
human nature. [FN9] The starting point for the radical tradition is Aristotle's assertion that human nature
finds fulfillment in political life. [FN10] The possibility of radical political theory is opened by an
ambiguity in this formula: does the good society conform to a fixed human nature, or can human nature
be reformed to realize the good society? Radicalism finds its faith in the latter ambitious aspiration.
Liberalism rejects this classical tradition as at once naive and repressive. Finding fulfillment in
political life would require more virtue than humans can muster. Widespread political participation can
only be won at the price of either coercion that ultimately kills political life or conflict that rips apart the
polity. [FN11] One liberal tradition claimed that only a highly attenuated political life conforms to a
human nature seen as largely devoid of virtue, [FN12] while another saw more virtue in private
benevolence than in the fulfillment of public duty. [FN13]
Rousseau initiated the radical tradition in political theory by taking another path: he hewed to the
classical tradition, insisting that social life rendered politics unavoidable. [FN14] If private interest
corrupted politics, the *1990 solution was to expunge it from society. Since human beings could not
exist apart from society, Rousseau reasoned, any interest corrosive to society ultimately threatened the
self. [FN15] Human beings literally could not afford private interest. [FN16]
While breaking with classicism on the question of humanity's capacity for virtue, liberalism
followed classical tradition in considering human nature unalterable. [FN17] Rousseau broke with both

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985
classicism and liberalism on this point, treating human nature as an alterable social product. [FN18]
Private interest was not innate, but was cultivated in each individual by others bent on dividing in order
to conquer those they could not bribe. Self-interest was therefore socially imposed, and the pursuit of
self-interest was an expression of slavery, not of liberty. What liberalism took to be essential to human
nature--individual identity--was seen by Rousseau as an artifice subject to human will. [FN19]
Humanity might redeem itself from slavery to particular masters by a deliberate act of subordination
of each to all. [FN20] Binding oneself to society as a whole, each individual would be redeemed from
slavery to his or her particular will much as Greek slaves could be redeemed from servitude to a
particular master through bondage to a god. In return for surrendering up one's particular self, each
member of Rousseau's republic would receive in return a civic identity. [FN21]
Rousseau was not, of course, the first to think that human nature could be transformed. Basic to
Christianity is a view of sin as self-alienation or self-enslavement. Equally basic is the belief that human
faith and divine grace can redeem humanity from its fallen state. Here, too, a transformation in human
nature is figured as the redemption of a slave through consecration to a god. Just as slavery was
imagined to have *1991 originated in the slave's cowardly choice of captivity over death in battle, Christ
is deemed to have purchased the slave's fidelity by dying in his place, thus restoring him to honor.
[FN22]
By supplying this image of redemption from sin, Christianity introduced the imaginative possibility
of transformation into the classical political tradition. But that does not make Christianity in and of itself
radical. [FN23] An additional element is needed to make the ideal of human transformation politically
radical: the utopian vision of a social context for such transformation.
Christianity's radicalism therefore depends upon whether the redemption of humanity is conceived as
a worldly project, or as a wholly spiritual event. The key question is not when redemption occurs--
before or after death--but where. Radicalism requires that it occur in the social world. An inner state of
grace, even one achieved by human will, has no political meaning if it is entirely self-generated. If we
can each achieve redemption individually, without society's help, the health of our souls does not depend
on the health of society. Since the pursuit of such redemption accepts society as it is, it does nothing to
improve the prospects of others for redemption. To thus consign one's fellows to their fallen state is to
make a separate peace with sin.
Extending the metaphor of alienation as a kind of enslavement, solitary redemption is like a

manumission that leaves the institution of slavery intact. [FN24] This is the radical view of redemption:
what does it profit one to win her own soul and lose the world? Radicalism requires both: personal
transformation is its goal, but society must be its medium.
If mainstream Christianity is not necessarily radical, radicalism can nevertheless be found in

Christianity's millenarian tradition. Based on interpretation of the Book of Revelation, [FN25]
millenarian thought looks forward to dramatic worldly reform. Contrary to common misconception,
millenarianism does not equate such reform with the last judgment and *1992 the ascension of all souls.

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985
[FN26] Instead, these events are foreshadowed in human history by apocalyptic conflict, leading to a
last battle and the worldly triumph of good over evil. [FN27] Human good reigns on earth for one
thousand years, followed by the last judgment. [FN28]
Out of this tradition grows the association of radical transformation with revolution. The good
society represents a catastrophic break with the past. It is initiated suddenly, violently, angrily, as if
prefiguring the terrible swift sword of divine judgment. Millenarian enthusiasm was associated with
violent, if somewhat aimless, popular movements in medieval Europe, [FN29] with insurrection in
Renaissance Florence, [FN30] and most famously with the Puritans of seventeenth-century England. An
oft-quoted sermon of the Reverend Thomas Case to Parliament in 1641 captures the brutal urgency
associated with radical reform. Before being newly planted, society must be thoroughly uprooted:
Reformation must be Universall. . . . I beseech you, reform all places, all persons and callings;
reform the Benches of Judgment . . . . Reform the Church. . . . Reform the Universities, reform the
Cities, reform the Countries, reform the inferiour Schools of Learning; reform the Sabbath, reform
the Ordinances, the worship of God. . . . You have more work to do than I can speak. Every plant
which my heavenly father hath not planted shall be rooted up. . . . Not broken off, then it may grow,
and sprout again; but pull'd up by the very roots. If it be not a plant of God's planting, what do's it in
the Garden? Out with it, root and branch, every plant, and every whit of every plant. [FN31]
The millenarian tradition helped spawn the radical reinterpretation of classical political theory by
linking the Christian project of redeeming human nature to the classical goal of erecting the good
society. But it also brought to the radical tradition an apocalyptic aesthetic and an agonistic*1993
understanding of history. Thus, a third element came to be seen by many as a prerequisite to radical
change, if not a defining feature. For many, radical change is the social transformation of human nature
as a consequence of violent struggle. It was the association of change with violence that made revolution
seem indispensable.
During the French Revolution, this association was made explicit. Revolutionary came to mean
"expeditious and arbitrary." [FN32] The "revolutionary instrument" was the guillotine. [FN33]
Rousseau's democratic radicalism, constantly invoked by Marat [FN34] and Robespierre, [FN35]
seemed to authorize such violent revolution. To the sans-culottes, Rousseau stood for the proposition
that "the ultimate foundation of sovereignty . . . was . . . insurrection: the armed uprising of the
citizenry," the remaking of law "at the point of the sword." [FN36] When conceived as a vehicle for
radical change, the purpose of revolution was to remake not only laws, but also humanity. In 1793 the
Lyons Surveillance Committee decreed that building a Republic would require that each citizen
"experience and effect within himself a revolution equal to that which has changed the face of France."
[FN37]
Even beyond France's borders, the Revolution was greeted as radically transformative of "the whole
previous constitution of the world." [FN38] German university students in particular "identified their
personal crises with the historical crisis of European culture and connected the possibility of a
satisfactory resolution to the hopes for a collective historical transformation aroused by the French
Revolution." [FN39] Endorsing Rousseau's aspiration to transform humanity, [FN40] they invented the

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985
new vocation of radical theorist and populated it with a dazzling array of luminaries: Hegel, Hoelderlin,
Fichte, Schelling, and Schiller, followed by Strauss, Bauer, Ruge, Feuerbach, and Marx.
Within France, Rousseau's memory received homage of a very different sort. After Robespierre's
death, Gracchus Babeuf organized a *1994 "Conspiracy for Equality" to carry on his work. [FN41]
Babeuf plotted a "dictatorship . . . designed to help a corrupt people restore themselves to goodness,
while conquering their enemies through the unblinking use of violence." [FN42] Babeuf sought
redistribution of wealth, the abandonment of cities, and a "moral regeneration . . . to be effected and
preserved through direct popular sovereignty." [FN43] After Babeuf's execution, one conspirator,
Philippe-Michel Buonarotti, continued attempting to plot "communist" insurrections, eventually
influencing the feared Auguste Blanqui. [FN44] Blanqui in turn was influential in the development of an
organized communist movement, and his followers eventually joined forces with Marx, uniting
conspiratorial and theoretical radicalism. [FN45]
In the wake of the French Revolution, European radicalism, both within France and without, retained
its identity by awaiting the signs of a second coming. [FN46] In the twentieth century, radical theory
organized itself epistemologically around the experience of revolution in the same way that science
organizes itself around the experiment, and opinion research around the survey. [FN47] Radicals from
Sorel to Debray embraced revolution, not only as a stratagem for seizing power, but as a source of self-
knowledge, a school for virtue and an arena for existential choice. [FN48] Violent revolution was
expected to yield the "New Socialist Man."
Revolution may not be intrinsic to the concept of radical change, but it has so dominated the radical
imagination that it has been easy to use "militant" in place of "radical," easy to assume with Jefferson
that the tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of patriots, [FN49] and easy to forget that
revolutions have not invariably cultivated our better natures. [FN50]
*1995 B. Revolution as a Legal Concept
From its inception, the concept of revolution has been bound up with legal notions. The term does
not appear to have been used to describe political upheavals before the fourteenth century, did not
become used widely in this sense before the sixteenth century in Italy, and was little used in a political
context in England until the seventeenth century. [FN51] Nevertheless, the concept of revolution
developed during the Renaissance and Reformation was rooted in a tradition of speculation about the
patterns and causes of constitutional change most associated with Aristotle and Polybius. [FN52]
Aristotle initiated the study of fundamental political change by defining democratic, oligarchic, and
monarchic constitutional orders, and distinguishing a change in constitutional form from a change of
ruler. In Aristotle's thought, the constitution of a state is social: the concept designates both the ruling
class and the overall social composition of the society. When the ruling class is no longer the dominant
class in numbers or power, a constitutional change occurs. [FN53]
Polybius supplied the cyclic metaphor that would eventually give rise to the modern concept of

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985
revolution. For Polybius, a state's constitution was defined by two elements--the number of participants
in the rule, and their virtue. The corrupting effect of power entailed that each of the constitutional forms
discussed by Aristotle was inherently instable. Legitimate kingship would inevitably degenerate into
despotism, leading to an insurrection of the virtuous few. The resulting aristocracy would degenerate
into oligarchy and inspire a democratic revolt. But as the people became corrupt, democracy would
degenerate into the chaos of mob rule, forcing the people to turn to a king. According to Polybius, then,
a cyclic change in legal order was itself ordained by natural law. [FN54]
In the modern era the concept of constitution grew more legal and less social than in classical
thought--but, notwithstanding shifts in the meaning of constitution over time, it remained the correlative
of revolution. Thus Locke's right of revolution proceeded from the theory that any illegal alteration of
the constitution dissolved it and authorized society *1996 to establish a new one. [FN55] Often,
especially in the early days of the English, American, and French Revolutions, revolution was conceived
as a restoration of a decayed constitution, a return made necessary by a preexisting hiatus in
constitutional government. [FN56] Occasionally, a revolutionary program was itself given constitutive
content, so that a constitution was imagined as a vehicle to bring about revolutionary change. [FN57]
Since the French Revolution, the main line of thinking has seen revolution as an interregnum
between constitutional orders, a mode of constitutional change not authorized by the constitution.
[FN58] Robespierre distinguished sharply between constitution and revolution [FN59] and Hannah
Arendt has concurred that constitutions are the end-products and the ends of revolutionary processes.
[FN60] Such nineteenth-century constitutional theorists as Daniel Webster and John Jameson defined
revolution as extraconstitutional change and hence denied that there could ever be a constitutional right
of revolution. [FN61] Charles Evans Hughes also viewed revolution as incompatible with constitutional
government. [FN62] On this view insurrection aimed at restoring or realizing a constitutional order was
not, by definition, revolutionary.
From its origins, then, the concept of revolutions has been defined by its opposition to the concept of
constitution. Moreover, the relationship between these opposites has not been an equal one. If revolution
and constitution are mutually constitutive, the term constitution has clear priority, not just
chronologically, but normatively and causally. For *1997 most political theorists, it is weakness in a
constitutional order that generates revolution, rather than the exhaustion of the revolutionary impulse
that forms constitutions. At best, revolutions are praised as servants of constitutional development,
making the concept of revolution seem a poor dependent on the concept of a legal order.
There is, however, a major difficulty confronting the claim that revolution has been conceived
primarily as a legal event. Surely the most important analyst of revolution in the Western world has been
Karl Marx. [FN63] Although Marx was educated in the law, he seemed singularly uninterested in the
legal conditions and consequences of revolution. He departed from the natural law tradition of
revolutionary discourse by eschewing the concepts of law and justice in his critique of capitalism,
viewing both as superstructural adornments of an economic reality. [FN64] Marx even seemed to regard
legal institutions as ultimately unnecessary, not just for explanation, but for social life. After the
communist revolution, he claimed, law and the state would whither away. [FN65] Hence Marx appears

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985
to represent a decisive departure from the classical tradition of conceiving of revolution as a hiatus
between legal orders.
On closer examination, however, it is clear that Marx adapted but nevertheless perpetuated the
classical tradition. The crucial concept in Marx's theory of revolution is the mode of production, which,
like the classical constitutional theories of Aristotle and Polybius, combines two elements: relations of
production and productive forces. As power is the parricidal child of virtue in Polybius's constitutional
theory, so the forces of production are the parricidal children of the relations of production. Relations
between the productive forces--labor power and the means of production [FN66]--initially develop and
ultimately retard those forces. The tension between them is resolved by a revolution which permits the
productive forces to continue their development within new relations. [FN67] Thus change is constant,
but it alternates between the normal arena of productive forces and the revolutionary arena of productive
relations. [FN68] When the productive relations change, the revolution is complete and a new epoch has
begun. Productive relations take all the bows on the stage *1998 of Marxian history, while the
productive forces labor backstage in obscurity.
But what are the relations of the production? When we examine the productive relations that concern
Marx--slavery, feudalism, and especially capitalism--we see that he defines them largely in terms of the
law of property and labor relations. [FN69] As Jon Elster admits, " s ince the property relations are 'but a
legal expression for' the relations of production, we can characterize the latter in terms of ownership and
non-ownership of the factors of production." [FN70] The mode of production that was supposed to
provide the social base upon which a legal superstructure could be constructed proves to be a legal
construct. [FN71]
G.A. Cohen has attempted to avoid this problem by noting that since legal rights are not always
enforced, they do not always confer power over productive forces. [FN72] Yet the available regime for
the enforcement of legal rights--"the state"--is itself legally defined. [FN73] Hence, a revolutionary
transition from one mode of production to another is a transition between legal orders. Although
grounded in "private" as well as "public" law, a mode of production is a legal code for ordering a
society, a constitution.
There is a difficulty with this juristic interpretation of Marx's theory of revolution. We have
developed this interpretation by assimilating Marx's theory into classical constitutional theory. But
classical constitutional theory was essentially pessimistic--it predicted the inevitable corruption of every
legal form. Marx, by contrast, is optimistic, predicting the transcendence of every legal form by an ever-
improving society. [FN74] *1999 Accordingly, he sees the communist revolution as different from other
revolutions--not just another spoke in a perpetual wheel of change, but the culmination and end of the
process. Similarly, communism is different from other modes of production. Thus the role of law as an
ordering and identifying device for a society is said to be characteristic of the particular modes of
production that precede communism, which are all characterized by the division of labor--but not of the
communist mode of production. The communist revolution, Marx insists, will be not a change of legal
orders, but the end of legal order. [FN75]

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985
Yet the bulk of Marx's analysis is devoted to the legal construct that is capitalism; about the legally
amorphous society of communism, he has little to say. It is as if a society without law cannot be
analyzed, explained, or even described. Even the revolution that would create such a society commences
with the transfer of ownership of the means of production from one class to another, so that only by
giving meaning to the concepts of "class" and "ownership" can we assign any meaning to the idea of a
communist revolution. Ultimately, even Marx's concept of communist revolution turns out to depend
upon legal concepts. [FN76] Although attempting to develop a purely social conception of revolution,
Marx could not escape the dominant legal positivist conception of revolution as unauthorized legal
change.
C. Critical Legal Studies and Revolution
Since the French Revolution, radicalism has usually been identified with revolution and revolution
has usually been conceived as the replacement of one constitutive legal order with another. Application
of the concept of revolution thus appears to require that we be able to tell constitutive legal orders apart.
Yet critical legal scholars have claimed that legal doctrine is indeterminate, [FN77] *2000 in ways
that undermine our ability to distinguish constitutive legal orders. Is labor-management strife pluralist
politics or class struggle? [FN78] Is the coincidence of "individualist" and "altruist" norms in private law
constitutive or corrosive of the liberal welfare state? [FN79] Are "mediated contradictions" stabilizing or
destabilizing? [FN80] Does doctrinal conflict evidence contradiction within a single social order or
confrontation between past and future social orders? Such questions subvert the criteria used by legal
positivists and Marxists to identify revolutions.
*2001 How do legal positivists tell different legal systems apart? H.L.A. Hart's famous response to
this problem was to claim that each system's rules are related by common pedigree. [FN81] Each of
these rule families can be identified by the rule of recognition that identifies all of its members. [FN82]
If constitutive legal orders are understood as rule families, the concept of revolution permits much
indeterminacy within rule families, so long as the rules of recognition that differentiate them are
determinate. But they can't be.
Nineteenth-century positivists like Daniel Webster and John Jameson pointed out that the
amendment of a constitutive legal order need not be revolutionary. [FN83] To count as revolutionary, a
constitutional change must not be constitutionally authorized. If it were, the new constitutive order
would derive its authority from the old, and so the legal authority of the old would persist. Even changes
in the rule of recognition are not revolutionary if they themselves conform to the rule of recognition. For
example, if the American people amend article V according to the procedures required by article V, they
make no revolution. Thus, revolution can occur only when the rule of recognition for constitutional law
is violated. But how can a violation of the rule of recognition ever create constitutional law? If the
ratification of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments appear unauthorized by article V, does that
mean they were revolutionary, or does it mean that article V was never our rule of recognition? [FN84]
The very meaning of a rule of recognition is that no violation of it can create law. How can we tell

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985
that a new rule of recognition has become legally authoritative except by reference to some rule of
recognition for authoritative law? Revolutionaries never claim to make the people sovereign; rather, they
recognize and defend the people's preexisting sovereignty. This may mean that the old constitutional
regime was illegal, but it may also mean that the old regime derived its legal authority from popular
consent--as indeed, many medieval monarchies claimed to do. [FN85] Because the identification of any
rule of recognition invites an infinitely *2002 regressive inquiry as to our rule of recognition for rules of
recognition, rules of recognition are always indeterminate. If anything, it is easier to identify the content
of the law than to identify its source of authority. [FN86]
For one observing a legal system from the inside, no unauthorized change in the rule of recognition
is possible. But an "external" observer faces the same difficulty: whatever criterion she employs to
identify an authoritative legal system is her rule of recognition. There is no external perspective from
which to identify two rule systems as distinct and legally authoritative.
How do Marxists identify revolutions? Marxian revolutions involve the replacement of one mode of
production with another and, as I have argued, modes of production are constitutive legal orders. [FN87]
Critical legal scholar Roberto Unger has argued that the Marxist theory of revolution is undermined
by its inability to distinguish between modes of production. [FN88] How does Marx define the concept
of capitalism, the paradigm for all modes of production? According to G.A. Cohen's influential analysis
of Marx, at least three factors are critical for the identification of a capitalist economy: (1) a
predominance of "free labor," understood as the condition in which a laborer owns all of her own labor
and none of the means of production; [FN89] (2) commodity production for private accumulation of
wealth; [FN90] and (3) sufficient accumulation of wealth to enable industrialization. [FN91] But Unger
points out that there is no necessary connection between commodity production and the development of
a labor market, or between a labor market and industrialization, or between industrialization and private
accumulation. [FN92] Any rule of recognition for capitalist societies based on these criteria will be both
under- and over-inclusive.
The critical assumption underlying Marx's conception of capitalism is that "free labor" is
economically necessary to industrialization. [FN93] This assumption is undermined by the irreparable
ambiguity of the concepts of free labor and economic necessity. Each of these concepts is analytically
related to the concept of desire. To say, as Cohen does, that the "free laborer" has property in her labor,
is to say that her labor can only *2003 be utilized with her consent. [FN94] To say that a "free labor"
market makes possible industrialization by utilizing labor more efficiently is to say that it better fulfills
desires. Because Marx's theory of revolution is a variant of economic determinism, it shares the
tendency of liberal economics to treat individual desire as an independent variable. A market is a means
of aggregating desires. If one claims that the introduction of a free labor market better fulfills desires,
one wrongly assumes that desires are independent of the means by which they are aggregated into social
choice. [FN95]
The instability of desire over time renders the concept of free labor indeterminate. Are specifically
enforceable contracts for personal service expressions of "free labor" or involuntary servitude? [FN96]

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985
As early as 1821, the Indiana Supreme Court held that so enforcing an indenture would violate the
prohibition on involuntary servitude in the state's constitution. [FN97] But as late as 1897, the United
States Supreme Court denied that the specifically enforceable labor contracts of merchant sailors
violated identical language in the Thirteenth Amendment. [FN98] In respecting the sailor's freedom at
the time of contracting, the Court sacrificed his freedom at the time he jumped ship, thereby designating
his former self custodian of his later self's interest. In recognizing the indentured servant's freedom at the
time she left service, the Indiana court reduced her freedom at the time of contracting, effectively
designating her later self custodian of her former self's interests. The instability of desire precluded these
courts from simply respecting the autonomous preferences of either laborer. Both decisions upheld "free
labor"; yet both were paternalistic. [FN99] Because we cannot uncontroversially identify individual
*2004 preferences, we can give no determinate meaning to the concept of free labor that underlies
Marx's concept of capitalism.
The instability of desire also undermines the determinacy of concepts like economic efficiency that
aggregate individual desires. [FN100] Thus even if Marx could define free labor, he would have
difficulty demonstrating that free labor was economically necessary to industrialization. And this claim
is crucial to Marx's conception of capitalism as both a system and a necessary stage in the development
of the productive forces.
Marx would have denied that his conception of economic necessity was based on any notion of
desire. For Marx, economic life consisted in production rather than consumption, and the value of
products was a function of labor rather than consumer demand. Thus "economic necessity" would have
meant "necessary to production," not "necessary to the satisfaction of consumer demand." "Free labor"
then, was "necessary" in the sense of necessary to the development of industrial production.
An analysis of this claim, however, will show that its validity depends on culturally contingent
preferences. In characterizing bondage as a "fetter" on the development of the productive forces, Marx
meant that it inhibited production by misallocating labor: bound laborers have no incentive to seek more
productive tasks. And less production means less social surplus to invest in the development of industry.
But unless we specify the "consumer" preferences of laborers and employers for different labor
relations, we cannot conclude that a market in free labor will allocate work more efficiently than a
market in bound labor. This follows from the familiar Coase theorem that, absent transaction costs,
allocative efficiency does not depend on the distribution of entitlements. [FN101] From the standpoint
of efficiency, the choice of remedy for personal service contracts is as irrelevant as the choice of remedy
for any contract.
In a famous illustration of this principle, the Oklahoma Supreme Court refused to specifically
enforce a mining company's promise to restore Mrs. Peevyhouse's land at the conclusion of their mining
operation, because the restoration would have cost more than it would have added to the market value of
the land. [FN102] But if both parties are "rational utility maximizers," it shouldn't matter whether courts
remedy breach specifically or monetarily. For some figure between the benefit to Mrs. *2005
Peevyhouse and the cost to the mining company of restoring the land, Mrs. Peevyhouse will agree to

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985
leave the land as it is. And if Mrs. Peevyhouse is "irrationally" insistent upon restoring the land, neither
remedy will prevent Mrs. Peevyhouse from achieving this "inefficient" result at her own expense. If she
receives damages, the irrational Mrs. Peevyhouse pays the cost of restoration directly. If she accepts
specific performance, she pays the opportunity cost of foregoing a more lucrative monetary settlement.
Thus the court's choice of a contract remedy distributes, but does not allocate, resources. [FN103]
The choice between free and bound labor is simply a choice between a damage remedy and a
specific performance remedy for contracts for personal service. Just as the distribution to Mrs.
Peevyhouse of a property right to the mining company's landscaping services does not require that those
services be used inefficiently, so too the distribution to employers of a property right in their laborer's
services doesn't prevent the efficient allocation of those resources. A worker learning of a more
productive position can buy her employer out, leaving both better off. [FN104] Similarly, an employer
discovering a more productive use for an employee can lease her services to another employer, or to the
employee herself. Like indentured labor, slave labor may also be efficiently reallocated. [FN105] The
American South was probably the slave regime least hospitable to manumission. But even here, many
slaves "hired their time" or purchased themselves. [FN106]
We can only conclude that slavery allocated labor inefficiently by viewing labor as a consumer good
rather than a factor of production. Many masters refused to manumit their slaves at market price, or to
permit them to hire their time. [FN107] Few masters invested in the education *2006 and skilling of
their slaves, or permitted their slaves to so invest. Many masters felt that it demeaned their authority to
bargain with their slaves. [FN108] And masters correctly feared that slaves allowed to wander in search
of productive employment would run away. But this means that the slave system failed to allocate labor
efficiently because neither the master nor the slave regarded the slave merely as a factor of production,
to be valued according to the income she might yield. Masters owned slaves partly for the consumption
value of the attendant honor, just as slaves were often willing, though not always able, to pay more than
their own market value to consume the honor of self-ownership. [FN109] Thus Marx's concern with the
efficient allocation of labor for production cannot be separated from the question of its efficient
allocation for consumption.
Critical legal scholars have pointed out that the concept of efficiency is thoroughly indeterminate
when applied to the allocation of resources for consumption. Because we often incorporate our
possessions into our sense of self, [FN110] how much we value a good often depends on whether we
already have it. This point applies to property in labor. Employers whose identities are already invested
in master status are more likely to pay a premium for slave labor, while we would be suprised to learn of
freed slaves selling themselves back into slavery at any price. Thus the efficient allocation of the
entitlement to dispose of labor depends in part on how the law distributes it.
Yet the value we place on entitlements is also contingent on cultural norms not recognized in the
law. Thus, the fact that some slaves were willing to make great sacrifices to purchase freedom or
undergo great risks to escape shows how much they already incorporated self-ownership into their self-
images.

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985
The contingency of allocative efficiency on legal and cultural norms means that legal and cultural
changes can make an efficient allocation inefficient and vice-versa. Robert Steinfeld has shown that
indentured servitude ceased to be a profitable way to employ labor when workers *2007 would no
longer stand for it, and courts became less willing to enforce it. [FN111] Rather than economic
rationality ending bound labor, the cultural rejection of bound labor made it economically inefficient.
Marx's foremost contemporary defender denies that the cultural values that accommodate us to or
alienate us from our economic roles are themselves material forces. [FN112] Yet he reluctantly admits
that the relative efficiency of what we have come to call "free" labor cannot be explained without
reference to such cultural values. [FN113] What made bondage a "fetter" on the productive forces was
the fact that the productive forces included laborers who saw it as demeaning. What binds "free" wage
labor to the service of industrialization and accumulation to form "capitalism" is culture. This means that
capitalism can never be separated from the "superstructure" it is supposed to explain. It also means that
there is no necessary connection among any of the defining elements of a mode of production, and no
necessary incompatibility between what are supposed to be elements of different modes of production.
[FN114]
Critical legal scholars have argued that all legal rule systems contain contradictions. I have tried to
show that the pervasiveness of such contradiction *2008 precludes us from claiming that elements of
different legal systems are incompatible. This makes it very difficult for us to distinguish conflict within
a legal order from conflict between legal orders, or to distinguish change within a legal order from the
replacement of one legal order with another. Thus, the indeterminacy thesis, as developed by critical
legal studies, undermines the concept of a constitutive legal order on which the concept of revolution
depends. [FN115]
This result poses a difficulty for critical legal scholars, who have seen themselves as political
radicals. If one can no longer distinguish between fundamentally different social orders, what becomes
of the desire for fundamental change? What does it mean to be radical without hope of revolution?
D. The Incompatibility of Radical Politics with the Pursuit of Revolution
This section will argue that radicals should cease identifying radical politics with the pursuit of
revolution. [FN116] As traditionally conceived, revolution involves an impossibly complete break with
the old order. A political movement devoted to the pursuit of this chimera is likely to regiment
supporters and demonize enemies in ways that are incompatible with democratic participation by large
numbers of people. Revolutionary movements, in short, tend to develop a martial organizational form.
Since, as Part II will emphasize, participatory democracy is crucial to radical transformation, the
organizational form dictated by the pursuit of revolution is incompatible with the aims of radicalism.
Twentieth-century radicalism has seen revolution as central to the notion of radical transformation of
human nature because it has seen revolutionary violence as encouraging solidarity and self-sacrifice.
[FN117] By militarizing the conflict between an unpopular government and a passively disaffected
people, guerrillas hope to impose on the populace a choice between active support of the regime and

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985
active resistance. Removing the middle ground of grudging and cynical acquiescence forces an
existential crisis in which the subject must redefine and resurrect her *2009 civic identity. [FN118] The
mobilization of the populace is not only a means of realizing the revolutionary program--it is the
revolutionary program, the desired radical change. [FN119]
As an answer to the question "how can one seize state power?," popular mobilization is
unexceptionable. But how does it look as an answer to the question "what does a utopian society look
like?" The claim that revolutionary mobilization is a school for civic virtue now looks like an
unconvincing dodge. It implies that citizens will be sufficiently improved by the process of revolution
that they need not worry about what institutions the revolution will bring into being. The very process of
revolution will purge society of the selfish corruption that engendered the need for revolution in the first
place.
Such expectations court disaster. Lacking any legitimate institutional framework, a revolutionary
society is easily tempted to base the legitimacy of its social choices on the character of its people. This
explains the intense anxiety about corruption that characterizes revolutionary societies: any flagging of
virtue threatens the legitimacy of the entire society. When we identify revolutionary struggle as the
vehicle for purifying character, anyone lacking in revolutionary commitment becomes a source of the
feared impurity. But if the new order is indistinguishable from the old, how can we be sure of anyone's
revolutionary commitment? Fearing impurity in ourselves, we need endless opportunities to display our
revolutionary commitment. And this means we need ever more struggle against ever more enemies,
which we can only generate by setting ever higher our standards of purity. [FN120] In short, without a
positive program for institutionalizing character reform, revolution degenerates into a self-consuming
cycle of internecine purges. [FN121] And, as *2010 revolution becomes increasingly oriented towards
the purgation of enemies, it ceases to be conceived as the construction of a new human nature. Instead,
revolution becomes revenge against an old order that has so incurably perverted human nature that it
resists radical transformation.
An impoverished conception of identity underlies the model of revolution as an opportunity for self-
redefinition. According to this view, the self is radically up for grabs--reconstructed anew at each
moment of consciousness. The revolutionary situation, like any life-or-death situation, reveals the
contingency of all of the self's attributes and hence frees the self from the illusory constraints of a
corrupt culture.
The problem with this sort of reasoning lies in its assumption that identity is illusory because it is
culturally contingent. At bottom, this casual dismissal of people's prerevolutionary identities reflects an
essentially liberal belief that the "real" self of each person is presocial. Only from this perspective can
people be stripped of their old social contexts with no psychological costs. But a social identity is not an
outer garment covering up a true self: if we strip away the social "skin," however confining, the inner
being will disintegrate. Individual identity is culturally constructed. We cannot redefine ourselves
simply by dismantling the corrupt cultural and social institutions that currently sustain individual
identities. Truly radical politics involve not just the desire to deconstruct, but also the desire to
reconstitute society; not just the desire to uproot, but the recognition that social life requires roots.

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985
When the goal is the destruction of an existing culture, revolution may not be necessary. Cultures are
fragile--most of the traditional sources of authority in French society were already in retreat before the
revolution. [FN122] If the goal is the construction of a new culture, the violent conflict engendered by
the pursuit of revolution is not especially integrative. As romantic critics of the French Revolution have
long argued, the pursuit of revolution destroys the social contexts that sustain identity and inform human
behavior with values, without necessarily replacing those contexts. [FN123]
Revolutionary organization may take many forms, but none are *2011 very conducive to the
achievement of radical aims. The mass movements that characterize successful insurrections are neither
sufficiently intimate nor sufficiently stable to sustain identity. Toppling only those governments
incapable of solving preexisting problems, successful revolutionary movements inherit crises requiring
an authoritarian response. Thus, Hannah Arendt argues that social revolutions quickly subordinate
democracy to the more pressing problem of organizing and coercing the redistribution of resources.
[FN124] Theda Skocpol argues that successful social revolutions are generally facilitated by foreign
military or economic threats to which they must respond. [FN125] No matter how ideologically opposed
to programmatic thinking and institutional embodiment a revolutionary movement may be, events will
supply a program and engender institutions. As a result, revolutionary success generally depends upon
the erection of a hierarchical bureaucracy, not participatory democracy. The revolutionary regime
achieves legitimacy by more effectively mobilizing people and resources to achieve the goals of the old
regime, rather than by involving more people in the definition of societal goals. To the extent that
radicals find our own society already too impersonal, too instrumental, too bureaucratic, and too
managed, the path of revolution will not lead in the direction of radical change.
Of course, not all revolutionary movements achieve success. What are the cultural consequences of
revolutionary politics prior to revolution? The more serious people are about making revolution, the
more they risk repression. The more they risk repression, the more likely they are to act and meet in
secret. And secret organizations tend not to be very democratic. A secret conspiracy can provide its
participants with an intimate context for the construction and recognition of identity, but the risk of
betrayal makes the participants dependent on one another to a degree that invites paranoia. The rigid
military discipline imposed by the need for secrecy makes the revolutionary cell an outpost of
instrumental culture, rather than a prefiguration of utopia. Accordingly, professional revolutionaries are
social technicians, analyzing, predicting, and manipulating society from the outside. In this respect, their
self-images resemble those of mainstream policy analysts. [FN126] Far from advancing radical goals,
"professional" revolution reproduces and reinforces the instrumental *2012 culture that, Part II will
argue, it is the contemporary task of radical politics to transform.
II. Radicalism Reconstructed
A. A Cultural Concept of Radical Change
Radicals have traditionally aspired to revolution, and revolution has generally been perceived as a
change of legal systems. Since critical legal studies persuasively argues that the concept of a legal

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985
system is incoherent, it undermines the aspiration to revolution that has supplied radicals with their
dominant image of radical change. Hence, if we wish to preserve the aspiration to radical social change,
we have to separate it from the revolutionary aspiration. In Part I, I argued that the pursuit of revolution
is probably incompatible with the attainment of the kind of society that most self-identified radicals
desire: a society characterized by community, participatory democracy, and self-realization. "Radical"
goals need not be pursued by revolutionary means. In fact, radicals should probably reject revolution for
political, as well as conceptual, reasons.
But there remains a conceptual problem that this political argument does not address. Is radical
social change conceptually distinguishable from revolution? As my critique of the concept of mode of
production illustrates, conceptions of social order tend to be just as lawlike as conceptions of legal
order--and just as indeterminate. If we are skeptical about constitutive or foundational changes in law,
are we not compelled to be equally skeptical about radical changes in society? Isn't the critique of legal
determinacy built on a foundation of thoroughgoing epistemological skepticism?
Not necessarily. Critical legal scholars have stressed the indeterminacy of legal and sociological
concepts based on some notion of preference or consent. And they have denied that legal and social
orders have foundations--that is, determinate rules of recognition. But these critiques need not be
"founded" on skepticism or any other epistemological position. Nor does a rejection of foundation
metaphors require a rejection of the concept of radical change.
Radical change is not necessarily fundamental change. Because foundation metaphors are
essentialist, fundamental change is a contradiction in terms. Alter the essence of the thing and you don't
change it--you destroy it, creating something new. Change is thus inherently limited; change takes place
only if some aspect of the object remains the same. Root metaphors express this limitation. To be rooted
is to be situated. Uprooted, a plant can be transplanted in a different context. A *2013 root can be seen
as merely one part of an organic system, each element of which depends on every other but which, as a
whole, is in a constant flux of growth, decay, reproduction, and evolution.
We can call change radical to the extent that it changes the identity of human beings. But we can
also recognize that personal identity is culturally constructed rather than "natural" or "essential." Thus,
identities fit into cultures in the way that roots fit into organic systems.
What is a culture? It is a stable, mutually constituting combination of socioeconomic structures,

affective associations, collectively recognized identities, and individual value commitments. When I say
that each of these elements--distributions of wealth and power, associative relationships, identities, and
values--constitute each other, I do not mean they logically entail each other. I mean that they supply
meaning to one another. Any one of these elements is "iterable," which is to say that it can be abstracted
from its relationship to the other elements. This means both that it can be represented in language, and
that it can be retained or reproduced in a different social context. [FN127] Represented in isolation from
the other elements of a culture, the meaning of an identity ("citizen of the United States," "psychological
parent") or an institution ("family," "private club," "trust," "school district") is indeterminate, because
we can easily imagine it in combination with a different social context.

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985
Despite the independence of each of these elements, some combinations turn out to be self-
sustaining:
[Social] structure has consequences for the formation of associative relationships which in turn
have consequences for the formation of character. By character I mean . . . those values that people
are committed to because they have invested their sense of self in them. Associations affect those
value commitments because they provide contexts in which people can be recognized and identified
by others as individuals defined by particular character traits. Because such traits or perceptions are
built into people's self-conceptions and are reinforced by their social relationships, they have a much
stronger hold than any ideology. A stable culture exists when the identities encouraged by the
structure of social life direct people to behave in ways that reproduce that structure. [FN128]
Americans currently inhabit and reproduce a culture that I have described as instrumental:
Instrumentalism is a culture of calculating individuals and impersonal *2014 social forces. Its
participants believe in the separability of means and ends, with its corollary that ends can be defined in
advance of the processes that realize them. They are planners and resume builders, looking past every
experience to its consequences. Individually, they pride themselves on choosing their own ends;
collectively, they stockpile those resources that can serve any end. . . .
....
Instrumentalism flourishes where socially stunted selves combine to form the impersonal forces
that inhibit the social development of personal identity. [FN129]
Belief in the determinacy of desire plays an important role in instrumental culture, encouraging
individuals to identify themselves with their present desires. A person with such an instrumental identity
is a "natural" consumer: when she consumes she expresses her authentic self. In demonstrating the
indeterminacy of desire, critical legal scholars have critiqued the human nature constructed by
instrumental culture. In the next section I explicate the vision of human beings as self-realizing
participants in politics that inspires this critique. In a third section I show how the collective pursuit of
self-realization can build a cultural alternative to instrumentalism, that, even in local settings, would
represent radical change.
B. Radicalizing Human Nature
Human nature, as understood by Aristotle, was both the way people are and the way they should be.
This complex concept of nature was designed to take account of ontogenetic development, the paradox
that immature members of the same species resemble one another more than they resemble their future
selves. [FN130] It resolved this paradox by portraying human beings as naturally developing toward a
particular purpose. But it also introduced another paradox by permitting human beings to simultaneously
conform to their nature and not conform to it--they could be on the path towards their purpose and not
yet have reached it. Hence, they could be alienated from human nature and nevertheless human. This
paradox recognized a dynamic element within human nature*2015 which radicalism has reinterpreted as
the possibility that human nature itself can change.

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985
The most familiar use of the concept of human nature in political argument is to identify innate
human needs that societies are bound to serve. Radical political theory departs from this conventional
model in two important respects. It conceives of human nature as a set of capacities rather than a set of
needs, and it sees these capacities as cultivated rather than innate. The radical thus seeks to identify
capacities that societies are bound to develop in human beings.
Human nature may be conceived of in terms of such "natural" needs as food and air, without which
one cannot continue to exist as a human being. Alternatively, human nature may be visualized as a need
prerequisite to one's full development as a human being, such as economic independence, or political
participation, or the nurturance of another life. The fulfillment of these "cultural" needs may not be
required in order to be human. Instead, merely having such a need can mark one as human, as when we
identify alienation as the human condition. "Natural" and "cultural" needs can never be kept neatly
separate: we need education just to survive into adulthood.
Human nature may also be viewed as an ability or disposition, such as the disposition to rationally
maximize utility, or the capacity to make one's own tools. Need and capacity converge in some dynamic
conception of human nature as self-revising. One who sees human nature as the capacity to redefine
one's needs fulfills herself by constantly inventing new ways of frustrating herself. This paradox is
particularly evident when the creation of new needs is a sort of unintended by-product of the satisfaction
of old ones. Desire typically has this sort of dialectical structure in writing influenced by Hegel and
Marx, whether its instability is lauded as fertile [FN131] or scorned as self-consuming. [FN132]
One can see the deployment of both the need and the capacity conceptions of human nature in Robin
West's "Jurisprudence and Gender." [FN133] Based on a reading of Duncan Kennedy, Peter Gabel, and
other male critical legal theorists, West speculates that men are naturally isolated but desire connection.
[FN134] Relative to their own desires, then, men are naturally flawed, contradictory, and incomplete.
They are defined primarily in terms of a need which, according to West, men hope that *2016 society
can artificially supply. By contrast, West sees women as naturally "connected" by virtue of their
capacities for pregnancy and lactation. Where men long for the connection their biology has failed to
supply, women long for the autonomy that society has deprived them of. [FN135] Thus men are
naturally barren or empty, and in need of artificial fulfillment. Women are naturally fertile and abundant,
but are socially oppressed.
There are difficulties here. [FN136] West persuasively refutes the view that human beings are, as a
matter of natural fact rather than cultural identification, distinct from each other. But she then resurrects
it by treating the isolation of males as a natural fact.
This tension in West's thinking illustrates a second dimension along which conceptions of human
nature vary: the axis between the innate and the artificial elements of human nature. Any radical
political theory must see at least some important human characteristics as artificial, in the sense that
human action can alter or replace them with other traits. A theory which holds that human needs can be
met or that human capacities can be realized by social reform without altering human nature is not a

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985
radical theory.
The prospects of radical theory are made happier by the fact that human needs and capacities are
alterable. Consider first human needs. What economists call preferences change constantly, for at least
three reasons. One reason is adaptive preference formation: a good is less available, and so as consumer
wants it less. Of course, this is what the economist would predict: when a good is less available, its price
will go up and consumers will demand less. Their demand curves haven't changed. However, the status
degradation or the gnawing frustration implicit in wanting something we cannot afford may induce us to
say "sour grapes," adapting our preferences as well as our habits to our newly straitened circumstances.
[FN137] One need, cognitive dissonance reduction, compels the abandonment of another. [FN138]
Another reason preferences change lies in the capacity of people to become addicted to certain
goods. Addicts demand more and more of a particular good and are satisfied by it less and less. Jon
Elster speculates *2017 that consumption in general is an addiction. If Elster is right, such an addiction
is a variant of adaptive preference formation--we want consumer goods because they are available.
Because acquiring them does not reduce their availability, we keep wanting them. But as we acquire
more and more, the utility we derive from each decreases. Thus, while the activity of consumption as a
whole may be addictive, consumption is restless with respect to any particular object. The consumer's
self is the dead calm at the eye of a raging storm. Her desires are ever-changing, but they leave her
unaffected because she commits herself to none. [FN139]
Elster contrasts addictive consumption with self-realization. Activities that contribute to self-
realization generate more utility the more we engage in them, because we get better at them. Therefore,
one of the most important reasons why our needs can change is that our capacities can change. We
derive satisfaction from doing things well because this enables us to see ourselves as more capable.
The "human" capacity for self-realization is not innate; it is culturally contingent. Because
performing an activity well is socially defined, the utility generated by self-realization depends upon
recognition by others. Activities which may engender such self-realization include meaningful work and
participation in democratic politics. [FN140] Such activities yield increasing satisfaction only to the
extent that they are sustained over time. [FN141] Thus, they can radically transform their participants
only by providing a stable social context in which desire can deepen.
Self-realization is very much a collective pursuit. Unlike consumption, self-realization is not a zero-
sum game in which my gain is your loss. Opportunities for self-realization depend on stable political
engagements, intimate associations, and work environments. Accordingly, to the extent that I commit
myself over time to a particular political community or intimate association, I enhance the ability of
others to do the same. To the extent that I avoid commitment, allowing myself to be absorbed in a
whirlwind of consumption, I decrease the opportunities of others to realize themselves. Work
environments provide a variety of opportunities for self-realization. They are potential settings for
participatory democracy and friendship, of course, but they are also potential settings for the mutual
recognition of a job well done. [FN142] This mutual *2018 recognition requires colleagues who have
developed competence and have also invested their identities in the value of performing work well.

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985
Ultimately, all types of self-realization depend on and enable the pursuit of self-realization by others.
Therefore, the rarer opportunities for self-realization become, the more likely I am to adapt my
preferences to consumption, further undermining the motivation of my fellows to realize themselves. In
an instrumental culture, self-realization is hampered by collective-action problems; its pursuit may be in
the long-term interest of all, but in the short-term interest of none. [FN143]
Self-realization is better viewed as a capacity than as a need: we can survive without it. Self-
realizing pursuits may become addictive for those already pursuing them; they may be necessary to the
maintenance or development of an identity that the pursuer has chosen. But, self-realization may not
recommend itself to those who are not already committed to it. Self-realization is hard work. To say that
it yields increasing satisfaction over time is to acknowledge that it yields little happiness in the short run.
In fact, its initial returns may be negative. [FN144]
Nor is self-realization "necessary" for maintaining the ordinary person's self-image. To the contrary,
self-realization changes one's identity. The fascination with contradiction that characterized romanticism
stemmed from the conflict between the romantic aspiration to create the self and the romantic aspiration
to express the self. [FN145] The latter aspiration proudly flaunts the self that we have--the former
aspiration ruthlessly rejects it. Self-realization entails the alienation of the self we start out with. Of
course, we may conclude that the original self is impoverished. But the instant that we claim that self-
realization is a human need, we contemptuously dismiss as inhuman those who have not realized
themselves.
A final reason for rejecting the characterization of self-realization as a human need is that the
language of needs is the language of consumption. Self-realization does not replenish us; it is not a fuel
that we use up in order to maintain ourselves. Instead it is a quest, a hard road. It uses us up. It
increasingly possesses us and discards what we were.
By definition, no radical political theory can base its normative conclusions on invariant human
needs. But it can rest on our capacity to *2019 collectively cultivate new needs and capacities. This is
the vision of human nature implicit in Mark Kelman's overly sanguine claim that
all choices are part of a never-equilibrating, dynamic process of self-discovery. We continually
try to establish conditions in which more desirable selves, with particular preferences, will flourish.
Then, we reevaluate our vision of whether the chooser we create by working to establish those
conditions seems more or less realized, then work some more to redo background conditions.
[FN146]
Kelman is right: all choice is self-choice. But Kelman is also wrong: the only self-definitions available
on the shelves of instrumental culture are self-consuming needs, not self-cultivating capacities. "We"
cannot "establish conditions in which more desirable selves . . . will flourish" all by ourselves. That is
why the establishment of such conditions would represent radical change.
C. The Practical Possibility of Radical Change

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985
Self-realization radically changes an individual in the sense that it alters her identity. But self-
realization is not an individual pursuit--it requires the active participation of others. As a result, the
radical change of any individual requires radical social change. By this I mean that for any individual to
change many must change, and that these changes are mutually dependent. I think this sort of change is
possible because projects of self-realization are not just mutually dependent--they are mutually
reinforcing. Self-realization, in other words, is a characteristic of a culture.
I call instrumentalism a culture because instrumental behavior is causally related to other

instrumental behavior. The more I view the other people as instruments and obstacles to the realization
of purposes I define on my own, the less available I am for the kind of long-term dialogue and
cooperation that facilitates self-realization. This has consequences both for others and for myself. My
instrumentalism reduces the opportunities and incentives for others to self-realize and encourages them
to define their purposes in isolation. This in turn reduces my opportunities for self-realization in the
future. In addition, since the rewards of self-realization increase over time, current consumption reduces
my future incentive to self-realize. Thus instrumentalism is a culture in the sense that instrumental
behavior and instrumental attitudes reproduce themselves.
Self-realization could define a culture in this same sense. Because self-realizing behavior increases
the future opportunities and rewards of *2020 self-realization for the actor and for others, self-
realization also can reproduce itself. Empirical studies of worker participation in workplace decision
making suggest that it permanently changes not only the way people view themselves, but the way they
treat others. Participation builds self-esteem by changing the experience of work. This enhances
workers' belief in their political competence and motivates them to organize other settings in which they
can exercise it.
Participation in management can make even "dirty" work a source of pride. One former member of a
garbageman's cooperative lamented, "I miss the meetings. . . . It was a terrific feeling to own a company
at 22. . . . I used to walk out of here at night, look back at all the trucks, and say to myself, 'this is mine. I
own one of these trucks."' [FN147] Said a member of one such co-op to his interviewer: "Look, it's Jerry
isn't it? Jerry, if you want to work along with us, that's fine, but watch the spillage in the street when you
dump your sack into the hopper. . . . Public Relations, you know. It means everything for the company.
That's what makes us." [FN148] Said a woman who worked in an illegal abortion collective in the
1960s:
You think you could never stick your hand into a toilet bowl full of blood and vomit and pull out
a placenta and look at it. You think you could never put a needle into somebody's ass. But you have
to do it and you're the only person who can do it--you do it. And once you've done it, you say, my
God, I can do this. [FN149]
Despite such traumatic work, another member of this collective concluded "My participation in the
service grew me into the person I was meant to be." [FN150] These quotes reveal that participation is
transformative because it is more than just talk, it is sharing in responsibility for one's own actions.
Doing a dirty job has a completely different meaning when one is taking responsibility rather than taking
orders: it feels like a courageous sacrifice rather than a craven surrender.

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985
Because participation changes the way that workers view themselves, it can change their beliefs
about their capacity for participation. [FN151] Workers who have never been offered managerial
responsibility often deem themselves incompetent. [FN152] But
*2021 a structure of participation . . . in the long run becomes more effective because of the
eventual compatibility of personality with structure. In other words, the organization that permits
participation ultimately produces individuals who are responsible to participation. [FN153]
One British auto worker's description of participation at his plant reveals as much about him as it does
about his work:
[it] provides a natural frame of security, it gives confidence, shares money equally, uses all
degrees of skill without distinction and enables jobs to be allocated to the man or woman best suited
to them, the allocation frequently being made by the workers themselves. [FN154]
The political self-confidence engendered by workplace participation can have radiating effects
beyond the workplace. Political scientists have long noted that people with high self-esteem and
confidence in their own political efficacy are more likely to participate in civic affairs. [FN155] As a
consequence, workers who participate in the organization of work are more active politically. [FN156]
Thus, several participants in the abortion collective called the experience "radicalizing" or "politicizing,"
and said it led to other involvements. [FN157] But participation can also influence the political self-
image of nonparticipants. Participants come to understand that they are politically effective because they
listen to and learn from others. By contrast, those who are given little input into decisions that affect
them allow others little input into their own decisions, both at home and at work. [FN158] But if
coercion and manipulation reproduce themselves, so may democratic participation. And that means that
introducing any amount of democratic participation, anywhere in our society, at any time, can produce
real and lasting change.
III. Defending Radicalism Against Deconstruction
The conception of radical change I outlined in Part II depends on *2022 four concepts stressed by
Rousseau: participatory democracy, community, human nature, and culture. I argued that democratic
participation in community decision making changes people in ways that commit them more strongly to
the sustenance of democratic communities. I defined this sort of mutual reproduction of personal
identity and social relations as a culture. Because our identities are culturally rooted in relations with
others, I argued that our cultural surroundings set what appear to us to be "natural" constraints on our
possibilities. We can change ourselves, I concluded, but only by altering the cultural environment that
shapes us; and in this sense, the construction of a culture of democratic participation changes our nature.
By rooting us in a culture of self-realization, democratic participation can change us radically.
Deconstructive critics, such as Jacques Derrida, Iris Marion Young, and Bernard Yack, see such
Rousseauian radicalism as expressing a totalitarian drive for homogeneity. Hence they charge that
demands for democratic participation are motivated by an anti-intellectualism that limits political
argument to the repetition of prevalent clichés and the reinforcement of common prejudices; that

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985
devotion to community is motivated by a need for insularity and conformity; and that the longing to
fulfill one's humanity or root one's identity in a culture reflects a need to stigmatize others as inhuman or
inauthentic. In sum, deconstructive critics read the desire for self-realization as a yearning to overcome
alienation by restoring a natural or authentic self. Arguing that all of our thoughts and desires are
mediated, deconstructive critics view any such aspiration as unachievable. But in an effort to purify the
self of external influence, deconstructive critics charge, radicals are prone to purge their social
environments of dissenting voices and heterogeneous populations.
As the ensuing sections demonstrate, this deconstructive critique profoundly misconstrues

radicalism.
First, radicals demand universal participation in politics, not to lower debate to the level of the least
educated and most parochial, but to broaden and educate all citizens by involving them in intellectual
debate; assuming that everyone is capable of self-realization, radicals are anti-elitist, not anti-
intellectual.
Second, far from privileging an authentic, unmediated self, radicalism proceeds from the premise
that all self-knowledge is mediated through the eyes of others, so that we can change only with the help
of others who are different from us. This entails a community premised on difference and dissent, not
conformity and comfort.
Third, radicalism doesn't seek to restore a natural self, insulated from external influence, but to
cultivate new selves by means of mutual *2023 influence. Thus, the "nature" radicalism hopes to realize
is conceived as a cultural artifact.
Finally, radical theory's identification of discrete cultures is not motivated by the pursuit of cultural
purity. The concept of culture explains how instrumental identity can be at once contingent and resistant
to change; and gives hope that self-realizing identities can be similarly reinforced by their cultural
surroundings. By depicting social life as more contingent, unstructured, and unpredictable than it really
is, deconstruction discourages the long-term commitment to a community or calling that self-realization
requires, and so reinforces instrumental culture.
A. Deconstruction and Democracy
This section will explicate and evaluate Jacques Derrida's critique of participatory democracy.
Derrida's most important critical work, Of Grammatology, critiques the privileging of speech over
writing he finds implicit in the ideal of direct democracy, as developed by Rousseau. Derrida argues that
political communication is always mediated rather than direct, so that Rousseau's critique of
representation undermines all political arguments, including Rousseau's own.
Distinguishing social from natural freedom, Rousseau associates social freedom with direct,
deliberative participation in politics--the open assembly or town meeting. [FN159] Rousseau's critique

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985
of political representation is based on the educative, virtue-inculcating function of participatory

democracy. [FN160] Believing that "everything was radically connected with politics, and that however
one proceeded, no people would be other than the nature of its government," [FN161] Rousseau favors
participation because of its effects on character. [FN162] His emphasis on political participation flows
from his beliefs that both independence and cooperation require self-reliance. [FN163] "In a country that
is really free, the citizens do everything with their hands and nothing with money . . . ." [FN164]
Rousseau's rejection of political representation reflects this general commitment to the view that human
beings fulfill and develop their capacities *2024 only through action, and that only by trying to affect the
world could they learn from it: "man is born to act and to think, and not to reflect." [FN165] Rousseau
therefore conceives of political participation as active experience, not just as the use of language.
Deprived of the opportunity to deliberate with others, Rousseau implies, citizens can develop no will.
[FN166] Unless citizens do their own decision making, they can have no preferences or interests for
their representatives to represent.
Derrida offers two related attacks on this position. Derrida's first objection is that a preference for
direct rather than representative democracy reflects a sentimental belief that direct democracy enables
the expression of authentic or unmediated desires. According to Derrida's account, Rousseau favors
speech over writing because writing is a representation of speech, using formulaic media of
representation. Yet speech itself is a representation of something else-- passion. [FN167] Even though
he admits that speech contains conventional elements, Rousseau argues that it also contains a
nonformulaic, nonconventional element--the musical inflection of the particular living voice. [FN168]
However, this live element of speech turns out to be conventional as well. The alterations of pitch that
give expression to the spoken word, are also dependent, argues Derrida, on regular, notatable intervals--
the intervals that allow music to be reproduced. [FN169] In order to deny the conventionality and
artificiality of music, Rousseau must say that music grew out of song, which grew out of impassioned
speech. [FN170] Thus, the nonlinguistic aspect of speech turns out to be a representation of language.
Hence, Derrida concludes, there is no origin at which the expression of feeling is any less conventional,
or mediated.
All of this would be quite devastating if Rousseau objected to writing's artificiality. To the contrary,
however, he scorns writing as more private and hence as less socially constructed than conversation.
Writing facilitates the representation of what the sovereign people would say if they were assembled
together. Rousseau fears that such representation fixes individual preferences in advance of the political
dialogue that alone can transform them into a sovereign will. The direct dialogue demanded by
Rousseau mediates individual preferences more than representation. *2025 Representative democracy
rests on the fiction that individual preferences can be accurately depicted and reflected in social decision
making. Direct democracy openly aims at changing them.
Derrida's second objection to Rousseau's critique of representation is that it is self-consuming. After

all, Rousseau writes. And although his work inspired much political struggle in his native community of
Geneva, Rousseau lived in exile and resisted engagement with that struggle. [FN171] Derrida
demonstrates that Rousseau's view of writing as shameful, sterile, and solitary frequently finds
expression in an association of writing with what Rousseau regarded as his own particular vice of

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985
masturbation. [FN172] To write, according to Rousseau, is to fantasize in isolation and spill ink at an
absent reader who is helpless to argue or respond. [FN173] Writing is sterile in the sense that it cannot
engender the voluntary communion established by conversation. [FN174]
Derrida argues that isolation, far from being the haven of unnatural acts, is natural and original:
masturbation precedes sexual relations, writing precedes speech, self-reference precedes
communication. Derrida sees all experience as requiring the active interpretation of its recipient.
Accordingly, all experience is a form of self-stimulation:
Auto-affection is a universal structure of experience. All living things are capable of auto-
affection. And only a being capable of symbolizing, that is to say of auto-affecting, may let itself be
affected by the other in general. Auto-affection is the condition of an experience in general. [FN175]
This startlingly solipsistic position--that others affect us only if we "let" them--leads to a thoroughly
subjectivist account of language, in which meaning is constructed not culturally but individually.
Conversation is, then, a communication between two absolute origins that, if one may venture
the formula, auto-affect reciprocally, repeating as immediate echo the auto-affection produced by the
other. Immediacy is here the myth of consciousness. [FN176]
In conversation--or any other social experience--we are affected not by the other, but by a fantasy that
we conjure up and control. [FN177] Thus *2026 " s peech and the consciousness of speech--that is to
say consciousness simply as self-presence--are the phenomenon of an auto-affection lived as
suppression of differance." [FN178]
This reinterpretation of social life as nothing more than a solitary communion between each
individual and a fantasy of her own creation is individualism pure and simple. Few accounts of
communication better illustrate Marx's claim that "in bourgeois ethics speaking and loving 'are
interpreted as expressions and manifestations of a third artificially introduced Relation, the Relation of
utility."' [FN179] The Derridean self relates not to other people but only to her own desires. While
ostensibly deconstructing the concepts of subjectivity, nature, and origin, Derrida in fact treats the
autonomous subject, isolated in an experiential world of her own creation, as natural and original.
[FN180]
Thus it is Derrida rather than Rousseau who gives voice to nostalgia for a presocial origin. Granted,
Rousseau offers a Discourse on the Origins of Inequality and an Essay on the Origin of Languages. But
as Paul de Man points out, in a critique of Derrida's reading of Rousseau, Rousseau's rhetoric favors
[d]iachronic structures . . . over pseudo-synchronic structures . . . because the latter mislead one
into believing in a stability of meaning that does not exist. The elegiac tone that is occasionally
sounded does not express a nostalgia for an original presence but is a purely dramatic device. . . .
The origin here "precedes" the present for purely structural and not chronological reasons. [FN181]
Seen in this light, Rousseau's "nature" is not a presocial condition located in the historical past; it is
instead the world conjured by the imagination. [FN182] The exclusive pursuit of this "natural" freedom,
however, is contrary to a human nature that fulfills itself by transcending the natural. Human beings live

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985
in a social world, and so can experience only social freedom. [FN183] As radical democrat Benjamin
Barber writes,
*2027 If the human essence is social, then men and women have to choose not between
independence or dependence but between citizenship or slavery. . . .
To a strong democrat, Rousseau's assertion . . . that man is born free yet is everywhere in chains
does not mean that man is free by nature but society enchains him. It means rather that natural
freedom is an abstraction, whereas dependency is the concrete human reality, and that the aim of
politics must therefore be not to rescue natural freedom from politics but to invent and pursue
artificial freedom within and through politics. [FN184]
Rousseau presents all of his key political values--freedom, community, and democracy--as achievements
of human artifice.
Yet Derrida associates these values with a metaphysics of "presence" that views artifice as
inauthentic. Derrida mocks the "affective impulse" he detects in Rousseau and in Claude Levi-Strauss
toward the "islets of resistance" to commercial capitalism found in "the small communities that have
provisionally protected themselves from . . . a corruption linked . . . to writing and to the dislocation of
unanimous people assembled in the self-presence of its speech." [FN185] Derrida then broadens his
attack from Rousseau and Levi-Strauss to the whole radical tradition:
Self-presence, transparent proximity in the face-to-face of countenances and the immediate range
of the voice, this determination of social authenticity . . . relates . . . to the Anarchistic and
Libertarian protestations against Law, the Powers, and the State in general, and also with the dream
of the nineteenth-century Utopian Socialists, most specifically with the dream of Fourierism.
[FN186]
Derrida's charge that radicalism embodies a metaphysics of presence generalizes to all radicals his
reading of a Rousseau wracked by self-hatred and self-delusion.
First, Derrida means to generalize his charge that a written critique of representation is self-
contradictory. In privileging presence over representation, radicals reveal themselves to be self-hating
intellectuals, romanticizing ignorance as innocence and inarticulateness as authenticity. Derrida, whose
idiosyncratic coinages and daunting constructions resist interpretation, could not disagree more with
Rousseau's axiom that "any tongue with which one cannot make oneself understood to the people *2028
assembled is a slavish tongue. It is impossible for a people to remain free and speak the tongue."
[FN187] For Derrida this requirement of rhetorical humility debases political argument and ultimately
requires the intellectual to present herself inauthentically. But this characterization of direct democracy
as anti-intellectual ignores the educative function of political participation. Radical democrats value
intellectual debate so much, they think everyone will benefit by engaging in it--even intellectuals. Thus
the requirement that intellectuals address the public is not a requirement that they disguise their views,
but that they communicate them. And while their views may change in the process of communication,
that is what politics is all about--transforming its participants, not preserving an authentic, prepolitical
self.

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985
In associating radicalism with the metaphysics of presence, Derrida depicts all radicals as not only
self-hating, but self-deluded. Accordingly, the radical ideals of direct democracy and community rest on
the "delusion" that face-to-face politics can avoid the alienation and mediation that are the preconditions
of communication. [FN188] But radical democrats are not so deluded. What they demand is not speech
but dialogue, not "presence" but interaction. "At the heart of strong democracy," writes Benjamin
Barber, "is talk. . . . T alk is not mere speech. It refers here to every interaction that involves language or
linguistic symbols." [FN189] The mischaracterization of democratic deliberation as "speech" depends on
the instrumentalist assumption that its purpose is to reveal rather than to change preferences. [FN190]
The advantage of face-to-face political debate is not that it "presents" us to one another without
distortion, but that it enables us to change and be changed by one another.
Is this belief in the power of citizens to reshape themselves through language naive? Not if
experience is any guide. After studying participation in a cooperative crisis intervention center and a
New England town meeting, Jane Mansbridge concluded:
Face-to-face assemblies have their advantages. In an assembly of all the members, ideas,
emotions, and points of view surface that rarely reach elected or appointed representatives. The rank-
and-filers can themselves listen to points in a debate, mull the issues over, ask questions, draw their
own conclusions, and make their decisions on how to act. By acting themselves, they make
themselves responsible for the collective action. The government becomes us not them. Moreover, in
an assembly, one sees the *2029 opposition. Ideas that one would normally reject out of hand come
from people one knows, people who may have believable reasons for espousing them. Finally, when
an assembly struggles through to a satisfactory conclusion on a difficult issue, the very act of
congregating produces mutual pride and a feeling of communion. [FN191]
Participation, then, is more than just talk. It changes the participants by confronting them with opposing
views and with the human consequences of their decisions. It also changes them by conferring personal
responsibility to support and implement their own decisions. As we have seen, the increased self-
confidence engendered by this responsibility makes participants in workplace democracy more willing
to consult others. And by thus sharing responsibility, democratic participants reproduce self-confidence
in others.
The radical critique of representation is not based on the belief that conversation is more "natural"
than writing. To the contrary, the problem with political representation is that it leaves people in their
original state, whereas political deliberation engages them and transforms them into citizens. This
transformation is possible because the citizens are different from each other. Participation in a political
community continually transforms the participants by exposing them to one another, not by making
them all the same. [FN192] Deconstructive critics systematically misread radical democrats because,
viewing discussion as a solipsistic exercise, they deny it can change people.
B. Deconstruction and Community
Philosopher Iris Marion Young exemplifies this assumption in applying Derrida's critique of
radicalism to the ideal of community. Young argues:

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985
[T]he ideal of community participates in what Derrida calls the metaphysics of presence . . ., a
metaphysics that denies difference. The ideal of community presumes subjects can understand one
another as they understand themselves. It thus denies the difference between subjects. [FN193]
*2030 According to Young, "most radical theorists seek to understand community as a unification of
particular persons through the sharing of subjectivities: Persons will cease to be opaque, other, not
understood, and instead become fused, mutually sympathetic, understanding one another as they
understand themselves." [FN194] Young points out that such a vision of community would be futile,
since individuals are not transparently self-aware. [FN195] We cannot understand others as ourselves if
we do not understand ourselves.
But is the naive assumption that individuals are transparently self-aware inherent in the value of
community? Radicals are drawn to the idea of community to the extent they believe we can only realize
ourselves with the help of others. Why would they embrace the view that we can know ourselves
without the help of others? Young endorses Hegel's claim that others understand us better than we
understand ourselves, [FN196] but ignores its implication that we need relations with others in order to
understand ourselves. [FN197] Thus community is created not by allowing the other to see us through
our own eyes, but by allowing the other to see herself through our eyes. That is why community can
occasion self-realization--because it constantly changes the way we see ourselves. It is the self-
transformation generated by commitment to others that enables us collectively to recreate society--and
that is what opens up the possibility of radical change. But Young sees this very possibility of self-
transformation as a threat of violence from the other that renders community impossible: "The other
person may at the next moment understand my words differently from the way I meant them or carry my
actions to consequences I do not intend." [FN198] Communitarians would say that it is the other
person's capacity to reinterpret our actions that makes self-knowledge possible and community
desirable. By contrast, Young perpetuates the liberal vision of the self as an autonomous source of
meaning and value, unaffected by others.
Having misportrayed radical communitarianism, Young goes on--in a tactic common among post-
structuralists [FN199]--to condemn it by association. *2031 "The desire for community relies on the
same desire for social wholeness and identification that underlies racism and ethnic chauvinism on the
one hand and political sectarianism on the other." [FN200] This sort of hyperbole provokes a number of
questions. Is the desire for interracial community really the same desire that underlies racism? Is the
desire to participate in debate with one's fellow citizens really the same desire that underlies political
sectarianism? Does membership in, say, an intellectual community preclude the expression of
"differences"? [FN201] Precisely which political positions are being denoted by "political sectarianism"
and thereby associated with racism? Are we being cowed into equating intolerance of racism with racist
intolerance? Identifying Marxism or participatory democracy with racism? Separated only by a few
seemingly ornamental letters from the embarrassment of communism, communitarianism makes
otherwise careful thinkers see red.
C. Deconstruction and Human Nature

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985
Deconstructive critics have seen a totalitarian "desire for social wholeness" implicit in the concept of
human nature as well as that of community.
Like Derrida, Bernard Yack critiques radicalism as a futile longing to overcome humanity's
alienation from nature. But while Derrida represents this longing as a desire to discard artifice and
naturalize humanity, Yack represents the radical impulse as a desire to conquer, or to humanize nature.
For Yack, radicals are control freaks, seeking to absorb and subdue every alien element in their
surroundings by viewing society as a totality which is either entirely subject to their will or unbearably
alien. "Longing for total revolution," radicals are inevitably totalitarian.
According to Yack, "Left-Kantians" such as the young Hegel, and "Left-Hegelians" like the young
Marx, sought to reconcile human freedom and natural necessity by realizing human freedom in the
world. Arguing that human freedom is purely intellectual, Yack insists that this aspiration to embody it
in social relations reflected a category mistake. [FN202] This philosophical error, Yack argues,
engendered a sense of alienation *2032 in a world resistant to human will, which in turn inspired a futile
longing to eradicate all constraint.
This critique of radicalism hinges upon a conflation of two types of constraint--the societal
determination of the individual and the natural determination of society.
Yack first mischaracterizes radicalism as an individualist doctrine, claiming it offers "a definition of
man's humanity in terms of the individual's ability to resist external conditioning." [FN203] He rightly
concludes that such a definition would rule out "the realization of our humanity in the social world,"
because it would condemn as dehumanizing any social relationship that "conditions our behavior"--
which is to say any social relationship at all. [FN204] But since radicals regard the individual's
responsiveness to social conditioning as the source of humanity's collective capacity for radical change,
they do not aspire to free the individual from social determination.
Even if radicalism is conceived as an effort to create social conditions conducive to "realizing

humanity," however, Yack argues that it is vitiated by a "contradiction." If the radical admits that social
relations are not inherently dehumanizing, Yack asks, how can she explain the presence in society of any
dehumanizing relations? The radical's only alternative, Yack concludes, is to attribute dehumanization to
an all-pervasive "spirit of modern society, rather than social interaction per se." [FN205]
This argument involves an excluded middle fallacy. Its unstated premise is that radicals must view
all social relations as dehumanizing, or none. Accordingly, Yack assumes what he should prove--that
radicals necessarily see dehumanization and human fulfillment as totalities. [FN206]
The kernel of truth that gives this assumption a surface plausibility is the fact that radicals do see
dehumanization as systemic. But to say that dehumanizing relations are causally related to one another is
not to say that they are caused by some force outside of social relations. That social relations affect one
another is a testament to society's self-determination rather than its determination by external forces.

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985
Social relations influence each other because people affect one another. Thus, as I have argued, the
pursuit of self-realization through participation in self-government has an enabling effect on self-
realization by others. Similarly, coercion and manipulation has a disabling effect on the efforts of others
*2033 to realize themselves. It induces instrumental behavior in return. Thus dehumanizing social
relations are systemic because they have a multiplier effect. But by the same token, humanizing social
relations have a multiplier effect as well. And that means that radicals can aspire to identify, uproot, and
replace dehumanizing systems of social relations by strategies short of "total revolution." [FN207]
Because humanizing and dehumanizing relations are both inherently expansionist, they cannot coexist
peacefully or stably. But they can and do coexist.
Having excluded that middle possibility, Yack reasons that radicals are condemned to explain
systemic dehumanization by forces beyond the capacity of human beings to control. "If every social
phenomenon is always shaped by the spirit of social interaction that informs its epoch or society as a
whole, then social phenomena will always be externally conditioned." [FN208] Given that social
relations are mutually reinforcing, however, Yack's conclusion does not follow. Systems of mutually
reinforcing social relations could be characterized by a single, self-sustaining "spirit"--what I have called
a culture--without being externally conditioned.
The source of Yack's insistence that social relations are necessarily conditioned by something
outside of themselves is his assumption that there is an irreducible gap between a material world
determined by nature, and a mental domain in which humans are free to think what they will without
effect. This is more than a claim that social relations are conditioned by material scarcity, for Yack
views nature as a "social source[] of dissatisfaction." [FN209] Because social interaction takes place in a
material world to which the mind is alien, Yack implies, every social interaction is dehumanizing. Yack
proceeds from mind-body dualism to the individualist conclusion that each person is utterly alien from
every other. Like Derrida and Young, Yack ignores the fact that individual identity is a social construct,
that we are more ourselves in a social world than in isolation.
*2034 The mind-body dualism underlying Yack's individualism cannot be sustained. We are neither
disembodied minds, nor prisoners of our bodies: to the contrary, the fact that we are bodies situated in a
natural world is what enables us to organize, communicate, indeed to have experience. [FN210] At the
same time we are active participants in our experience, not just by interpreting "nature," not just by
constructing the language and culture that enable interpretation, but by influencing the "natural"
conditions of perception--including the human body.
Consider Alison Jaggar's discussion of the social conditioning of apparently "natural" sex
differences.
The hand is not the only organ that is a result as well as a cause of our system of social
organization. Even our reproductive biology, the most basic sex difference of all, is in part a social
product. In the course of human evolution, as our ancestors became bipedal tool-users through [a]
historical process . . . bipedalism reduced the size of the bony birth canal in women. Simultaneously
tool use selected for larger brain size and consequently for larger bony skulls in infants. This
"obstetrical dilemma" . . . was solved by the infants' being born in an earlier state of development.

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985
But this in itself was possible only insofar as adults, being already bipedal, were able to carry the
infants who were too small to cling on by themselves. And it was possible only because human
social organization was so far developed that other adults would cooperate with the mother
sufficiently to support a long period of infant dependence. [FN211]
Examples of this sort can be multiplied: the increase in human life expectancy is a collective cultural
achievement that removes natural constraints to individual achievement. In a more striking example of
the cultural dependence of such natural constraints, psychologists Ellen Langer and Judith Rodin found
that participation in decision making increased not just the psychic but the physical health of nursing
home patients--they lived longer. [FN212]
In general, concludes Dorothy Dinnerstein,
humans are by nature unnatural. We do not yet walk "naturally" on our hindlegs . . . . Yet this
unnatural posture, forced on the unwilling body by the project of tool-using, is precisely what has
made possible the development of important aspects of our "nature": the hand and the brain, and the
complex system of skills, language, and social arrangements which were both effects and causes of
hand and brain. Man-made and physiological structures *2035 have thus come to interpenetrate so
thoroughly that to call a human project contrary to human biology is naive: we are what we have
made ourselves, and we must continue to make ourselves as long as we exist at all. [FN213]
A similarly cultural conception of human nature is offered by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann:
Man is biologically predestined to construct and inhabit a world with others. This world becomes
for him the dominant and definitive reality. Its limits are set by nature, but once constructed, this
world acts back on nature. In the dialectic between nature and the socially constructed world the
human organism is itself transformed. In this same dialectic, man produces reality and thereby
produces himself. [FN214]
From the perspective of these radical social theorists, the distinction between natural constraint and
human adaptability is insupportable. Human inventiveness is a natural capacity with consequences in the
natural world. It is not that humanity is faced with no constraints--it is that constraint is what human
beings naturally adapt themselves to.
The reconstruction of radicalism I have offered in this essay sees nothing alien in our
dependence on others and so nothing troubling in our adaptation to circumstances beyond our
control. The radical hope that our social relations will challenge us to discover the unexpected in
ourselves is inconsistent with the totalitarian impulse to control our experience in advance.
D. Deconstruction and Cultural Identity
We have seen that deconstructive critics ascribe totalitarian implications to the concepts of
participation, community, and human nature. According to these critics, radicals deploy these terms in
an effort to portray social relations among heterogeneous elements as inauthentic, incoherent, unnatural,
or inhuman. Deconstructive critics assign the concept of cultural identity a similar rhetorical function:
by bounding off discrete cultures, we stigmatize the rest of our social surroundings as foreign or
inauthentic. And by identifying ourselves with discrete cultures, we suppress heterogeneity within

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985
ourselves. Accordingly, the deconstructive critics view the radical's aspiration to redefine her culture as
a totalitarian impulse to purify herself.
This section will argue that the deconstructive critique of cultural *2036 identity relies on
psychological intuitions peculiarly applicable to instrumental culture. As a result, the deconstructive
claim that there are no identifiable cultures is revealed to be ethnocentric.
Why do radicals seek to identify discrete cultures? Rooting oppression in human nature, radicals
wager their hopes for progressive change on a view of human nature as contingent because culturally
produced. But the more contingent human nature becomes, the less work it can do in explaining the
persistence of oppression. Thus the concept of culture plays a mediating role in radical thought: the
cultural construction of a stable human nature explains why social change is possible, but also why
society is resistant to change. It enables radicals to treat society as a contingent system or structure.
Dissatisfaction with the instrumentalist assumptions of Marxism has compelled radicals to

reconceive society as a system of contingent meanings rather than fixed material interests. Accordingly,
radical theorists have been attracted to the deconstructive claim that
language, broadly conceived as systems of signification that extend well beyond mere words to
include the symbols and structures of all ways of communicating . . . is the essential ground within
which social life is embedded. [FN215]
But where radicalism requires a conception of cultural meaning as both contingent and systematic,
deconstruction emphasizes only the contingency of meaning, denying that it is systematic.
Deconstructive critics and reconstructed radicals can agree that social orders lack any constitutive
foundation: there is no law determining any social order that is distinguishable from the social order
itself. But deconstructive critics go on to conclude that the social order has no order--that the cultural
system is not a system. Because cultures have no constitutive law, deconstruction denies that they have
any regulative structure. [FN216] If society can have no regularity, no identity over time, it also cannot
change its identity. Radical social change becomes an impossibility.
For Derrida, there can be no local cultures, because culture is a boundless and seamless web.
Referring to culturally mediated meaning as "discourse," Derrida defines discourse as "the present,
living, conscious representation of a text within the experience of the person who writes or reads it," but
observes that a text "constantly goes beyond this representation by the entire system of its resources and
its own laws." [FN217] *2037 Accordingly, "there is nothing outside of the text," [FN218] in the double
sense that any discourse refers to all other discourse, and that all social life is discursive. There is no
place outside of one's own culture from which to critique it, no boundary beyond which alien values
may be expelled.
One implication of the seamlessness of culture is that every attempt at radical critique must be self-
consuming. Endemic to cultural communication itself, the cultural sources of oppression can never be
isolated and eradicated. [FN219] Doomed to futility, the effort to expunge oppressive elements from a
culture will entail the kind of compulsive repetition we have already associated with revolutionary

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985
purges. Derrida concludes that every effort to eradicate oppression reproduces it. [FN220]
Because any criterion of cultural authenticity bounds culture artificially, its correlative criterion of
inauthenticity carves out an internal Gulag to which we can exile all the parts of ourselves we would
prefer to view as alien. Unable to purify ourselves of shameful traits, we disown them and blame their
presence within us on foreign influences. And the more we unjustly project our sins onto others, the
greater the burden of sin we have to displace; so that out cultural traditions consist in the bequest of
memories repressed rather than preserved. On this view, there are no continuous cultures. The
construction of any cultural tradition involves a lie, violently erasing the evidence of earlier lies.
[FN221] Since there *2038 can be no discrete, self-identical cultures, culture cannot confer the kind of
bounded and coherent identities its participants yearn for.
This deconstructive critique of cultural identity rests on a series of superficially plausible

psychological [FN222] intuitions which we might schematize as follows:
1. Everyone yearns for identity.
2. Identity implies consistency.
3. But identity also implies stability.
4. Everyone has inconsistent characteristics.
5. So everyone faces a dilemma between inconsistency or instability.
6. This dilemma can be avoided by disavowing some characteristics and projecting them onto
others.
The first and fourth intuitions are unexceptionable; the fifth and sixth follow from the first four; but
what about the second and third intuitions? Does the yearning for identity necessarily involve a desire
for stability and consistency? It probably does in an instrumental culture that associates autonomy and
integrity with the ability to resist the influence of others. Such a culture expects us to define our goals
independently and stick to them. But what kind of identity do we commit ourselves to when we pursue
self-realization? Self-realizers commit themselves to change in response to experience. If we hope to
realize civic identities through democratic participation, we commit ourselves to be affected by one
another and we make the realization of our identities dependent on one another's participation.
But won't we still be tempted to seek scapegoats for our own inadequacies, even in a culture of self-
realization? Perhaps, but the temptation will be weaker because the recognition of one's own
inadequacies poses no threat to the identity of a self-realizer. To the contrary, self-realization depends on
the perpetual identification and transcendence of inadequacy. My point is not that a culture of
democratic participation turns its participants into angels--only that it absolves them of the obligation to
regard themselves as angels. The identities conferred by such a culture don't necessarily preclude the
pathologies deconstructive critics ascribe to all culture--but neither do they compel such pathologies.
If the deconstructive critique of cultural identity resonates with our psychological experience, that
may be because its psychological assumptions fit our particular culture. Denying that there are any
discrete cultures,*2039 deconstructive critics assume that psychological intuitions applicable in one
cultural setting are universally valid. But in so doing they assume what they should prove.

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985
The claim that there are no discrete cultures is probably true within an instrumental culture that treats
cultural commitments as the choice of a garnish or an ornamental facade--Dijon or Teriyaki, Tudor or
French Provincial. And skepticism about personal identity is justified when consumers are reduced to
identifying themselves by such choices. The more we consume empty packages of cultural associations,
the emptier we feel inside--an emptiness we hasten to conceal with another image-making purchase.
[FN223] All of this is true of our particular culture. But it doesn't prove that we cannot construct a
radically different culture. By treating instrumental culture as the only possible culture, deconstruction
discourages any effort to replace it.
Because the deconstructive critique of instrumental culture is premised on that culture's inevitability,
it has a disturbingly ambiguous quality. It is made to look like the scaffolding that attends the
dismantling of a condemned building. But it can also be read as the latest fashion in architectural
illusion, a facade of ironic detachment suspended from the sturdy structure it ornaments. Deconstruction
offers us a hip attitude toward what we are destined, in any case, to accept. And so makes its acceptance
that much easier.
This ambiguity between critique and ornament is typical of postmodernish cultural movements
generally. In postmodern art, for example, "the fiction of the creating subject gives way to frank
confiscation, quotation, excerption, accumulation and repetition of already existing images." [FN224]
Such art protests its own commodification--but how seriously can we take a protest of consumerism that
offers itself for sale? In postmodern society, observes Frederic Jameson, the production of culture "has
become integrated into commodity production generally: the frantic economic urgency of producing
fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods (from clothes to airplanes), at ever greater rates of
turnover, now assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position to aesthetic innovation
and experimentation." [FN225] In such a context, the critical content of postmodernism is far less
important than its stylistic celebration of novelty, ephemerality, and fragmentation. *2040 Presenting
politics as a "created world of images, sounds, and scenarios," broadcast by unseen powers, [FN226]
postmodernism teaches us that we might as well sit back and enjoy it, because participation is pointless.
Postmodernism began as a critique of modernist culture and its obsession with planning social life.
But like so many other rhetorics of resistance, postmodernism was quickly bought up by the very culture
it critiqued and then resold for profit. Developers slapped art deco facades on suburban shopping malls,
while motel chains repapered their walls in aubergine and British racing green. Behind the ornament,
however, the machinery of modernism proceeded according to plan: "We feel that postmodernism is
over," a prominent United States developer told the architect Moshe Safdie. "For projects which are
going to be ready in five years, we are now considering new architectural appointments." [FN227] The
planned obsolescence of postmodernism, however, merely reiterates the original joke: that the term
refutes itself. What could be more modernist than a critique of modernism as outmoded? And what
could be more complicit than trashing a culture designed for disposal?
IV. Conclusion: Between Revolution and Critique

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985
Two practices have organized radical theorizing since World War II: revolution and critique. For the
postwar generation, witnessing the worldwide process of decolonization, to identify with the left was to
support revolutionary struggles for national liberation. Marxism supplied the dominant rhetoric. But
during the last third of the twentieth century, the revolutionary engagement of radical theory has
gradually been supplanted by a posture of critical withdrawal, and deconstruction has supplied the
dominant rhetoric.
This essay has argued that neither practice can ground a conceptually coherent and politically
appealing account of radical change.
Conceptually, neither revolutionary theorizing in the tradition of Marx nor deconstructive criticism
as practiced by Derrida can account for radical change, because both view society as a totality.
Misconceiving radical change as total change, revolutionary theorists have slighted local and
incremental strategies, while revolutionaries have consumed their societies in Sysiphean struggles to
purge every vestige of the past. Recognizing the impossibility of total change, deconstructive critics
assume the impossibility of radical change, reducing their own radicalism to a matter of aesthetic
attitude.
*2041 Politically, both practices reinforce instrumental culture. The high stakes at risk in all-or-
nothing revolutionary strategies have a tendency to concentrate decision making in the hands of a
zealous elite. On the other hand, the postmodern attitude that politics is a superficial realm of imagery in
which nothing is really at stake integrates supposedly radical criticism into the production and
consumption of commodities. Both strategies recognize that individual identity is socially determined,
but both forget the capacity of communities of social agents to collectively redefine themselves that
originally inspired the radical tradition.
This essay has urged that radical theorizing reorganize itself around this venerable model of radical
change. By focusing on the transformation of social actors rather than social orders, radical theory can
recognize the possibility of change that is less self-consuming than the pursuit of total revolution and
more meaningful than the reproduction of planned obsolescence. The point of focusing in on social
actors is not to detach the individuals from their cultural context, but to recognize that these cultural
contexts are mediated through and reproduced by the individual identities they construct. Individuals
cannot change by themselves--but the cultural settings in which their identities are rooted are sufficiently
localized to permit meaningful change through collective action.
The way that social actors can radically transform themselves is by constructing social settings
which enable self-realization for themselves and others--typically by constituting communities which
define and allocate the responsibilities of their members through participatory decision making. Such
communities need not be universal or all-encompassing. Democratic culture is no hothouse specimen
that shrivels upon exposure to heterogeneity. It is an open system, robustly capable of influencing its
surroundings and reproducing itself in an inhospitable environment. The task for radical theory is to look
hard at the glittering facade of instrumental culture: in the tiniest crack, democracy can take root.

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985
[FNa] Professor of Law, S.U.N.Y. at Buffalo; Visiting Professor of Law, University of Michigan. A.B.
1977, Princeton University; J.D. 1980, Yale Law School. This essay benefitted from conversation with
Alex Aleinikoff, Vince Blasi, Phoebe Ellsworth, George Kannar, Leo Katz, Larry Kramer, Jim Krier,
Mark Linder, Bill Miller, Dennis Patterson, Rick Pildes, Peter Pitegoff, Nick Rine, Jack Schlegel,
Jonathan Simon, Rob Steinfeld, J.B. White, Sarah Zearfoss, and Phil Zylberberg.
[FN1]. B. YACK, THE LONGING FOR TOTAL REVOLUTION: PHILOSOPHIC SOURCES OF

SOCIAL DISCONTENT FROM ROUSSEAU TO MARX AND NIETZSCHE 368 (1986).
[FN2]. Yack, Toward a Free Marketplace of Social Institutions: Roberto Unger's "Super-Liberal"
Theory of Emancipation (Book Review), 101 HARV.L.REV. 1961, 1961-62 (1988) (reviewing R.
UNGER, POLITICS: A WORK IN CONSTRUCTIVE SOCIAL THEORY (1987)) (citations omitted).
[FN3]. The view that radical theory dictates radical politics is implicit in the very title of Yack's critique.
See supra note 1.
[FN4]. K. MARX, The German Ideology, in THE MARX-ENGELS READER 164 (R. Tucker ed. 1978)
(translated as "driving force of history").
[FN5]. See generally Baker, The Process of Change and the Liberty Theory of the First Amendment, 55
S.CAL.L.REV. 293 (1981) (defining instrumentalism as the separation of means and ends).
[FN6]. See Binder, Beyond Criticism, 55 U.CHI.L.REV. 888 (1988).
[FN7]. See B. PALMER, DESCENT INTO DISCOURSE: THE REIFICATION OF LANGUAGE

AND THE WRITING OF SOCIAL HISTORY 3 (1990).
[FN8]. Young, The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference, in FEMINISM/POST-
MODERNISM 300, 302 (L. Nicholson ed. 1990).
[FN9]. See S. WOLIN, POLITICS AND VISION: CONTINUITY AND INNOVATION IN WESTERN
POLITICAL THOUGHT 302 (1960).
[FN10]. See ARISTOTLE, POLITICS 8 (Bk. I, ch. 2) (E. Barker ed. 1948); G. SABINE, A HISTORY
OF POLITICAL THEORY 119-22 (E. Corwin 3d ed. 1959).
[FN11]. See G. ALMOND & S. VERBA, THE CIVIC CULTURE 186 (1965); S. HUNTINGTON,
POLITICAL ORDER IN CHANGING SOCIETIES 265-66, 401-02, 430-31 (1970).
[FN12]. See G. WOOD, THE CREATION OF THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC 1776-1787, at 608-12
(1969).
[FN13]. See G. WILLS, INVENTING AMERICA: JEFFERSON'S DECLARATION OF

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985
INDEPENDENCE 194-96 (1978) (discussing the Scottish Enlightenment).
[FN14]. See J. ROUSSEAU, THE SOCIAL CONTRACT 17-19 (L. Crocker ed. 1967).
[FN15]. Id. at 23; see G. BINDER, TREATY CONFLICT AND POLITICAL CONTRADICTION 75-
76 (1988).
[FN16]. It must be noted that Rousseau's fear and subordination of privacy reflected a fear and
subordination of the women he would confine to the private sphere. See J. ROUSSEAU, supra note 14,
at 140; J. MILLER, ROUSSEAU: DREAMER OF DEMOCRACY 203 (1984); S. OKIN, WOMEN IN
WESTERN POLITICAL THOUGHT 99-194 (1979). This could give rise to a critique of the
Rousseauian ideals of community and direct democracy as essentially rather than incidentally sexist.
Such a critique could only succeed if it avoided reliance on the deconstructive arguments I discredit in
Part III, subparts A and B.
[FN17]. Cf. A. HIRSHMANN, THE PASSIONS AND THE INTERESTS: POLITICAL ARGUMENTS
FOR CAPITALISM BEFORE ITS TRIUMPH 12-14 (1977) (discussing the seventeenth-century
emergence of the belief that a realistic understanding of human selfishness was necessary to pragmatic
political theory).
[FN18]. See J. ROUSSEAU, supra note 14, at 19, 22-23, 43.
[FN19]. See J. ROUSSEAU, DISCOURSE ON THE ORIGIN AND FOUNDATION OF

INEQUALITY AMONG MANKIND 211, 219-20, 224-25 (L. Crocker ed. 1967).
[FN20]. J. ROUSSEAU, supra note 14, at 61-62.
[FN21]. Id. at 17-19, 22-23, 98-99.
[FN22]. See O. PATTERSON, SLAVERY AND SOCIAL DEATH 70-76 (1982); cf. D. DAVIS, THE
PROBLEM OF SLAVERY IN WESTERN CULTURE 84-85 (1966) (discussing the Christian belief
that Christ redeems from slavery to sin).
[FN23]. See Binder, Angels and Infidels: Hierarchy and Historicism in Medieval Legal History, 35
BUFFALO L. REV. 527, 554-72 (1986) (arguing that the idea of worldly progress was absent from
medieval scholasticism).
[FN24]. Rejecting the merely spiritual redemption offered slaves by white preachers, Frederick
Douglass linked his spiritual freedom to common struggle and his worldly freedom to the abolition of
slavery for all. See F. DOUGLASS, MY BONDAGE AND MY FREEDOM 275-76, 441-45 (1855 ed.
& photo. reprint 1968) (rejecting "slaveholding priestcraft" and arguing the impossibility of his
celebrating the Fourth of July until "the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice,
embodied in the Declaration of Independence," are extended to all slaves).

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985
[FN25]. See Revelation 20:1-6 (describing the binding of Satan and the millennial age).
[FN26]. Cf. E. TUVESON, REDEEMER NATION 11-12, 29-33 (1968) (noting that seventeenth-
century theologians emphasized the ultimate defeat of evil by humanity and within history).
[FN27]. See Revelation 19:11-21 (describing the Second Coming of Christ, the battle of Armageddon,
and its immediate aftermath).
[FN28]. See generally E. TUVESON, supra note 26, at 30 ("The Kingdom of God on earth . . . is to be
no fantastic, preposterous dreamland in which the saints get their rewards and their revenge, but such a
condition as we should expect if honest, rightly motivated men, filled with the grace of the Gospel, were
to exercise supreme control." (citing J. EDWARDS, HISTORY OF THE WORK OF REDEMPTION
168 (1830))).
[FN29]. See N. COHN, THE PURSUIT OF THE MILLENNIUM 89-186 (rev. ed. 1970) (describing
millenarian movements associated with the crusades, messianic deification of the Emperor Frederick II,
flagellant movements, and the heresy of the Free Spirit).
[FN30]. J. POCOCK, THE MACHIAVELLIAN MOMENT: FLORENTINE POLITICAL THOUGHT

AND THE ATLANTIC REPUBLICAN TRADITION 103-13 (1975).
[FN31]. Lasky, The Birth of a Metaphor: On the Origins of Utopia & Revolution (pt. II),
ENCOUNTER, Mar. 1970, at 30, 30 (quoting T. Case, Two Sermons Lately Preached at Westminster,
before Sundry of Honorable House of Commons (1641)); see M. WALZER, THE REVOLUTION OF
THE SAINTS: A STUDY IN THE ORIGINS OF RADICAL POLITICS 10-11 (1965) (quoting the
same sermon).
[FN32]. Ozouf, Revolution, in A CRITICAL DICTIONARY OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 806,

813 (F. Furet & M. Ozouf eds. 1989) [hereinafter DICTIONARY].
[FN33]. Id.
[FN34]. See J. MILLER, supra note 16, at 1.
[FN35]. See id. at 149-50.
[FN36]. Id. at 151.
[FN37]. Ozouf, supra note 32.
[FN38]. Letter from Friedrich von Schelling to Georg Hegel (Feb. 4, 1795) (quoted in J. TOEWS,
HEGELIANISM: THE PATH TOWARD DIALECTICAL HUMANISM, 1805- 1841, at 31 (1980)).

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985
[FN39]. J. TOEWS, supra note 38, at 31.
[FN40]. See B. YACK, supra note 1, at 89-98 (analyzing Rousseau's influence on late eighteenth-
century German intellectuals).
[FN41]. See J. BILLINGTON, FIRE IN THE MINDS OF MEN: ORIGINS OF THE

REVOLUTIONARY FAITH 72-78 (1980); J. MILLER, supra note 16, at 207.
[FN42]. J. MILLER, supra note 16, at 207.
[FN43]. Id.
[FN44]. Id. See generally J. BILLINGTON, supra note 41, at 87-92, 173.
[FN45]. See J. BILLINGTON, supra note 41, at 247, 282-86.
[FN46]. Cf. K. MARX, THE EIGHTEENTH BRUMAIRE OF LOUIS BONAPARTE 15-18 (1963)
(mocking the revolutionaries of 1848 for their obsession with the revolution of 1789); F. FURET,
MARX AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 3-65 (D. Furet trans. 1988) (finding Marx guilty of the
same obsession).
[FN47]. Wolin, The Politics of the Study of Revolution, 5 COMP. POL. 343, 345-52 (1973).
[FN48]. Works in this tradition include O. CABEZAS, FIRE FROM THE MOUNTAIN (1985); R.
DEBRAY, LA GUERILLA DE CHE (1975); R. DEBRAY, REVOLUTION IN THE REVOLUTION?
ARMED STRUGGLE AND POLITICAL STRUGGLE IN LATIN AMERICA (1967); F. FANON,
WRETCHED OF THE EARTH (1963); E. GUEVARA, GUERILLA WARFARE (1985); E.
GUEVARA, SOCIALISM AND MAN IN CUBA AND OTHER WORKS (1968); MAO TSI-TUNG,
On Protracted War, in 2 COLLECTED WORKS OF MAO TSI-TUNG 113 (1967); G. SOREL,
REFLECTIONS ON VIOLENCE (1912).
[FN49]. Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Colonel William Stevens Smith (Nov. 13, 1787), reprinted in 2
THE WRITINGS OF THOMAS JEFFERSON 317, 319 (H.A. Washington ed. 1893).
[FN50]. See F. Furet, Revolutionary Government, in DICTIONARY, supra note 32, at 548, 558.
[FN51]. J. BILLINGTON, supra note 41, at 16-20; see Griewank, The Emergence of the Concept of
Revolution, in WHY REVOLUTION? THEORIES AND ANALYSIS 16 (C. Paynton & R. Blackey
eds. 1969) [hereinafter WHY REVOLUTION?]; Hatto, "Revolution": An Enquiry into the Usefulness of
an Historical Term, 58 MIND 495, 498-500 (1949); Lasky, The Birth of a Metaphor: On the Origins of
Utopia & Revolution (pt. I), ENCOUNTER, Feb. 1970, at 35, 41-42; Lasky, supra note 31, at 30-37.

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985
[FN52]. See Hatto, supra note 51; Lasky, supra note 31, at 33-34.
[FN53]. ARISTOTLE, supra note 10, at 245 (Bk. V, ch. III).
[FN54]. See POLYBIUS, THE HISTORIES 212-22 (Bk. VI) (E. Badian ed. 1966).
[FN55]. See J. LOCKE, SECOND TREATISE OF GOVERNMENT 119-32 (T. Peardon ed. 1952).
[FN56]. See Binder, Revolution As a Constitutional Concept, in ASSOCIATION INTERNATIONALE

DE METHODOLOGIE JURIDIQUE, LE RECOURS AUX OBJECTIFS DE LA LOI DANS SON
APPLICATION 341, 341-52 (1990).
[FN57]. See E. MORGAN, INVENTING THE PEOPLE: THE RISE OF POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY
IN ENGLAND AND AMERICA 118 (1988) (noting that "[t]he sovereignty of the people was a
convenient . . . fiction for a convention bent on disinheriting and displacing a monarch whose beliefs and
conduct offended . . . his subjects"); see also Binder, supra note 56, at 350 (observing that both the
French and American Revolutions were "perceived by some as the expression of constitutional traditions
rooted in history").
[FN58]. However, the view that a constitution could be a vehicle for the gradual achievement of
revolution retained currency in American thought during the nineteenth century, and finds its most
articulate expression in the writings of Abraham Lincoln. See Binder, supra note 56, at 351-52.
[FN59]. See H. ARENDT, ON REVOLUTION 132-33 (1965) (discussing Robespierre's conviction that
"constitutional government is chiefly concerned with civil liberty, revolutionary government with public
liberty").
[FN60]. Id. at 133-34.
[FN61]. See J. JAMESON, THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION 100 (1867) (noting that an act,
to be revolutionary, must be done in violation of the customary laws); Luther v. Borden, 48 U.S. (How.)
7, 31 (1849) (containing Webster's argument that "[o]ur American mode of government does not draw
any power from tumultuous assemblages"); cf. 1 F. LIEBER, MANUAL OF POLITICAL ETHICS 218-
23, 234 (T. Woolsey rev. 2d ed. 1881) (1st ed. 1838) (arguing that society alone is sovereign and that
more customary law is preserved in "revolutions" than is abrogated).
[FN62]. Hughes, War Powers Under the Constitution, 42 A.B.A. REP. 232 (1917).
[FN63]. See Tucker, The Marxian Revolutionary Idea, in WHY REVOLUTION?, supra note 51, at 215-
25.
[FN64]. See Wood, The Marxian Critique of Justice, in MARX, JUSTICE, AND HISTORY 3, 3-5 (M.
Cohen, T. Nagel & T. Scanlon eds. 1980). But cf. Husami, Marx on Distributive Justice, in id. at 42, 43

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985
(arguing that Marx condemned capitalism for its injustice).
[FN65]. See J. ELSTER, MAKING SENSE OF MARX 456-58 (1985).
[FN66]. See G. COHEN, KARL MARX'S THEORY OF HISTORY: A DEFENCE 32 (1978).
[FN67]. See J. ELSTER, supra note 65, at 243; Tucker, supra note 63, at 134- 38.
[FN68]. See Tucker, supra note 63, at 220-21.
[FN69]. See G. COHEN, supra note 66, at 63-69.
[FN70]. J. ELSTER, supra note 65, at 253-54.
[FN71]. See Gordon, Critical Legal Histories, 36 STAN.L.REV. 57, 102-09 (1984); see also J.
ELSTER, supra note 65, at 402-03 (noting that "since ownership must be backed by the state and hence
presupposes a legal system, it cannot enter as an independent variable in the explanation of that
system"). Other Marxian historians who treat wage labor as the defining feature of capitalism include
C.B. Macpherson and Karl Polanyi. See C. MACPHERSON, THE POLITICAL THEORY OF
POSSESSIVE INDIVIDUALISM; HOBBES TO LOCKE 53-61 (1962); K. POLANYI, THE GREAT
TRANSFORMATION 68-76 (1957).
[FN73]. Kennedy, The Legal Realist Element or the Stakes of Law, LEGAL STUD. F. (forthcoming
1991). Cohen points out that a right to travel is ineffective if a gang of vigilantes can intimidate its
holder from traveling. See G. COHEN, supra note 66, at 219-20. But the decision whether and how to
enforce the right, and who is to do the enforcing (e.g., federal or state officials) is subject to legal
decision making. See Hodges v. United States, 203 U.S. 1 (1906) (overturning the conviction of
vigilantes for preventing black workers from fulfilling labor contracts in violation of the Thirteenth
Amendment).
[FN74]. "The socialist revolution suppresses fetishism, and the condition of communism to which it
leads may be described as the conquest of form by matter." G. COHEN, supra note 66, at 129. "[N]ot
only the varying contents of currently obtaining legal relations and legal norms, but the legal form itself
in all its manifestations is 'just as' fetishistic in character as is the commodity form of political
economy." Korsch, An Assessment, in E. PASHUKANIS, LAW & MARXISM: A GENERAL
THEORY 189, 189 (B. Einhorn trans., C. Arthur ed. 1978).
[FN75]. See Wood, supra note 64, at 30. "Previous revolutions within the framework of the division of
labor were bound to lead to new political institutions; . . . the communist revolution, which removes the
division of labor, ultimately abolishes political institutions." MARX & ENGELS, THE GERMAN
IDEOLOGY 416 (S. Ryazanskaya trans. 1964). This withering away of the state is also a withering

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985
away of the relations of production and hence of law: "finally . . . the communist revolution will be
guided not by . . . 'social institutions' . . . but by the productive forces." Id.; cf. J. ELSTER, supra note
65, at 456-58 (criticizing this expectation as naive).
[FN76]. See Tucker, supra note 63, at 224. Elster suggests that in THE CRITIQUE OF THE GOTHA
PROGRAM Marx did not deny the need for some institutional structure in the ultimate stages of
communism, but that he naively believed that these institutions would be apolitical and nonlegal because
there would be no controversy over the distribution of goods. J. ELSTER, supra note 65, at 453-58.
[FN77]. For discussion and critique of a variety of interpretations of the indeterminacy claim, see
Solum, On the Indeterminacy Crisis: Critiquing Critical Dogma, 54 U.CHI.L.REV. 462 (1987)
(claiming that the underlying assumptions of current critical scholars' indeterminacy theories are
problematic and that adherence to a strong view of indeterminacy is counterproductive to critical
scholarship); for my discussion, see generally Binder, supra note 6. For various applications of post-
structuralist theories of language to legal rules, see G. BINDER, supra note 15, at 49-67 (arguing that a
deconstructive reading of legislative history explains the evolution of draft convention in terms of
patterns of misreading); Balkin, Deconstructive Practice and Legal Theory, 96 YALE L.J. 743 (1987)
(introducing the theories of Derrida); Boyle, The Politics of Reason: Critical Legal Theory and Local
Social Thought, 133 U.PA.L.REV. 685 (1985) (analyzing controversies within critical legal studies as a
debate between subjectivist and structural strands of the movement); Dalton, An Essay in the
Deconstruction of Contract Doctrine, 94 YALE L.J. 997 (1985) (applying Derrida's theories to contract
doctrines to demonstrate doctrinal indeterminacy reflecting larger problems of knowledge and power);
Frug, The Ideology of Bureaucracy in American Law, 97 HARV.L.REV. 1277 (1984) (analyzing the
different defenses of bureaucracy as invocations of a misleading subject-object dichotomy); Heller,
Structuralism and Critique, 36 STAN.L.REV. 127 (1984) (suggesting that neither structuralist nor liberal
theory sufficiently explains legal practices); Hutchinson, From Cultural Construction to Historical
Deconstruction (Book Review), 94 YALE L.J. 209, 231 (1984) (reviewing J. WHITE, WHEN WORDS
LOSE THEIR MEANING: CONSTITUTIONS AND RECONSTITUTIONS OF LANGUAGE,
CHARACTER, AND COMMUNITY (1984)) (asserting that "[i]ndeterminacy does not require the
conclusion that all texts are meaningless" but it does present the opportunity to find a meaning); David
Kennedy, The Turn to Interpretation, 58 S.CAL.L.REV. 251 (1985) (illustrating structuralist and post-
structuralist techniques of reading with an analysis of O. Henry's Gift of the Magi); Duncan Kennedy, A
Semiotics of Legal Argument, in 3 LAW & SEMIOTICS 167, 175 (R. Kevelson ed. 1989); (arguing that
all language is political; the language of every question encourages one type of answer and blocks other
possible responses); Peller, The Metaphysics of American Law, 73 CALIF.L.REV. 1152 (1985)
(arguing that the differing methods of legal analysis all mediate the social relations they represent and all
rest on the subject-object metaphor in legal representational practice); Schlag, Fish v. Zapp: The Case of
the Relatively Autonomous Self, 76 GEO. L.J. 37 (1987) (criticizing Stanley Fish's interpretive theory
as covertly subjectivist); Schlag, "Le Hors de Texte, C'est Moi": The Politics of Form and the
Domestication of Deconstruction, 11 CARDOZO L. REV. 1631 (1990) (criticizing Jack Balkin's efforts
to "use" deconstruction in normative argument as covertly subjectivist). Balkin interprets the two well-
known Duncan Kennedy articles cited later in this paragraph as examples of deconstruction. Balkin,
supra, at 762-63. It seems apparent to me, however, that post-structuralism had no influence on the first

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985
wave of critical legal scholarship, published in the 1970s. The people who introduced post-structuralism
into legal scholarship were the second-generation crits--those of us who encountered post-structuralism
as undergraduates in the 1970s, and then in law school read first-generation crits through the prism of
our post-structuralist educations. The post-structuralism of the second generation then had a feedback
influence on some of the first-generation scholars.
[FN78]. See Forbath, The Shaping of the American Labor Movement, 102 HARV.L.REV. 1109 (1989);
Klare, Judicial Deradicalization of the Wagner Act and the Origins of Modern Legal Consciousness,
1937-1941, 62 MINN.L.REV. 265 (1978).
[FN79]. See generally Kennedy, Form and Substance in Private Law Adjudication, 89 HARV.L.REV.
1685 (1976).
[FN80]. See generally Katz, Studies in Boundary Theory: Three Essays in Adjudication and Politics, 28
BUFFALO L. REV. 383, 389 (1979); Kennedy, The Structure of Blackstone's Commentaries, 28
BUFFALO L. REV. 205, 261 (1979).
[FN81]. See H. HART, THE CONCEPT OF LAW 97-107 (1961).
[FN82]. Id. at 97-98. Hart defines a rule of recognition as specifying "some feature or features
possession of which by a suggested rule is taken as a conclusive affirmative indication that it is a rule of
the group to be supported by the social pressure it exerts." Id. at 92.
[FN83]. See J. JAMESON, A TREATISE ON THE PRINCIPLES OF AMERICAN

CONSTITUTIONAL LAW AND LEGISLATION 484 (1869 & photo. reprint 1981); E. WHELLER,
DANIEL WEBSTER: THE EXPOUNDER OF THE CONSTITUTION 10 (1904 & photo. reprint
1986).
[FN84]. See Ackerman, Discovering the Constitution, 93 YALE L.J. 1013, 1057-70 (1984); Amar,
Philadelphia Revisited: Amending the Constitution Outside Article V, 55 U.CHI.L.REV. 1043, 1054
(1988).
[FN85]. See G. SABINE, supra note 10, at 203-12.
[FN86]. See Fitzmaurice, The Foundations of the Authority of International Law and the Problem of
Enforcement, 19 MOD.L.REV. 1, 8-9 (1956) (noting the difficulty inherent in any inquiry as to the
source of authority for a particular rule of international law).
[FN87]. See supra notes 63-76 and accompanying text.
[FN88]. R. UNGER, SOCIAL THEORY: ITS SITUATION AND ITS TASK 101-19 (1987).
[FN89]. See G. COHEN, supra note 66, at 64-69, 82-83, 181.

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985
[FN90]. See id. at 80-81.
[FN91]. See id. at 180-81.
[FN92]. See R. UNGER, supra note 88, at 100-04.
[FN94]. See id. at 182-83 (stating that in capitalism the laborer is free to contract with the specific
landlord he wishes); see also Calabresi & Melamed, Property Rules, Liability Rules, and Inalienability:
One View of the Cathedral, 85 HARV.L.REV. 1089, 1105 (1972) (defining a property entitlement as
one that cannot be taken from its holder without her consent).
[FN95]. See K. ARROW, SOCIAL CHOICE AND INDIVIDUAL VALUES (2d ed. 1963); A.
MACKAY, ARROW'S THEOREM: THE PARADOX OF SOCIAL CHOICE 2 (1980) (showing
paradoxes entailed by this assumption). For a painstaking and penetrating critique of this assumption in
its home terrain of social choice theory, see Pildes & Anderson, Slinging Arrows at Democracy: Social
Choice Theory, Value Pluralism, and Democratic Politics, 90 COLUM.L.REV. 2121 (1991).
[FN96]. See generally R. STEINFELD, THE INVENTION OF FREE LABOR IN THE UNITED
STATES (forthcoming 1991) (exploring the meanings attached to indentured servitude and its
disappearance).
[FN97]. Mary Clark's Case, 1 Blackf. 122, 126 (Ind. 1821).
[FN98]. Robertson v. Baldwin, 165 U.S. 275, 288 (1897).
[FN99]. See M. HOLLIS, MODELS OF MAN 99-100 (1977) (noting that preferences cannot be
respected as autonomous without imposition of some independent criterion of "rational" preferences);
M. KELMAN, A GUIDE TO CRITICAL LEGAL STUDIES 137 (1987) (acknowledging that "[i]n
practice . . . paternalism and sensitivity to ambiguous choice are inevitably entwined"); Regan,
Paternalism, Freedom, Identity, and Commitment, in PATERNALISM 113, 113- 38 (R. Sartorius ed.
1983) (arguing that the identification of preferences involves intrapersonal paternalism); cf. Sunstein,
Legal Interference with Private Preferences, 53 U.CHI.L.REV. 1129, 1171 (1986) (assuming that
justifications for interfering with private preferences based on their changeability can avoid
paternalism).
[FN100]. See M. KELMAN, supra note 99, at 124-50.
[FN101]. Coase, The Problem of Social Cost, 3 J.L. & ECON. 1 (1960).
[FN102]. Peevyhouse v. Garland Coal & Mining Co., 382 P.2d 109, 113-14 (Okla. 1963).

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985
[FN103]. But see Kelman, Consumption Theory, Production Theory, and Ideology in the Coase
Theorem, 52 S.CAL.L.REV. 669 (1979) (arguing that distribution affects preferences, which in turn
affect efficient allocation); Kennedy, Cost-Benefit Analysis of Entitlement Problems: A Critique, 33
STAN.L.REV. 387 (1981) (same).
[FN104]. If the employee doesn't have the money, she can borrow it at interest, leaving all three parties--
employer, employee, and creditor--better off.
[FN105]. Cohen admits this proposition. See G. COHEN, supra note 66, at 190 (admitting that there is
no reason why the vendor of the labor power must be the laborer himself and that it could be someone
who owns the laborer); see also R. FOGEL & S. ENGERMAN, TIME ON THE CROSS: THE
ECONOMICS OF AMERICAN NEGRO SLAVERY 261-62 (1974) (quoting Gunnar Myrdal on the
relatively efficient allocation of labor in the slave South); id. at 234-35 (arguing that slave labor was as
efficient as free labor in industry, but more efficient than free labor in agriculture); cf. H. GUTMAN,
SLAVERY AND THE NUMBERS GAME: A CRITIQUE OF TIME ON THE CROSS 8-9, 39-48
(1975) (contesting the ability and inclination of masters to influence slaves through "positive" labor
incentives).
[FN106]. See Binder, Negating Slavery, in G. BINDER, J. BUSH & K. THOMAS, RECOGNIZING
FREEDOM (forthcoming 1992).
[FN107]. See generally I. BERLIN, SLAVES WITHOUT MASTERS: THE FREE NEGRO IN THE
ANTEBELLUM SOUTH 138-57 (1974) (describing the legal, cultural, and economic restraints on
redemption of slaves in the South).
[FN108]. See E. GENOVESE, ROLL, JORDAN, ROLL 306 (1974) (describing a master's resentment at
his slave's demanding payment for finding beehives on the master's property).
[FN109]. There is little evidence to support the belief that jural freedom would have increased the
earning potential of most slaves in a racially stratified society; but freedom offered more dignity. See R.
FOGEL & S. ENGERMAN, supra note 105, at 236-39 (suggesting that slaves were materially deprived
relative to white workers primarily in the sense that they would have given up a lot of material welfare
for free status, and white workers would have foregone high wages to avoid slave working conditions).
[FN110]. See Radin, Property and Personhood, 34 STAN.L.REV. 957, 959-61 (1982).
[FN111]. R. STEINFELD, supra note 96, at 162-70.
[FN112]. G. COHEN, supra note 66, at 33, 113.
[FN113]. Here is Cohen's explanation:

First, it is difficult to conceive the provident habits and skilled craftsmanship which capitalism

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985
needed in the labour force it took over as faculties of slaves. The education presupposed by these
abilities, and the sense of personal worth associated with them, cannot be united with slave
status. . . .
Secondly, slaves must . . . be . . . strictly policed: they require more extensive supervision than
do free workers. . . .
Third, rising productivity leads sooner or later to a rising standard of consumption among the
producers, and that stimulates an enlarged self-awareness and a self-assertion which are difficult to
reconcile with persistence of enslavement.
Id. at 191-92. That these assumptions are not universally applicable in all cultures has been
demonstrated by Orlando Patterson. See O. PATTERSON, supra note 22, at 299-333 (discussing highly
privileged, educated, and influential slaves in the Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman empires).
In addition, Cohen's efficiency analysis treats supervision entirely as a cost of production, ignoring
its positive utility as consumption. Much of the master's security against slave escape, for example, was
provided free of charge by slave patrols composed largely of slaveless whites who seem to have
regarded the intimidation of slaves and hounding of runaways as something between ennobling civic
duty and sport.
[FN114]. Concludes Robert Steinfeld:

It has been assumed that "unfree contractual" labor and "free" labor [were] rooted in the logic of
two qualitatively different social and economic systems, one in medieval economy and society, the
other in market economy and society. . . . In the American colonies [, however,] indentured servitude
flourished alongside "free" labor. The two merely represented alternative legal expressions of the
idea that individuals owned and could freely sell the property in their own energies. In England, if
there was a form of the wage relationship that had priority [in the eighteenth century] it would have
been "unfree" wage labor. . . . A definitive selection . . . among these two . . . did not take place until
the nineteenth century. Not the inexorable logic of the market, but a complex process of contingent
social, cultural and economic struggle led . . . to the . . . repudiation of unfree contractual labor.
R. STEINFELD, supra note 96, at 6-7.
[FN115]. See Binder, supra note 6, at 892-97.
[FN116]. I do not deny that the pursuit of revolution is sometimes a necessary response to intractable
injustice; but I do deny that it is likely to encourage radical change. A revolutionary strategy will be the
lesser of the two evils in many settings--but it will be an evil nonetheless.
[FN117]. See J. WODDIS, NEW THEORIES OF REVOLUTION 398 (1972) (describing two
twentieth-century radicals who saw violence as a "necessary experience in itself" and as "the cleansing
fire which tests and purifies revolutionaries"). The idea that conflict builds character has a venerable
history. See G. BINDER, supra note 15, at 83 (noting that Machiavelli, Rousseau, and Hegel viewed war
as "perfectly compatible with the maintenance of virtue").
[FN118]. See Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution, in ASPECTS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
118-20 (A. Cobban ed. 1968) (describing revolution as a competition for loyalty between two polities);

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985
Binder, On Critical Legal Studies As Guerilla Warfare, 76 GEO. L.J. 1, 10 (1987).
[FN119]. The tendency of revolution to mobilize much of the populace forms the basis for Samuel
Huntington's theory of revolution as a crisis of political participation. See generally S. HUNTINGTON,
supra note 11. As Charles Tilly and his associates have argued, one reason why political participation
increases dramatically during revolutions is the availability of not one but two competing"states," each
demanding active displays of affiliation. See generally Tilly, Revolutions and Collective Action, in
HANDBOOK OF POLITICAL SCIENCE 520- 21 (F. Greenstein & N. Polsby eds. 1975).
[FN120]. See generally B. BAILYN, THE IDEOLOGICAL ORIGINS OF THE AMERICAN

REVOLUTION (1967) (exploring paranoid anxiety about corruption on the part of American
revolutionaries); R. HOFSTADTERT, THE PARANOID STYLE IN AMERICAN POLITICS 3-40
(1966) (discussing the prerevolutionary origins of rhetoric of infiltration); M. WALZER, supra note 31
(exploring psychological and social roots of the craving for purity among Calvinist revolutionaries,
particularly in England); F. Furet, supra note 50, at 554-57 (describing how the pursuit of virtue led to
terror in the French Revolution); Ozouf, supra note 32, at 811- 16 (describing revolution as a Sysiphean
task).
[FN121]. Gueniffey, Robespierre, in DICTIONARY, supra note 32, at 306-09 (noting that Robespierre's
strategy for inculcating virtue was purgation, endlessly repeated). See generally H. TAINE, THE
ANCIENT REGIME 191-251 (1962) (arguing that the abstract utopian ideology of the French
Revolution led to brutality).
[FN122]. See generally S. SCHAMA, CITIZENS: A CHRONICLE OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

(1989) (synthesizing recent histories stressing the fast pace of change in prerevolutionary France). The
original expression of this thesis was A. DE TOCQUEVILLE, THE OLD REGIME AND THE
REVOLUTION (S. Gilbert trans. 1955).
[FN123]. Works in this tradition include H. ARENDT, supra note 59; K. BAKER, INVENTING THE
FRENCH REVOLUTION (1990); E. BURKE, REFLECTIONS ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE
(1968); O. GIERKE, NATURAL LAW AND THE THEORY OF SOCIETY, 1500-1800 (E. Barker
trans. 1934 & photo. reprint 1950); G. HEGEL, HEGEL'S PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT (T. Knox trans.
1967); and A. DE TOCQUEVILLE, supra note 122.
[FN124]. H. ARENDT, supra note 59, at 60-114.
[FN125]. T. SKOCPOL, STATES AND SOCIAL REVOLUTIONS: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

OF FRANCE, RUSSIA, AND CHINA 50 (1979).
[FN126]. See MacIntyre, Ideology, Social Science, and Revolution, 5 COMP. POL. 321, 340-42 (1973).
[FN127]. See J. CULLER, ON DECONSTRUCTION: THEORY AND CRITICISM AFTER

STRUCTURALISM 110-34 (1982) (discussing the relationship between meaning and iterability);

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985
Balkin, supra note 77, at 749 (arguing that iterability, "the property of being able to be repeated in many
different contexts," is "essential to any form of communication").
[FN128]. Binder, supra note 6, at 906.
[FN129]. Id. at 907-09.
[FN130]. The "nature" of an entity could be its present form, its future form, its pattern of growth, or its
purpose. See ARISTOTLE, Physics, in THE COMPLETE WORKS OF ARISTOTLE 329-30 (Bk. II,
ch. 1), 339-41 (Bk. II, ch. 8) (R. Hardie & R. Gaye trans. 1984). In some respects, immature members of
one species may resemble mature members of another species more than mature members of their own.
See S. GOULD, ONTOGENY AND PHYLOGENY 390 (1977) (noting that the skeletal features of
some types of less evolved juvenile primates resemble those of human adults more than they resemble
their own adult forms).
[FN131]. E.g., the desires for recognition, self-consciousness, or meaningful work.
[FN132]. E.g., decadent compulsions such as skepticism in Hegel or the fetishism of commodities in
Marx.
[FN133]. See West, Jurisprudence and Gender, 55 U.CHI.L.REV. 1 (1988).
[FN134]. See id. at 44, 51-52 (discussing contradictions between the "human being" assumed by legal
theory and "women" described by feminism).
[FN135]. See id. at 35-37.
[FN136]. Just who are these naturally connected women connected to? Aren't some fetuses, breast-
feeding infants, and older but nevertheless dependent children male? And for children of both sexes,
isn't connection a need rather than a potentiality or inevitability? On the other hand, not all adult women
become pregnant, breast-feed, or otherwise nurture children. Isn't the decision to bear or rear children
social and in this sense artificial?
[FN137]. J. ELSTER, SOUR GRAPES: STUDIES IN THE SUBVERSION OF RATIONALITY 109-

40 (1983).
[FN138]. L. FESTINGER, A THEORY OF COGNITIVE DISSONANCE (1957).
[FN139]. Elster, Self-Realization in Work and Politics: The Marxist Conception of the Good Life, 3
SOC. PHIL. & POL'Y 97, 103-04 (1986).
[FN140]. Id. at 99. Elster notes that friendship and love can also involve increasing satisfaction, personal
transformation, and mutual recognition, but claims that they differ in that the mutual recognition is not

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985
mediated by any instrumental purpose. Id.
[FN141]. Id.
[FN142]. See id. at 115 (noting that recognition from coworkers is more important than from
supervisors, since the latter are paid to use profitability rather than quality of performance as the
criterion for evaluating work).
[FN143]. Sunstein, supra note 99, at 1140-47.
[FN144]. Elster, supra note 139, at 100.
[FN145]. C. TAYLOR, HEGEL & MODERN SOCIETY 48 (1979).
[FN146]. Kelman, Choice and Utility, 1979 WIS.L.REV. 769, 787.
[FN147]. Russell, The Rewards of Participation in a Worker-Owned Firm, in WORKPLACE

DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL CHANGE 109, 116 (F. Lindenfeld & J. Rothschild-Whitte eds. 1982).
[FN148]. Id. at 113.
[FN149]. Schlesinger & Bart, Collective Work and Self-Identity: Working in a Feminist Illegal Abortion
Collective, in WORKPLACE DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL CHANGE, supra note 147, at 139, 146.
[FN150]. Id.
[FN151]. See generally POLITICAL LEARNING IN ADULTHOOD 89-202 (R. Sigel ed. 1989)
(discussing studies and theories of political socialization in the workplace).
[FN152]. C. PATEMAN, PARTICIPATION AND DEMOCRATIC THEORY 40, 82, 85, 107 (1970).
[FN153]. P. BLUMBERG, INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY: THE SOCIOLOGY OF PARTICIPATION

109 (1968); see also C. PATEMAN, supra note 152, at 64 (quoting Blumberg); Tannenbaum,
Personality Change As a Result of an Experimental Change of Environmental Conditions, 55 J.
ABNORMAL & SOC. PSYCH. 404, 406 (1957) (noting a trend in personality toward "equilibrium"
with its environment).
[FN154]. Wright, The Gang System in Coventry, 2 ANARCHY 47, 50 (1961).
[FN155]. See, e.g., G. ALMOND & S. VERBA, supra note 11, at 206-07; A. CAMPBELL, G. GURIN
& W. MILLER, THE VOTER DECIDES 187 (1954); L. MILBRATH, POLITICAL PARTICIPATION
59 (1965).

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985
[FN156]. See C. PATEMAN, supra note 152, at 52; see also R. BLAUNER, FREEDOM AND
ALIENATION: THE FACTORY WORKER AND HIS INDUSTRY 51-57 (1964) (reporting that
printers, who are involved in their work and have a high level of control and freedom, extend that
control to their social relations); Lipsitz, Work Life and Political Attitudes, 58 AM. POL. SCI. REV.
951 (1964).
[FN157]. Schlesinger & Bart, supra note 149, at 147-48.
[FN158]. C. PATEMAN, supra note 152, at 49, 53.
[FN159]. See J. ROUSSEAU, supra note 14, at 98-101 (only direct democracy preserves freedom); id. at
19-23 (social contract entails exchange of natural for civil liberty).
[FN160]. See G. BINDER, supra note 15, at 75-76 (discussing Rousseau's critique of representation).
[FN161]. B. BARBER, STRONG DEMOCRACY: PARTICIPATORY POLITICS FOR A NEW AGE

213 n.1 (1984) (quoting J. ROUSSEAU, CONFESSIONS, bk. 9).
[FN162]. See C. PATEMAN, supra note 152, at 24-25; 1 J. PLAMENATZ, MAN AND SOCIETY 440-
42 (1963).
[FN163]. J. MILLER, supra note 16, at 31-32 (discussing the benefits of work--particularly farming--
and commitment to family and community).
[FN164]. J. ROUSSEAU, supra note 14, at 98.
[FN165]. Rousseau, Preface to "Narcisse: or the Lover of Himself," in 6 POL. THEORY 543, 550
(1978).
[FN166]. See J. ROUSSEAU, supra note 14, at 28, 99 (the "general will" cannot be divided).
[FN167]. J. DERRIDA, OF GRAMMATOLOGY 195 (G. Spivak trans. 1976).
[FN168]. J. ROUSSEAU, THE FIRST AND SECOND DISCOURSES AND ESSAY ON THE
ORIGIN OF LANGUAGES 239, 255-58 (V. Gourevitch ed. 1986).
[FN169]. See J. DERRIDA, supra note 167, at 199-200; see also J. ROUSSEAU, supra note 168, at 288-
90.
[FN170]. See J. DERRIDA, supra note 167, at 195-97.
[FN171]. See generally J. MILLER, supra note 16, at 52-54 (describing Rousseau's voluntary lifelong
exile); id. at 126-27 (describing how Rousseau provoked unrest in Geneva, then denied responsibility

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985
and refused involvement).
[FN172]. J. DERRIDA, supra note 167, at 150-54.
[FN173]. See id. at 151.
[FN174]. See id. at 168. Rousseau consoles himself that the victim of his corruption is only himself--that
his self-imposed isolation in a world of libidinal fantasy has at least harmed no one else. Id. at 156.
[FN175]. Id. at 165.
[FN176]. Id. at 166.
[FN177]. Derrida seeks support for this masturbatory vision of experience in Rousseau's statement that
"[h]e who imagines nothing senses no-one but himself; he is alone in the midst of humankind." Id. at
187 (quoting J. ROUSSEAU, supra note 168, at 32). But there is a profound difference between
Rousseau's position and Derrida's: Derrida thinks that even he who uses his imagination sees no one but
himself.
[FN178]. Id. at 166. "Differance" is Derrida's term for the distinction between contexts that prevents any
unit of language from ever meaning--or even being--the same thing twice. Id.
[FN179]. B. OLLMAN, ALIENATION: MARX'S CONCEPTION OF MAN IN CAPITALIST

SOCIETY 43 (1971) (quoting Marx's German Ideology).
[FN180]. See A. NORTON, REFLECTIONS ON POLITICAL IDENTITY 30 (1988).
[FN181]. P. DE MAN, BLINDNESS AND INSIGHT: ESSAYS IN THE RHETORIC OF

CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM 133-34 (W. Godzich ed. 1971).
[FN182]. See J. MILLER, supra note 16, at 177. Derrida notes the place of imagination in Rousseau's
conception of human nature, see J. DERRIDA, supra note 167, at 185-87, but suppresses the implication
that human nature is therefore artificial rather than original.
[FN183]. For Rousseau, therefore, purely intellectual activity, though natural, bespeaks alienation:
"[M]an is born to act and to think, and not reflect." Rousseau, supra note 165, at 550. To merely imagine
freedom is to endure the most perfect form of subjection. J. ROUSSEAU, EMILE, OR ON
EDUCATION 120 (A. Bloom trans. 1979). The real freedom made possible by social engagement
requires just as much imagination. See supra note 177.
[FN184]. B. BARBER, supra note 161, at 216 (footnote omitted). In rhetoric deliberately evocative of
Rousseau, Barber continues, "We are born insufficient, we need cooperation; we are born with potential
natures, we require society to realize them." Id.

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985
[FN185]. J. DERRIDA, supra note 167, at 134.
[FN186]. Id. at 138.
[FN187]. Id.
[FN188]. Id. at 139.
[FN189]. B. BARBER, supra note 161, at 173.
[FN190]. Id. at 174.
[FN191]. Mansbridge, Fears of Conflict in Face-to-Face Democracies, in WORKPLACE

DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL CHANGE, supra note 147, at 125, 126-27. See generally J.
MANSBRIDGE, BEYOND ADVERSARY DEMOCRACY (1980).
[FN192].
Because conversation responds to the endless variety of human experience and respects the
initial legitimacy of every human perspective, it is served by many voices rather than by one and
achieves a rich ambiguity rather than a narrow clarity. It aims at creating a sense of commonality,
not of unity, and the mutualism it aspires to weaves into one carpet the threads of a hundred
viewpoints.
B. BARBER, supra note 161, at 185.
[FN193]. Young, supra note 8, at 302.
[FN194]. Id. at 309.
[FN195]. Id. at 310.
[FN196]. Id. at 309-11.
[FN197]. See G. HEGEL, THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND 218-40 (J. Baillie trans. 1967).
[FN199]. See Derrida, Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul de Man's War, 14
CRITICAL INQUIRY 590 (1988) (identifying unsympathetic readers of de Man's anti-Semitic wartime
writing with Nazism, "in that to condemn de Man on the basis of a brief episode is to reproduce the
exterminating gesture of which he is accused"); cf. Binder, Representing Nazism: Advocacy and Identity
at the Trial of Klaus Barbie (pt. IV), 98 YALE L.J. 1321, 1323-24 (1989) (showing that Derrida equates
even the embrace of Jewish identity with Nazism). See J. LYOTARD, THE POST-MODERN

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985
CONDITION: A REPORT ON KNOWLEDGE 81- 82 (G. Bennington & B. Massumi trans. 1984)
(holding Kant and Hegel responsible for 20th-century terror); cf. Benhabib, Epistemologies of Post-
Modernism: A Rejoinder to Jean-Francois Lyotard, in FEMINISM/POST-MODERNISM, supra note 8,
at 107, 121 (calling this hyperbole).
[FN201]. See M. MINOW, MAKING ALL THE DIFFERENCE: INCLUSION, EXCLUSION, AND
AMERICAN LAW 293-94 (1990) (arguing that the right to argue is a community-affirming recognition
of difference).
[FN202]. B. YACK, supra note 1, at 98-208.
[FN203]. Id. at 366.
[FN204]. Id.
[FN205]. Id.
[FN206]. If "necessarily" seems to place an unfairly heavy burden on Yack, consider his claim that "any
attempt to define the obstacle to the realization of humanity in terms of a particular, historical form of
social interaction will eventually fall into something like this self-contradiction." Id.
[FN207]. Barber is an example of a radical democrat whose faith in the transformative power of
participation is so great that he thinks it can and should be introduced piecemeal, through incremental
reform. B. BARBER, supra note 161, at 309. Radicals who, following Marx, believe that participatory
enclaves will inevitably be swept under by market forces, should be even more pessimistic about the
prospects of revolutionary change than they are about the efficacy of reform. Przeworski is an example
of such a rigorously pessimistic radical. See A. PRZEWORSKI, CAPITALISM AND SOCIAL
DEMOCRACY (1985).
[FN208]. B. YACK, supra note 1, at 366-67.
[FN209]. Id. at 366, 369 (emphasis added). Yack says very little about what he takes to be these
irreducible social sources of dissatisfaction. But he does say that "we cannot separate the forms taken by
our social interaction from that which is dehumanizing: the external conditioning of our institutions and
needs by the natural contingencies that remain indifferent to human purposes." Id. at 367.
[FN210]. See generally M. JOHNSON, THE BODY IN THE MIND: THE BODILY BASIS OF
MEANING, IMAGINATION, AND REASON (1987).
[FN211]. A. JAGGAR, FEMINIST POLITICS AND HUMAN NATURE 11 (1984).

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985
[FN212]. E. LANGER, MINDFULNESS 82-84 (1989).
[FN213]. D. DINNERSTEIN, THE MERMAID AND THE MINOTAUR: SEXUAL

ARRANGEMENTS AND HUMAN MALAISE 21-22 (1976).
[FN214]. P. BERGER & T. LUCKMANN, THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY 183

(1966). For an early expression of a similar perspective, see 1 F. LIEBER, supra note 61, at 132-33.
[FN215]. B. PALMER, supra note 7, at 3.
[FN216]. K. SOPER, HUMANISM AND ANTI-HUMANISM 141-42 (1986).
[FN217]. J. DERRIDA, supra note 167, at 101.
[FN218]. Id. at 158.
[FN219].
And if a text always gives itself a certain representation of its own roots, those roots live only by
that representation, by never touching the soil, so to speak. Which undoubtedly destroys their radical
essence . . . . [T]o say that a text is never anything but a system of roots, is undoubtedly to contradict
at once the concept of system and the pattern of the root.
Id. at 101-02.
[FN220].
Is there a systematic set of themes . . . which, forming a closed and identifiable coherence with
what we call totalitarianism, fascism, nazism, racism, antisemitism, never appear outside these
formations and especially never on the opposite side? . . . Is there some property so closed and so
pure that one may not find any element of these systems in discourses that are commonly opposed to
them? . . . I do not believe that there is.
Derrida, supra note 199, at 645. This position is an illustration of the modern proverb that there is such a
thing as being so open-minded that your brains fall out.
[FN221]. See J. DERRIDA, Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel
Levinas, in WRITING AND DIFFERENCE 79-153 (A. Bass trans. 1978) (arguing that the concept of
identity is intolerant and violent); R. GIRARD, VIOLENCE AND THE SACRED (P. Gregory trans.
1977) (asserting that all cultural signification is based on the pattern of scapegoating); P. DE MAN,
Excuses (Confessions), in ALLEGORIES OF READING: FIGURAL LANGUAGE IN ROUSSEAU,
NIETZSCHE, RILKE, AND PROUST 278, 279 (1979) (suggesting that literary language faces the
repetitive task of covering up its crimes of covering up crimes); E. SAID, ORIENTALISM (1978)
(suggesting that the sentimental study of foreign cultures is a projection of desires repressed in Western
culture). For the roots of the idea that all culture consists in the displacement of guilt over an original
crime, see S. FREUD, TOTEM AND TABOO (A. Brill trans. 1918), and S. FREUD, MOSES AND
MONOTHEISM (1967).

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985
[FN222]. An often overlooked irony in deconstruction's attack on the identity of the "subject" is its
covert reliance on psychological defense mechanisms to coherently account for the contradictions it
finds in every text.
[FN223]. See M. KELMAN, supra note 99, at 132 (discussing goods-addiction and status-purchases);
Kelman, supra note 146, at 772-73.
[FN224]. Crimp, On the Museum's Ruins, in THE ANTI-AESTHETIC: ESSAYS ON POST-MODERN

CULTURE 43, 44-45 (H. Foster ed. 1983).
[FN225]. D. HARVEY, THE CONDITION OF POSTMODERNITY 63 (1989) (quoting Jameson,

Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 146 NEW LEFT REV. 53, 56 (1984)).
[FN226]. Wolin, Democracy in the Discourse of Post-Modernism, 57 SOC. RES. 1, 27-28 (1990).
[FN227]. D. HARVEY, supra note 225, at 356 (citation omitted).
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69 TXLR 1985 FOR EDUCATIONAL USE ONLY Page 1

69 Tex. L. Rev. 1985

Texas Law Review

Beyond Critique: Law, Culture, and the Politics of Form -- Papers

Copyright 1991 by the Texas Law Review Association; Guyora Binder

Introduction: Confronting Post-Radical Chic .............................. 1985

A. The Revolutionary Model of Radical Change ........................ 1989

B. Revolution as a Legal Concept .................................... 1995

C. Critical Legal Studies and Revolution ............................ 1999

D. The Incompatibility of Radical Politics with the Pursuit of

Revolution ............................................................. 2008

II. Radicalism Reconstructed ............................................ 2012

A. A Cultural Concept of Radical Change ............................. 2012

B. Radicalizing Human Nature ........................................ 2014

C. The Practical Possibility of Radical Change ...................... 2019

III. Defending Radicalism Against Deconstruction ......................... 2022

A. Deconstruction and Democracy ..................................... 2023

B. Deconstruction and Community ..................................... 2029

C. Deconstruction and Human Nature .................................. 2031

D. Deconstruction and Cultural Identity ............................. 2035

IV. Conclusion: Between Revolution and Critique ......................... 2040

© 2010 Thomson Reuters. No Claim to Orig. US Gov. Works.

Introduction: Confronting Post-Radical Chic

© 2010 Thomson Reuters. No Claim to Orig. US Gov. Works.

My purpose in presenting this critique of revolution is by no means to undercut the possibility of

© 2010 Thomson Reuters. No Claim to Orig. US Gov. Works.

A. The Revolutionary Model of Radical Change

© 2010 Thomson Reuters. No Claim to Orig. US Gov. Works.

Extending the metaphor of alienation as a kind of enslavement, solitary redemption is like a

If mainstream Christianity is not necessarily radical, radicalism can nevertheless be found in

© 2010 Thomson Reuters. No Claim to Orig. US Gov. Works.

© 2010 Thomson Reuters. No Claim to Orig. US Gov. Works.

*1995 B. Revolution as a Legal Concept

© 2010 Thomson Reuters. No Claim to Orig. US Gov. Works.

© 2010 Thomson Reuters. No Claim to Orig. US Gov. Works.

© 2010 Thomson Reuters. No Claim to Orig. US Gov. Works.

C. Critical Legal Studies and Revolution

© 2010 Thomson Reuters. No Claim to Orig. US Gov. Works.

© 2010 Thomson Reuters. No Claim to Orig. US Gov. Works.

© 2010 Thomson Reuters. No Claim to Orig. US Gov. Works.

© 2010 Thomson Reuters. No Claim to Orig. US Gov. Works.

D. The Incompatibility of Radical Politics with the Pursuit of Revolution

© 2010 Thomson Reuters. No Claim to Orig. US Gov. Works.

© 2010 Thomson Reuters. No Claim to Orig. US Gov. Works.

II. Radicalism Reconstructed

A. A Cultural Concept of Radical Change

© 2010 Thomson Reuters. No Claim to Orig. US Gov. Works.

What is a culture? It is a stable, mutually constituting combination of socioeconomic structures,

© 2010 Thomson Reuters. No Claim to Orig. US Gov. Works.

B. Radicalizing Human Nature

© 2010 Thomson Reuters. No Claim to Orig. US Gov. Works.

© 2010 Thomson Reuters. No Claim to Orig. US Gov. Works.

© 2010 Thomson Reuters. No Claim to Orig. US Gov. Works.

C. The Practical Possibility of Radical Change

© 2010 Thomson Reuters. No Claim to Orig. US Gov. Works.

I call instrumentalism a culture because instrumental behavior is causally related to other

© 2010 Thomson Reuters. No Claim to Orig. US Gov. Works.

III. Defending Radicalism Against Deconstruction

© 2010 Thomson Reuters. No Claim to Orig. US Gov. Works.

As the ensuing sections demonstrate, this deconstructive critique profoundly misconstrues