Subjectivity Transformed: The Cultural Foundation of Liberty in ModernityBy ThomasVesting, translated by NeilSolomon, London: Wiley, 2023, 288 pp., £18.99
Year: 2025
Type: book-review
Abstract: Thomas Vesting is well known to German-speaking socio-legal scholars as the author of a fourvolume study on the media of law, published between 2011 and 2015.In 2018, this work was condensed into a one-volume edition in English, titled Legal Theory and the Media of Law.This large-scale, erudite, and comprehensive analysis of the interplay between law and the media through which it is communicated offers an inspiring and refreshing interdisciplinary contribution to legal theory.Subjectivity Transformed: The Cultural Foundation of Liberty in Modernity is an English translation (splendidly handled by Neil Solomon) of Vesting's 2021 book Gentleman, Manager, Homo Digitalis: Der Wandel der Rechtssubjektivität in der Moderne.This work adds another dimension to Vesting's long-standing engagement with the history of Western law.Among the many themes of the earlier media project, Vesting focuses on subjectivity in this monograph, giving a detailed account of this key problem in both law and social theory.The book traces an evolutionary historical trajectory, similar to the one in Legal Theory and the Media of Law, which charts the progression from speech, through writing, to printing, and finally to computer networks.The three figures central to the narrative -though lost in the English title -are the gentleman, the manager, and Homo digitalis.They succeed, though do not entirely replace, one another, as 'personality ideals of modern creative man' (p. 1).This early declaration sets the argument within the modern era, which narrows the epic scope of Vesting's earlier work.With Subjectivity Transformed, we are invited to revisit the ideals that have organized knowledge production, technological innovation, and economic change in Western modernity since the late eighteenth century.This is a grand narrative, impressive in many ways, and a highly interesting contribution to socio-legal scholarship in both its social and legal capacities.Vesting raises fundamental questions about the social theory of law.How does law relate to social practice?Does formal law -typically state made, written, and frequently codified in the modern era -precede social practice, or does
Source: Journal of Law and Society
DOI: 10.1111/jols.12519
Author: MARTA BUCHOLC
Institutions: UCLouvain Saint-Louis Brussels, University of Warsaw
Language: English
Topic: Legal and Social Philosophy
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4407184296