The Bourgeois Charm of Karl Marx & the Ideological Irony of American Jurisprudence

The Bourgeois Charm of Karl Marx & the Ideological Irony of American Jurisprudence employs a well-known body of work, Marx’s, to explain the inevitable limits of scholarship, in hopes to encourage academic boldness, and diversity, especially within American jurisprudence. While scholarly meaning-making has been addressed in specific academic areas, mostly linguistics and philosophy, it has never been addressed in a triangular relationship between the text (T1) and its instigator (S1), as well as its subsequent interpellator (S2). Furthermore, while addressed as a result of difference, it has never been addressed for today’s liberal theory, which includes liberal jurisprudence, through the mirror of Marxist difference. Scholarship is the unique product of the instigator’s private and public subjectivity, as all theory is aimed to be communicated and used by the scholarly community and beyond. Understanding its public life, textual instigators (S1) aim to control its meaning employing various research methods to observe reality and then to convey their narrative, or “philosophy”. But meaning is not fixed; it is negotiated by S1 and those theories interpellate (S2), according to their own private and public subjectivity, which covers their ideology. Negotiated meaning is always a surprise to both S1 and S2, surprise which is both ironic and ideological. The book has ten chapters, an index and a list of references

Table of Contents:
 Acknowledgments  List of Illustrations  Introduction  1Marx, Irony and Ideology – Negotiating Meaning  2Meaning as a Result of Textual Instigation and Interpellation  1Contextualizing Marx: Differentiating to Embrace or to Reject?  1Marx and Dewey  2Linguistic and Cultural Barriers to Marx’s Works  3Cultural Lifespan  4Marxian Ideology as Soviet, ergo, Undesired, Subjectivity  5Marx’s Un-American Attitude toward Religion  6Marx’s Human Progress and Self-Promotion  2Marxian or Marxism: Labels Differentiating Content or Fabricating Difference?  3Textual Differences and Marx’s Interdisciplinary Dialectics  1Dialectics and Ideology: Thinking, Researching and Incorporating Observations  2Marxian Interdisciplinary Dialectics  3Dialectics and Post-Marxian Scholarship  4Private Subjectivity, Alienation and Theory Production  1Alienation as Creative Reification  2Alienation and Ideological Resistance to Power Structures  3Karl Marx, the Alienated Alienating Intellectual  5Ideology as Public (Political) Subjectivity  1Ideology through the Ages  2Marxian and Marxist Views on Ideology  3Academic (Ideological) Purges?  4Marx and Ideological Identity  5Ideology and Ideological Propaganda  6Mass Media – Ideology Is the Message  6The Irony of Scholarship Production  1Encoded Irony in T₁  2Dormant Irony as T₁ Textual Omissions  3Textual Irony and Rorty’s Intellectual Ironist  7Ideological Irony – S₂ Actuating T₁’s Meaning  1Irony and Direct Scholastic Criticism  2Scholarship as (Ironic) Polite Criticis  8The Bearable Lightness of Jurisprudential Irony  1Jurisprudential Irony as Inescapable Trade-Off between Scholastic Ambition and Reality  2Jurisprudential Irony and the Socratic Method of Teaching Law  3Jurisprudential Irony – Byproduct of Legal Hegemony  4Encoded Jurisprudential Irony  5United States Supreme Court Justices as Embodied Irony: The Late Justice Scalia and Justice Gorsuch  9Ironical Ideology, Difference of Meaning and Philosophical Camaraderie  1Plato’s Concepts of Just and Justice  2Aristotle’s Dialectical Universals  3Thomas Hobbes’ and John Locke’s Ideological Differences and Different Epistemological Conclusions  4The Intersection between the Abstract and Concrete Facets of the Law According to Montesquieu, Kant and Rousseau  5Jeremy Bentham’s Common Sense and Grotius’ Technocratic Approach to Law  6American Jurisprudence and Marx: Strange Bedfellows … Not  10Irony, Jurisprudential Meaning-Making and Ideological Camaraderie  1Classical Liberalism  2Law as Science or the Rejection of Ideology  3Formalism and Realism: Two Sides of the Same Coin  4The Limits of Rawls and Dworkin: Justice and Historical Contingency  5Critical Legal Studies and Marx  6Feminism and Queer Theory  7Intersectionality – Bridging the Gap between Theory and Reality  Summary and Conclusion  References  Index