Legal history and intellectual history 45 Peller notes, to have been liberating, even revolutionary. The Classicists’ epistemological naivete and political conservatism were exposed and discredited; in their place, the Realists established the sophistication of pragmatism, a recognition of the political character of all legal decisionmaking, and a progressive social agenda.What this interpretation fails to recognize, Peller contends, is the narrowness — indeed the conservatism — of the Realists’ vision. “It reduce[d] the conception of politics from the wide notion of struggle over the exercises of contingent social power to the narrowconception of howto adapt to the limited possibilities presented by the functional necessities of social life.”^‘^ The ultimate cause of this constricted outlook was a deep and profoundly constraining conceptual structure - a structure Realism shared with Classicism. “I refer to this structure as the subject/object dichotomy, the notion that the social world can meaningfully be described by separating subjective and objective realms of social life.”^° The manner in which this structure figured in Realism, Peller concedes, differed somewhat from the manner in which it figured in Classicism. But Realism failed to challenge or even bring to light the structure itself. Revealing it - and revealing its contingency - should free us to do better. In a crucial respect, Pcller’s study of this important transitional moment in American legal history conforms to the methodological recommendations of the textualist intellectual historians: he has abandoned the obsessive historicismof the contextualist approach in favor of a “tense interaction between empirically based reconstruction of the past and dialogic exchange.”^' His analysis of Realism oscillates between explications of texts themselves and reflections upon how those texts illuminate and are illuminated by the defects of present-day legal thought and practice. This intertwining of historicist and presentist inquiries is even more evident in an essay Peller wrote a few years later on the “Legal Process” Theory (the dominant style of American legal scholarship during the 1950s).^- The essay begins with close readings of the principal legal-process texts, detailing the authors’ efforts to differentiate the competencies of legislatures, courts, administrative agencies, and private parties and to match each of those tribunals with a particular type of legal problem. Peller then argues persuasively that this approach grew out of — and derived much of its wide appeal fromits resonance with - the efforts being made in the 1950s by American intellectuals in many other academic fields to fashion distinctions “between controversial issues of values and noncontroversial I-or an interpretation ot Realism in this general vein, see William Fisher, Morton Fiorvvitz, and Thomas Reed,/twer/at» Legal Realism (New York: Oxford, 1993). Peller, supra n. 47, 1 153. 70 Ibid., 1154. 7' See LaCapra, supra n. 190. 77 “Neutral Prineiples in the 1950s,” University of Michigan Journal of Laze Reform21 (1988): 561.
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