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đŸȘ” The Threshold

Intellectual honesty may turn Tushnet's iconoclasm against fashionable explanatory shibboleths

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tagsja-picks, xref, connection_points, primary_study, singleton, category/connection-points
aliases@bobbitt_reflections_1994, loc. 667

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Intellectual honesty may turn Tushnet’s iconoclasm against fashionable explanatory shibboleths

Evidence

Tushnet is one of the most accomplished constitutional scholars of our period. He combines a commitment to utter honesty with a voracious intellect and an indefatigable pen. Surely, if there is anyone capable of overcoming the customary assumptions of explanation that are so much a part of our contemporary intellectual life, it is he. When he comes to believe that the unquestioned aspects of our lives are not the petty stylistics of class, but are the profound tyrannies of unreflectively ascribing psychological dynamics to other people, I should not be surprised if his iconoclasm turns to attack the very shibboleth that currently casts a shadow on his work. — Philip Chase Bobbitt, Reflections Inspired by My Critics, 667

Categorization

  • XREF: The pattern of a gifted scholar’s honesty eventually undermining the very assumptions their own method relies on — echoes perennial debates about unmasking and postmodern critique collapsing under their own logic. — connects to: Tushnet is one of the most accomplished constitutional scholars of our period. He combines a commitment to utter honesty with a voracious intellect and an indefatigable pen. Surely, if there is anyone capable of overcoming the customary assumptions of explanation that are so much a part of our contemporary intellectual life, it is he. When he comes to believe that the unquestioned aspects of our lives are not the petty stylistics of class, but are the profound tyrannies of unreflectively ascribing psychological dynamics to other people, I should not be surprised if his iconoclasm turns to attack the very shibboleth that currently casts a shadow on his work.; This is Tushnet’s move in the debate about the counter-majoritarian objection to judicial review. I have given an argument that shows that what we thought were issues crucial to legitimacy were not so; and that the objection itself, insofar as it implicates legitimacy, can, I think, be decisively answered. My answer does not require one to count up, as it were, the many reasons for and against judicial review. Instead, it asks that we stick to the actual question being asked. Like Albert, Mark Tushnet is distressed by this and wants to re-orient the question so that it fits the calculations that make the problem so bedeviling in the first place. This is, I believe, the crucial move of the map of explanations. It changes ground, and then claims for itself the primacy of the original discussion. In such maps, one invariably encounters such phrases as, ‘What we’re really talking about here is 
’ or ‘What the writer was really doing was
,’ or ‘What really motivated him was 
’ And that is why it is so mortifying when it turns out that the casual causalist has got the facts wrong. I think, instead, that they are vulnerable to an irremediable flaw. If, as is asserted, the causalist can discern, beneath the surface, an otherwise hidden mechanics, how can we know that he, too, is not motivated by something as obscure to himself as he believes the true motives of others are to them? When, exactly, is Freud’s cigar not just a cigar?; Intellectuals oscillate between neutral discoverer and credentialed priest — James W. Carey, Communication as Culture- Essays on
, 408 (+3 more)

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