Re: [asa] dawkins and unbelief (again)

Well, we're getting far afield here, but let me just note this and drop
out: personally, though I have some libertarian instincts, I think
pragmatism and consequentialism, and the legal instrumentalism they
engender, are deeply problematic because they tend to undermine the rule of
law. There's an insteresting new book out on this by Brian Tamanaha, a law
prof at St. John's: *Law as a Means to an End: Threat to the Rule of Law*(
http://tinyurl.com/3db8f2) Personally I'm exploring virtue ethics and
virtue jurisprudence as a promsing post-formalist way to ground the rule of
law in something deeper than merely pragmatic concerns. (My feeble effort
to date:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=945473&high=%20opderbeck)

Along these lines, you might appreciate Jeffrey Stout's *Democracy and
Tradition* (http://tinyurl.com/2r796y), which makes the interesting move of*
*appropriating some of Hauerwas and MacIntyre's traditionalism and melding
it with pragmatism by conceiving of democracy itself as a sort of
tradition. I still think Stout is too enamoured of Dewey, however.

On 4/3/07, Janice Matchett <janmatch@earthlink.net> wrote:
>
> At 06:53 PM 4/2/2007, David Opderbeck wrote:
>
> *@ *Derrida is the darling of those who want to fool some useful idiots
> into believing that the Constitution is a "living document".
>
> I don't think the Warren Court was much into poststructualism. To the
> contrary, the legal realists and instrumentalists who displaced turn of the
> century formalism in statutory and constitutional interpretation were
> rationalists and libertarians who were heavily influenced by Dewey and his
> ilk. *It is actually pretty difficult, if not impossible, to hold to
> constitutional formalism and libertarian pragmatism at the same time. *
>
>
> *@* It's not impossible at all. It's done with* constitutional openness
> and the competition principle.
>
> *" .... Sophisticated originalists (prominently, Princeton professor *Keith
> Whittington*) have emphasized that constitutionalism is not merely a
> matter of interpretation .... It is rather a matter of construction. *Arguments
> that count often have to do with structure rather than semantics;* with
> purposes and consequences as essential inputs into ascertaining
> constitutional meaning. ...
>
> ...Originalists have thoroughly discredited the idea of an aspirational,
> "Living" Constitution. Progressives have made a persuasive case for
> pragmatic, consequentialist reasoning in constitutional construction. *The
> point of contention is not about constitutional pragmatism per se but about
> its purpose and objectives. Purpose and objectives are what the progressives
> have wrong.
>
> *They peddle a moribund, European social model. On their account, all law
> is politics, and a presumption for competition is no more plausible,
> constitutionally speaking, than a presumption for collectivism. Only then do
> they mobilize pragmatism­to escape the socialist implications of their
> theory and to render it politically palatable.
>
> Originalist pragmatism, in contrast, takes its bearings and objectives
> from the constitutional architecture. *The Constitution cannot work
> without pragmatism and consequentialism. But one must make those
> dispositions work for, not against, the Constitution.* The New Deal
> opposed pragmatism to constitutionalism, and the modern progressive project
> is to keep the two asunder. To reinvent a pragmatic originalism is the
> challenge for constitutional theorists, and justices, in the decades ahead.
> .." http://federalismproject.org/depository/FederalistOutlook232.pdf .
>
> And the reason why Derrida is one of the darlings of those who want to
> undermine what intellectually honest people know is the *easily
> discernable intent *of the Framers - (we have the Federalist Papers, after
> all) - is the fact that, like them, he wanted to believe that any text is
> subject to as many interpretations and deconstructions as there are elites
> to make them. Such "thinking" is convenient for central planners to
> embrace, since the Constitution of the United States, and other founding
> documents, stand in the way of the repressive social engineering plans they
> want to ENFORCE on the rest of us.
>
> ~ Janice ... picturing one of these elite clowns on his way to pick up his
> Nobel Peace Prize from another one of the incestuous, self-congratulatory
> organizations that hand out meaningless awards and trophies to those who
> covet and lobby to obtain such things.
> http://www.photopile.com/photos/dead/auctions/286556.jpg
>
>
>
>
> On 4/2/07, *Janice Matchett* <janmatch@earthlink.net > wrote:
> At 05:30 PM 4/2/2007, David Opderbeck wrote:
>
> As the trajectory from Dawkins to Campolo to Robert Mugabe, that perhaps
> is itself a bit of postmodern textual criticism, but I don't think even
> Derrida could have come up with that one.
>
>
>
> @ Derrida is the darling of those who want to fool some useful idiots into
> believing that the Constitution is a "living document".
>
> I can name names there, too, and do that "trajectory" for you if you like.
> :)
>
> ~ Janice
>
>
>

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Received on Tue Apr 3 13:06:39 2007