Wittgenstein and Justice as Method

Abstract

ittgenstein and Justice (W&J) changed the trajectory of my scholarship. I initially came across W&J while working on an empirical dissertation on legal interest groups and how the perception of their relationships with key actors altered their advocacy strategies. I could not determine whether this change was a result of those key actors’ “power” or “influence.” The interest groups literature conflates the two concepts. Influence is power, especially in Robert Dahl’s understanding of it, i.e., getting others to do things that they would not do otherwise. This cannot be right. If “influence” is just “power” why the need for two words? I did what I was trained to do—read more of the literature. As I later came to understand, the literature itself was the source of my confusion. Part of the reason for this is because of something that Colin Bird calls “scholasticism”: the tendency to privilege certain thinkers and beliefs. Bird captures the problem well: “we stand as much in the shadow as on the shoulders of these giants; the dazzling light they cast in some directions may artificially darken other areas and lend premature credence to assumptions that deserve closer scrutiny.” Dahl, Bachrach and Baratz, Lukes, and Foucault are titans in the power literature, but their understanding of power did nothing to address my concerns. Their ideas actually made the problem