Indeed, both Johansen and Nääv remain largely silent on the ideological forces that frame legal discourse in the first place.39 Neither work discusses ideology directly. Johansen critiques the dominance of decision-centred models in administrative legal thinking but does not link this development to the broader ideological project of, say, liberal legalism, a juridical imaginary in which legal authority is thought to reside in clear, rule-bound acts. Nääv traces the shift from substantive equality to formal equal treatment but stops short of naming the probably strongest contender in this regard, neoliberalism, as the broader rationality within which such a transformation might be situated. Now, Nääv does situate her thesis within the Swedish welfare state tradition and its emphasis on universalism, EU integration, including the adoption of EUanti-discrimination directives, and Swedish administrative legal culture and its preference for neutrality and formalism, However, she does not go much further into broader ideological or economic contexts, e.g., neoliberalism or globalization, as explanatory frameworks. In both cases, the reader is left with a richly detailed map of internal legal change, but few signposts pointing toward the larger ideological and material terrain in which that change took place. In this respect, both projects risk reproducing what Susan Marks has called the “false contingency” of legal discourse, where change is richly described, but its historical stakes remain under-theorized.40 The context, the “something else” remains elusive for both, and is in away ushered out of sight, lest it destabilize the discursive foundations of the analytical architecture of their respective archives. This methodological orientation inspired by Orford – the decision to construct an archive through legal sources and legal vocabulary – can be read in at least two ways.On one reading, it marks aretreat from sociological or materialist explanations. On another reading, however, 116 constructing the past: legal archives and critique 39 For example, Johansen mentions ideology as in the “ideology of sovereignty” (suveränitetsideologi) or the “ideology of rule of law” (rättsstatsideologi), Johansen, Förvaltning som verksamhet: bidrag till offentligrättens allmänna läror (note 10), p. 272; Nääv mentions very briefly that the Foucauldian study of discourses “excludes” from its object the study of ideology “since discourse and material practices are no longer separated, but are studied in a context that is historically transformative”, Nääv, (O)likabehandling. Likabehandling och jämlikhetsförbättrande åtgärder i den svenska diskrimineringslagstiftningens genealogi (above, note 10), p. 59, n. 142. 40 Susan Marks, ”False Contingency”Current Legal Problems 2009.
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