Marx And Foucault.pdf

JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY

VOLUME 31, NUMBER 4, DECEMBER 2004

ISSN: 0263-323X, pp. 592±609

Getting Marx and Foucault into Bed Together!

Alan Hunt*

This article is a contribution to the occasional series dealing with a

major book that influenced the author. Previous contributors include

Stewart Macaulay, John Griffith, William Twining, Carol Harlow,

Geoffrey Bindman, Harry Arthurs, and AndrÂ-Jean Arnaud.

MEETING MARX AND FOUCAULT

At the first meeting with the new graduate students in recent years to give a

brief indication of `where I'm coming from' I have got into the practice of

saying that I want to get Foucault and Marx into bed together. Though brief

and worth at least a smile, if not a laugh, it catches pretty accurately what I

have been thinking about over the last period. It also introduces the two

books that will frame this essay.

My first encounter with Marx was via the, thankfully shortened, edition of

Marx's The German Ideology. 1 In my teens I had never been so excited by a

book. The grand sweep of its universal human history was startling. I recall

copying out long sections and rereading them aloud. My second book is one

that continues to engage me. During my first reading of the introductory

volume of Foucault's The History of Sexuality 2 I was interested in an idea

that I was already open to, namely, that sexuality had a history, but was

rather deflected by my naive preoccupation with the question as to whether

his thesis about the Victorians and the `repressive hypothesis' was right or

wrong. I was also alienated from much of the suggestive potential of this text

by its narrow equation of law with monarchical sovereignty.

Subsequently I have re-read this, also thankfully short, book more often

than I have any other, each time getting new and different things from it, but

always coming away with varying dissatisfactions or intellectual itches. It

* Department of Law, Carleton University, Ottawa K1S 5B6, Canada

1 K. Marx, and F. Engels `The German Ideology' [1845±46] in Karl Marx Frederick

Engels Collected Works Vol. V (1976) 19±539. I no longer have my original cheap

Moscow edition that was doubtless picked up from a second-hand book stall.

2 M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality (1976/78).

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became clear to me that The History of Sexuality was a work of transition

located at the point of rupture between Foucault's preoccupation with the

transition between the two major forms of domination that have

characterized modernity, in brief, from sovereignty to discipline, to his

shift to the concern with the relationship between the governance of others

and the governance of self that featured in his final years.

It is significant that while neither of my two selected texts directly

engages with law, they both have wide ranging implications for law. I hasten

to add that I have come to realize that I do not think law as a more-or-less

independent phenomenon is what interests me; rather, law continues to

engage me because it exemplifies the dual dimension of being an institution

with coercive capacity that functions predominantly through discourses and/

or ideology.

I should say something about how these interests came to be formed. I

have long thought of myself as a product of the distinctive form of British

Labour welfarism that characterized Britain after the Second World War.

Born during the war into a family slowly becoming lower middle-class,

whose optimism about the possibility of making a better world kindled a

commitment to education in a house that was itself devoid of books and

whose enthusiasm for education made much of my early childhood, if not

exactly miserable, one that put more pressure for attainment than I was

enthusiastic about. I was entered to sit for scholarships, separated from my

local school friends, and sent to one of those classically illiberal institutions

that occupied a space between the elitist public schools and the state

secondary schools. St. Albans School suffered the indignity of being one of

the oldest schools in the country but could not claim this antiquity because

its existence had not been continuous, having been briefly closed during the

dissolution of the monasteries. So, without any formal provenance, it sought

to drive its pupils to attainment; the only legitimate aspiration was entry to

Oxbridge. This was done by imposing radical dividing practices; for

example, we were made to wear a multi-coloured blazer which meant that I

always ran the risk of abuse or a beating from the local kids as I made my

way home. It probably was not intentional but it seemed that the school

wanted to make study a drudgery and to extinguish any fun or excitement in

the learning process. There was also a suffocating formalism which meant

that to study humanities one had to take either English or Classics (Latin and

Greek); so my wish to study History, Geography, and Economics ended up

as a programme in Maths, Physics, and Chemistry! I completed my

schooling with indifference.

I did not flourish under these conditions and remain bitter that the most

tangible legacy was that I came to feel ashamed of my family and never

invited school friends to visit. I do not know how or why it happened but I

seemed in my mid-teens to have struck out towards independent study. I

started to haunt the local library and began taking out famous books. I read

Bertrand Russell on the history of philosophy and started on the classical

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philosophers themselves. But most significantly I read the Everyman pocket

edition of Marx's Capital 3 and Freud's Interpretation of Dreams that gave

me a strong sense that the human world was multi-dimensional.

Alienation from school and my reading had a radicalizing impact. I

became increasingly irritated by the petty school rules and regulations. We

had to play soldiers every Friday afternoon and this required lots of pressing

of uniforms and polishing of boots. I discovered, by chance, that this activity

was supposed to be optional and I took great pleasure in withdrawing from

the Officers' Training Corps and, if I had not acquired it before, soon

espoused a strong anti-militarism. This was beginning of activism since

others followed me away from the war games. This was the time that the

anti-nuclear-weapons movement began to surface. I am not sure whether I

went on the first Aldermaston March (although I can remember claiming that

I did), but I was certainly active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament

by the second march. And it was here that I encountered the many varieties

of the Left. I joined the Young Socialists who were promptly closed down by

the Labour Party. The people who impressed me the most were the

communists. Here were people, often without much formal education, who

lived in houses full of books and who could talk knowledgeably about a wide

range of topics. They seemed to live straightforward, simple, and serious

lives. Over the next twenty years I continued to be impressed by the calibre

of the communist activists. Early on I was particularly fortunate to get to

know Ted Bramley who had led wartime occupations of London houses left

empty by the rich; he had a wide circle of political and intellectual

acquaintances and I spent many evenings listening to energetic conversations

and disputations. I wanted to join the Communist Party but was not yet 18,

but some exception was made and I went off to university proudly, as a card-

carrying member.

I had selected Leeds University because it was not Oxford or

Cambridge and had something of a radical reputation. I had happily

abandoned science and, thinking that there might be some connection

between sociology and socialism, enrolled for a degree in sociology. My

cohort shared a variety of radicalisms and there was political and

intellectual excitement in the air; it must have served us well since

members of the group are today scattered in prominent positions in

universities around the world. I threw myself most enthusiastically into

communist politics in Leeds. The Yorkshire party leader, Bert Ramelson,

with whom I was later to cross swords, taught me the elements of public

speaking from a soap box outside Leeds Town Hall while he took breaks. I

enjoyed sociology but did not put in enough time to do well, but I did learn

something which stood me in good stead later, namely, to study late at

night and gradually reduce my sleep time.

3 Many years latter I stumbled on some notes I had made at the time and was

embarrased by my enthusiasm for a linear causality in the historical process.

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I became heavily involved in national student politics. At the time the

National Union of Students (NUS) was controlled by semi-professional

politicians who went on to careers in the Labour Party. One minor victory for

the Left had implications for my future; we won a rule change mandating

that candidates for office must recently have been full-time students. Since I

got close to election to the NUS Executive, I needed to remain a full-time

student for a while longer. For some reason, I had become tangentially

involved in mooting activities organized by the Law School and acquired an

always unrealistic aspiration to become a Clarence Darrow or D.N. Pritt,

defending the oppressed. I signed on for a law degree as also did Jack Straw.

We were both heavily involved in both local and national student politics

and did not have much time to attend lectures and tutorials. I would like to

make the belated confession that Straw and I benefitted from the neat

handwriting of two of the few female law students who periodically handed

over carbon-paper copies of their notes.

I finished my studies not having been particularly successful; but then I

defined myself in political and not academic terms. Impending marriage

compounded the need for employment. I still had thoughts of a career as a

barrister, so decided that law teaching would provide employment that would

allow scope for political work and professional qualification. I secured a junior

lectureship at the then Manchester Polytechnic. I enjoyed lecturing, and

teaching had the great merit of providing the possibility of a substantial control

over one's time, so I was able to throw myself into Communist Party politics in

the Manchester area. I became greatly involved in Marxist education which

also gave me a chance to reflect on teaching as a form of intellectual practice.

At the same time I became heavily involved with the Party's theoretical

journal, Marxism Today, which was to play a crucial role in theoretical and

political debates in Britain over the next two decades.

The late 1960s was a turbulent time. The British Left, small though it was,

became increasingly optimistic. The Communist Party pushed ahead with

developing its own strategic programme for a `British Road to Socialism'.

Creative though this process was, it later became evident that it left

unaddressed the question of the political strategy of the Soviet Union

through its control of the international communist movement. I had visited

the Soviet Union in my early years of activism; I had not been impressed. I

will cut short my account of my role in communist politics with the

observation that the British Communist Party signed its own death warrant

by, on the one hand, advancing its own independent project while, at the

same time, refusing to address why it was that the Bolshevik Revolution had

produced the oppressive bureaucratic system that was the USSR. I now

recognize that I wasted too many years in an organization that was tearing

itself apart with battles between the Soviet loyalists and the Eurocommunists

with whom I identified.

One productive consequence of my troubled political spirit was that I

threw myself into the explosion of theoretical debates that erupted within

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Marxism and other radical currents. Participation in these debates was what

made me aware of my own enthusiastic engagement with intellectual work.

The format of the reading group became popular as a means of systematic

engagement with `big' and `difficult' texts. One offshoot of my systematic

reading of Marx was to lead to the rewarding collaboration with Maureen

Cain that resulted in Marx and Engels on Law. 4 I also began to bring

together my work as a law teacher and my personal intellectual agenda. By

now I had ± thankfully ± given up the idea of becoming a legal practitioner.

And from this came the decision to strike out in a direction that was not

taken by many at the time. I decided that I wanted to bring together my

developing interest in law with my sociological background and my

Marxism by working for a doctorate. My otherwise supportive Head of

Department regretted having to turn down my request for institutional

assistance in pursuing a doctorate because `law teachers don't need

doctorates'.

So for the next few four years I spent ever spare moment, without much

slackening my political activism, under the reassuring, but somewhat

gloomy dome of Manchester Central Library. I sought to understand the

trajectory of the different ways in which sociologically rooted inquiries had

engaged the socio-political phenomenon of law. If I were to revive this

project, I would focus more explicitly on the changing historical conditions

in which law has been problematized. As it was, it made me engage in much

more depth than I had before with classical sociological theory,

rediscovering new depth and importance in Durkheim and Weber, but the

project also brought me into contact with a number of interesting figures who

left less lasting imprints on sociological thought. I became particularly

interested in the Russian sociological jurists, such as Timasheff and

Gurvitch, and the Bolshevik Evgeny Pashukanis, whom I found interesting

in themselves but also allowed me to explore one facet of the relation

between Russian Marxism and Russian sociology. One aspect of this gave

rise to my first `real' journal article that appeared in 1976 and I take the

liberty of mentioning it since nobody else has ever done so! 5 More

significant for my future was the publication of my doctoral thesis. 6

By this time there existed groupings that began to feel themselves as a

movement and that the designations `law and society' or `socio-legal studies'

represented something of a critical challenge to orthodox doctrinal or policy

approaches to law. What differentiated the law-and-society current from the

`new criminology' and `radical deviancy' 7 was that most of those who

identified with it were located within law schools. Radical deviancy was

doubly-significant because it was one of the earliest academic movements

4 M. Cain and A. Hunt, Marx and Engels on Law (1979).

5 A. Hunt, `Lenin and Sociology' (1976) 24 Sociological Rev. 5±22.

6 A Hunt, The Sociological Movement in Law (1978).

7 L. Taylor, Deviance and Society (1971); P. Rock, Deviant Behaviour (1973).

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