LAUSR

At a time when critics of social inequalities abound and proposals on how to erase them languish among social theorists, Boaventura de Sousa Santos poses relevant questions and invites the reader to engage in that propositional language. In his book, Toward a New Legal Common Sense: Law, Globalization, and Emancipation, he captures the attention of a broad audience and, by doing so, encourages scholars to surpass the fragmented understanding of social relations in the search of emancipatory paths. Santos uses provocative and emotional language together with an impressive review of literature to put capitalism and the law at the centre of the scene. In order to build emancipatory alternatives, capitalism has to be radically questioned, law has to be reinvented to fit subaltern claims and knowledge production has to change its inner inequalities. Santos’s ideas of emancipation are grounded in an understanding of power as any social relation ruled by an unequal exchange (Santos, 2002, p. 358). He explicitly mentions material inequalities, but the core of the book seems to be immaterial inequalities, such as: ‘unequal learning and unequal representation/communication and expressive skills. Unequal opportunities and capacities to organise interests. Unequal opportunities and capacities to participate with autonomy in meaningful decision and non-decision making’ (Santos, 2002, p. 358). Santos emphasises that the task of post-modern critical theory is to promote the emergence of emancipatory arguments and topoi though a dialogical rhetoric, which, by expanding along with argumentative audiences, will eventually become knowledge-as-emancipation (Santos, 2002, p. 398). ‘Post-modern emancipatory knowledge is rhetorical’ (Santos, 1995, p. 358). In this sense, Santos points at the ‘West’ and confronts it with the task of ‘dewesternizing’ its epistemological future to enhance emancipatory practices, which he defines as the pursuing of ever more equal social relations (Santos, 2002, p. 360). In Santos’s view, the grammar of rights emerges as a privileged site to engage in dialogical rhetoric bringing about cognitive justice and pursuing an emancipatory epistemology. Law should be reinvented to fit normative claims of subaltern groups and subaltern modernity provides some of the instruments for this reinvention (Santos, 2002, p. 446). ‘Reinventing law by searching for subaltern conceptions and practices’ (Santos, 2002, p. 446) is a complex task which Santos himself has actively pursued worldwide. Thus, Santos’s book gives us occasion for reflecting on knowledge production, the possibilities for emancipation and the role of the grammar of rights in the emergence of emancipatory practices. In this brief essay, I aim to reflect on two interrelated questions:Who decides what normative claims are ‘emancipatory’ (as opposed to ‘regulatory’)? Are current conditions of academic knowledge production affecting the possibilities of knowledge-as-emancipation?