Plunder. When The Rule of law is Illegal

Date of Review:

12/01/2008

Published Work:

Plunder: When the Rule of Law is Illegal

Reviewer:

Rik Pinxten

Source:

Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute 2008 NS 14

Review Excerpt:

Mattei, Ugo & Laura Nader. Plunder: when
the rule of law is illegal. x, 283 pp., bibliogrs.
Oxford, Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing,
2008. £19.99 (paper)
Some scholars – and I am one of them – will
hold that the supremacy of the West is coming
to an end. Others will focus on the ways such an
economic, political, and cultural complex is
choosing to stick to the status of supremacy over
the rest of the world. Mattei and Nader clearly
belong in this category. The former author is a
scholar in international law, and the latter may
be called the ‘founding mother’ of legal
anthropology. Together they wrote a book,
which could be produced only with this double
competence and with the intellectual courage
which is clearly theirs, about the structures and
processes by which the presumably respectable
tradition of the rule of law is blatantly used to
justify, to legalize, and to perpetuate plunder
throughout the world. The book is appropriately
dedicated to the memory of Edward Said.
Mattei and Nader set out to detail how a
major ‘Western cultural artefact’, namely the
rule of law, has its origins in feudal times in
England, where it was used by a minority of
landlords to prohibit a majority in the ruling
councils from redistributing wealth. Throughout
colonial times this instrument of political ruling
was the cause of the death of millions, which
drove none other than Adam Smith to voice his
objection against its use.
Recently the rule of law was turned in a
systematic way into an instrument of plunder,
seeking to win consent ‘both in the camp of the
hegemonic power and among the victims’ (p.
33). In the bulk of the book Mattei and Nader
demonstrate how the (ab)use of the rule of law
under neoliberal regimes in the North (most of
all the United States, but also Europe) yields a
new and encompassing kind of imperialism.
Ideas are stolen from other cultural traditions:
because they do not have a status of intellectual
private property there, they can be legitimately
patented by Western firms, where they do have
such a legal status. Automatically, they then no
longer ‘belong’ to the group from whom they
originated.
Over the past two decades the very idea that
the market thus allows for the spread of ideas
and goods, and that it is beneficial for humanity
to facilitate rather than constrain market
transactions, has been installed. Even more, ‘the
idea that market forces produce the law [rather
than the other around] is now accepted’ (p. 97).
Without doubt anthropology in colonial times
legitimized plunder under the rule of law, since
a rather general belief in the superiority of the
Western worldview was rampant in the
discipline, as with laypeople.
But there is more. The ‘Washington
consensus’ currently upholds the demonization
of Islam with its one-sided decisions to wage
war on countries like Iraq by invoking a ‘war on
terror’ as a contemporary version of the rule of
law. Where institutions are absent, plunder can
move on without constraints. Where institutions
are present, they are attacked and abolished
because they are claimed to be weak, terrorist,
or inferior in the words of defenders of the rule
of law. Thus, the authors hold, the rule of law
gradually becomes illegal by legalizing the
systematic plunder of other parts of the world.
Mexico (NAFTA), Russia, the Middle East, and
other examples are carefully documented. The
very effect of these applications of the rule of
law is that the ideology of the free market thus
only allows the winners further benefits, to the
detriment of the poor.
An intriguing aspect of contemporary use of
the rule of law in the trend towards globalization
is that ‘it is the market that controls, and
determines the political process and the law’
(p. 147), instead of politicians as elected
representatives of the people controlling the
market. A direct consequence of this reversal is
that politics itself is subjugated to the market:
corporations are seen to ‘invest’ more and more
openly in particular political parties and
Book reviews 913
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 14, 890-935
© Royal Anthropological Institute 2008
individual candidates in order to get the
‘justified’ revenue from this investment. At the
level of the media and of education and culture
a ‘market-friendly’ climate becomes an
important goal, and those who question this a
priori value can now be labelled suspect. The
now fashionable ‘Alternative Dispute Resolution’
(ADR), started after the civil rights movements
of the 1960s, does exactly that: people are
persuaded by powerful groups not to stand on
their rights, but to be lenient, understanding,
willing to go for a deal, and so on. Finally, the
Patriot Act in the United States crowned this
evolution by justifying a reduction of civil rights
and installing a climate of fear and anxiety rather
than trust among citizens. Here the authors join
the warnings of politicians (such as Al Gore),
researchers on penal law and on poverty
(Wacquant), and many others. The book ends
with a few proposals to go beyond what is
called the ‘illegal rule of law’. The tremendously
rich and elaborate list for further reading offers a
supplementary tool for research for the lay
reader and the scholar.
Without doubt this is an important book. It
gives a thorough scholarly analysis of the very
notion of rule of law: its historical origin, its
political institutionalization, and its further
interpretation and implementation in the era of
globalization. The aim of the book is to establish
convincingly the link between the rule of law as
a political and ideological instrument and the
unrestrained plunder of resources and
manpower by capitalism, being the economic
system whereby a small minority in the world
aims to take the wealth of all and turn it into
benefits for members of that minority. The
examples in the book are to some extent known.
But the way they are interpreted and used as an
illustration of a now global system of pillage and
plunder is new and quite inspiring. Of course,
we know of some such scholarly work nowadays
(Wallerstein, Klein, and Mandel, to name just a
few, and of a different vintage). But a work
which demonstrates how the technical and
rather formal (and hence supposedly ‘objective’)
thinking and practice of (the rule of) law
operates is an important contribution in the
deep and truly scientific critical tradition for
which our scholarly institutes stand.
Mattei and Nader have produced a
courageous, intellectually refined, and superbly
critical book about one of the main instruments
of society-building in our culture. The book
should find a wide audience in law classes, and
in graduate courses of sociology, anthropology,
and political sciences. It deserves to be the
subject of debate on campuses and, one might
still dream, in the media.
Rik Pinxten Ghent University