Homo Jurididcus

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Review Articles / Historical Materialism 17 (2009) 237–299

Homo Juridicus: On the Anthropological Function of the Law, Alain Supiot, London: Verso, 2007
Abstract In Homo Juridicus, Alain Supiot argues that law has an ‘anthropological’ function – constituting people as rational beings by linking together their biological and symbolic dimensions. The law also serves a ‘dogmaticfunction’, embodying Western values and serving as a bar to totalitarian scientism and tempering the excesses of technology in the workplace. However, the anthropological function of the law has been undermined by the advance of science and economics and widespread privatisation, contractualisation and deregulation. This article contests Supiot’s claims, especially as regards Marxism, counterposing hisposition to that of Bolshevik legal theorist Evgeny Pashukanis. Pashukanis’s insights into the relationship between law and capitalism are used to re-frame Supiot’s argument and to undermine his contention that globalisation is inimical to law. Pashukanis is also invoked to contest the claims that the anthropological function of the law is the only alternative to totalitarianism and that law serves to‘humanise’ technology. Keywords Law, Pashukanis, jurisprudence, Alain Supiot

Homo Juridicus is not an easy work to pin down, although primarily a work of legal theory, it draws on anthropology, sociology, social theory and philosophy. This eclecticism also makes the book somewhat difficult to review, as it veers from defence of the law, to polemic against ‘scientism’, to concrete analysis ofcontemporary French labour-law. However, it is possible to trace a consistent argument throughout this work, one that Marxists would do well to address. Supiot begins by outlining his particular philosophical vision. ‘Human beings’, he writes, ‘are metaphysical animals’ who inhabit ‘not only a universe of things but also a universe of signs’ (p. vii). A sign is anything in which human beings haveinvested meaning, including material products and even other humans. We apprehend these meanings through our senses and it is these meanings that give ‘sense’ to life. In order to gain access to these meanings, we need language, which is the ‘primary resource of the dogmatic beliefs necessary for the constitution of the subject’ (p. viii). The only way to gain the ‘autonomy’ that comes from language(the ability to think and express ourselves freely) is to submit to the radical heteronomy of the limits that give words meaning. Before we can be free beings, able to say ‘I’, we are already bound by words, which tie us to other people. Supiot argues that here the bonds of law and speech come together and endow our lives with meaning; this is the ‘anthropological function’ of the law: It is bytransforming each of us into a homo juridicus that, in the West, the biological and symbolic dimensions that make up our being have been linked together. The law connects our infinite mental universe with our finite physical existence and in so doing fulfils the anthropological function of instituting us as rational beings. (p. ix.)

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2009

DOI: 10.1163/156920609X436234Review Articles / Historical Materialism 17 (2009) 237–299

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For Supiot, law is based on dogma (indemonstrable propositions) and serves a dogmatic function itself, insofar as it posits human beings as rational and autonomous. Supiot does not think that ‘dogma’ is necessarily negative; instead, it is a resource that allows human beings assign meaning to their lives (p. 186). Indeed, forSupiot, dogma serves the role of ‘closing the gates’ to lunacy (p. xvii). Supiot argues that ‘our’ ‘Western’ legal conception of the human being ‘as an abstract universal, born free, endowed with reason, and equal among equals’ is the result of a drawnout historical process stretching from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (p. 11). The central moment here is when God disappears as a...