ABSTRACT
This chapter has both a broader and a narrower focus. The narrower aspect concerns an impasse in critical legal studies around the relationship between deconstructive method and socio-historical critique. The broader is to address that impasse by considering deconstruction as an important but limited form of dialectical critique in the light of Roy Bhaskar’s recent critical realist reworking of dialectics. The aim is to identify what is important in deconstruction, but to point to an important deficit, its tendency to marginalise social and historical issues in favour of a form of ethical short-circuiting. This chapter seeks to re-affirm the importance of the social and the historical by identifying deconstruction as a form of dialectics and relocating it on a dialectical terrain. It will not answer all the questions such a relocation involves. In particular, it will not resolve the ethical questions with which deconstruction battles. However, it will insist that any discussion of the ethical grounds of a social form (such as law) can only occur once its historical imbrication has been acknowledged.
