Formal logic and law serve the status quo once stripped of political content
Evidence
Horkheimer’s stress on dialectics also extended to his understanding of logic. Although rejecting the extravagant ontological claims Hegel had made for his logical categories, he agreed with the need for a substantive, rather than merely formal, logic. In Ddmmerung Horkheimer wrote: “Logic is not independent of content. In face of the reality that what is inexpensive for the favored part of humanity remains unattainable for the others, nonpartisan logic would he as nonpartisan as a book of laws that is the same for all.” n Formalism, characteristic of bourgeois law (the ideal of the Rechisstaat, which meant judicial universality without relating the law to its political origins), bourgeois morality (the categorical imperative), and bourgeois logic, had once been progressive, but it now served only to perpetuate the status quo. True logic, as well as true rationalism, must go beyond form to include substantive elements as well. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 225
Categorization
- XREF: This critique of formalism in law mirrors the Lex Oppia/republican-legal themes and connects to later Adorno-Horkheimer positions in Dialectic of Enlightenment. — connects to: The temporally-structured political code’s formal nature makes it compatible with opportunism — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 695; A law that has lost its content becomes indistinguishable from life; Politics freed from every ban requires thinking abandonment beyond every idea of law — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the…, 766 (+9 more)
- DEEPTHINKING: The equation of formal law, Kantian morality, and formal logic as three faces of one bourgeois formalism is dense and paradigm-shifting.
Broader Connections
- The temporally-structured political code’s formal nature makes it compatible with opportunism
#expands(0.85) — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 695 - Formalism is a central and distinctive feature of law
#expands(0.82) — Frederick Schauer, Thinking Like a Lawyer, 54 - Formalism might be seen not as embodying an embarrassingly crude understanding of communication, but as a sensible and highly pragmatic response to institutional limits of generalist judges and…
#qualifies(0.82) - Politics freed from every ban requires thinking abandonment beyond every idea of law
#complicates(0.80) — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 766 - Legal exclusion of both sides removed contentious issues from practical politics
#exemplifies(0.80) - Social order in formal democracies rests on tacit commonsense ideology more than formal law
#complicates(0.80) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 873 - A law that has lost its content becomes indistinguishable from life
#complicates(0.78) - Formalism disguises the need for judicial choice by freezing rule meaning
#expands(0.78) — HLA Hart, The Concept of Law (Clarendon Law…, 370 - Logical reasoning provides the foundation that prevents common law from becoming arbitrary fiat.
#contradicts(0.75) — Ruggero J. Aldisert, Agatha D. Aldisert, Logic for Lawyers- A Guide to Clear…, 122 - Electoral-counting compromises institutionalized moral compromises into law
#exemplifies(0.75) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 116