it points toward something more critical: an implicit theory of law as a hegemonic technique, in the Gramscian sense.41 Gramsci described ideology as action-oriented in the sense that it “cements and unifies”42 and strives to create “common sense”.43 When an ideology is established as common sense, it means that ideological perceptions appear natural and self-evident; they are naturalized and depoliticized and come to be seen as the obvious way to relate to the world.44 Both Johansen and Nääv show how law absorbs social tensions and gives them technical form, as function. From this angle, their archives contribute to ideology critique precisely by showing how legal knowledge itself becomes the site where hegemonic common sense is produced and stabilized. In this sense, both Johansen and Nääv’s work may be read as contributions to ideology critique, even if they do not frame themselves as such. I want to end by returning to the metaphor of the archive. Throughout this article, I have suggested that history and law are difficult to disentangle, not because legal scholarship occasionally “adds” a historical dimension, but because legal work is always already engaged in organizing the past. The archive metaphor captures this temporal embeddedness in a productive double-move. On the one hand, Johansen and Nääv accept a conventionally legal orientation by assembling their materials from a set of legal sources that Swedish lawyers recognize as belonging to the juridical domain. In this sense, their archives affirm a certain positivist image of law: one that takes statutes, preparatory works, and doctrinal writings as the legitimate terrain of legal meaning. On the other hand, by explicitly constructing an archive – and foregrounding the interpretive, selective, and normative work required to do so – they also make the limits of that positivist image visible. 117 petter danckwardt 41 This way of using the concept of “hegemony” originates from Antonio Gramsci, who used it to show how an ideology can become dominant by being rendered invisible. Quintin Hoare & Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (ed), Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci London 1971, p. 12. 42 Ibid, p.328. 43 “Common sense” – popular attitudes, often accepted as eternal truths by people – denoted, for Gramsci, a largely uncritical and “fragmentary” mode of consciousness; see Ibid, p.419. 44 Ibid, p.328. Concluding thoughts
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjYyNDk=