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Towards A Jurisprudence of State Communism: Law and the Failure of Revolution

Cercel, Cosmin

Authors

Cosmin Cercel



Abstract

More than twenty-five years after the collapse of the Socialist bloc, the nature of the regimes in Eastern Europe between 1945 and 1989 continues to evade the attempts of political theorists and scholars of post-communism to define and classify them. Drawing on philosophical inquiry, jurisprudential analysis and intellectual history, this book traces the impact of communist ideology and practice on legal thought: from its critical roots in the midst of the nineteenth century to its reactionary stand in the later years of the twentieth. Exploring how the communist experience – both in its revolutionary and authoritarian guises – has been articulated within the legal theoretical field, the book addresses two central theoretical lacunae fostered by the historiography of authoritarianism in Central and Eastern Europe: the status of law, and its relationship to the broader ideological framework legitimising authoritarian regimes. Moving beyond the limits of the contemporary discourse on communism – particularly as it is channelled through transitional justice and memory studies – Cosmin Cercel develops a theoretical framework that is able to uncover law’s complicity with the extreme ideologies that dominated Central and Eastern Europe. For it is, he argues, in its recourse to legal concepts that the communist experience raises important jurisprudential questions for our contemporary understanding of law, the limits of state sovereignty, and law’s relationship to historical violence.

Citation

Cercel, C. (2017). Towards A Jurisprudence of State Communism: Law and the Failure of Revolution. London: Routledge

Book Type Authored Book
Online Publication Date Nov 14, 2017
Publication Date Nov 20, 2017
Deposit Date Dec 4, 2018
ISBN 9781138684164
Public URL https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1222490
Related Public URLs https://www.routledge.com/Towards-A-Jurisprudence-of-State-Communism-Law-and-the-Failure-of-Revolution/Cercel/p/book/9780367232528
Contract Date Nov 14, 2017


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