Legal rhetoric as a technology to construct the social community

Li Sheng

Chapter 2 in Renmin Chinese Law Review, 2023, pp 33-57 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Law is not a pure objective material. The governance of law in the society requires the consensus by the community, which can be understood as an imaginary force. The law gains the strength from the imagination of the community, and acts on the construction of the community through producing the imagination of the community. There are some technologies of community construction in the legal practice. Legal rhetoric creates the imaginary consensus on the law in the society, becoming a technology to construct the social community. Legal rhetoric guides the imagination of the common life experience by the narratives, thereby constructing the community through the common experience shared by history and reality. Legal rhetoric guides the imagination of the common values by the argumentation, so that the conflict values in the diverse society reach a certain degree of consensus, to construct the community through the identification of common values. As a construction technology of social community, legal rhetoric produces the more ambiguous rather than absolute consensus, which achieves the incompletely theorized agreements to respond to the divergence of value judgement in the modern society, and is more conductive to the construction of community.

Keywords: Asian Studies; Law - Academic (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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