The book highlights the interconnections between three framing
concepts in the development of modern western law: religion, race,
and rights. The author challenges the assumption that law is an
objective, rational and secular enterprise by showing that the rule
of law is historically grounded and linked to the particularities
of Christian morality, the forces of capitalism dependent upon
exploitation of minorities, and specific conceptions of
individualism that surfaced with the Reformation in the sixteenth
century, and rapidly developed in the Enlightenment in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Drawing upon landmark legal
decisions and historical events, the book emphasizes that justice
is not blind because our concept of justice changes over time and
is linked to economic power, social values, and moral sensibilities
that are neither universal nor apolitical. Highlighting the
historical interconnections between religion, race and rights aids
our understanding of contemporary socio-legal issues. In the
twenty-first century, the economic might of the USA and the west
often leads toward a myopic vision of law and a belief in its
universal application. This ignores the cultural specificity of
western legal concepts, and prevents us from appreciating that,
analogous to past colonial periods, in a global political economy
Anglo-American law is not always transportable, transferable, or
translatable across political landscapes and religious communities.
'Darian-Smith's new book is an example of what is most exciting
about new scholarship in the humanities. It works across
disciplinary and methodological boundaries in its attempt to deal
with one of our most pressing current social problems - determining
the consequences of the sometimes violent interaction of race,
religion and law in times of social crisis. Darian-Smith explodes
the myth of secularism in modern society, and the illusion of
post-racialism, in her unblinking analysis of present dilemmas.
Once you read this book you will never again think that the western
concept of individual rights is sufficient to resolve the
contradictions of modern existence. This is a genuinely important
step forward in western scholarship' - Stanley Katz, President
Emeritus of the American Council of Learned Societies and
Professor, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University. 'Eve
Darian-Smith takes us on an amazing journey covering four centuries
that brilliantly illuminates the continuously evolving interplay of
law, religion, and race in the Anglo-American experience. This
wonderfully readable book is imaginatively organized around a
series of eight landmark 'law moments' that ingeniously show how
legal rights are always being subtly shaped by culturally
prevailing ideas about religion and race, a process that still goes
on in our supposedly 21st century secular world that claims to be
free of racism' - Richard Falk, Albert G. Milbank Professor of
International Law Emeritus, Princeton University. 'In this volume,
Eve Darian-Smith offers a passionate, wide-ranging analysis of the
complex, historically-vexed relations among religion, race, and
rights over the past four plus centuries. The book begins, in 1571,
with Martin Luther and ends, at the dawn of the new century, with
the discriminatory labor practices of Walmart, the recent crusades
of George Bush and his theocons, and the resurgence of religious
faith. By way of a well-chosen sequence of 'legal landmarks' - each
an historical drama in its own right, each a piece of theater in
which judicial processes take center stage - Darian-Smith develops
a compelling, complex critique of the law, of its inherent
ambiguities, its violence, its possibilities. And its historical
entailment in political, economic, social and ethical forces well
beyond itself, forces that, repeatedly, have opened up a yawning
gap between its ideological (self)representation and the realities
of its everyday practice. This is an ambitious work of scholarship,
one which, by virtue of brush strokes at once deft and broad,
challenges us to understand the legal underpinnings of our world in
new ways' - Jon Comaroff, University of Chicago.
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