Modern law’s abstract individual ideal enables its systematic social exclusions

Evidence

Law, with its insistence on abstract individuals who exist outside history, secures the dividing line between the modern and the pre-modern. In modernity, individuals cannot have loyalties to anyone but the state. In Balibar’s words, we ‘administer the universal by subjecting individuals to it (the school, judiciary, public health and other systems),’ a process that ‘has gone hand in hand with a vast system of social exclusions that appear as the counterpoint of the normalization and socialization of anthropological differences.’ — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 404

Categorization

• DEFINE: Spells out the paradox at the heart of liberal legal universalism: abstracting individuals out of history is what permits exclusionary administration of them.
• XREF: connects to: Platonic and Aristotelian universals masked Athens’ social exclusions — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 43; Legal equality before the law requires negating actual individuality — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 793; Formal legal equality leaves substantive social inequality untouched — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 959