Beyond the Public/Private Division: Law, Power and the Family

Over the past ten years, the intellectual machinery which radical social analysts have used to produce political intelligibility has begun to fall apart. Faced with the inadequacies of most social theory to cope with the problems of contemporary social reality, two strategies of repair have been noteworthy. The first is to shift the issue of power to the forefront of investigation. Power is no longer seen as the automatic by-product of economic exploitation or social stratification; it is itself the focus of analysis and the stake in political contestation. The second is to use 'history' rather than 'grand theory' as a way of taking apart the self-evidence of the present. The past is used to reveal the socially constructed nature of the present, implying that it can be transformed by conscious political strategy. Yet studies carried out under these auspices find it difficult to abandon the comfort provided by old forms of explanation. Historical investigation often merely projects conventional radical wisdom back onto the past. Power often appears in the repetitive guise of denial, control and repression. The old theories reappear as solutions to their own failure.