Zucca on Seeing Law Feelingly--Humanistic Jurisprudence, Poetic Wisdom, and the Future of Law

Lorenzo Zucca, King's College London, School of Law, has published Seeing Law Feelingly-Humanistic Jurisprudence, Poetic Wisdom, and the Future of Law. Here is the abstract.

Legal philosophy faces an existential crisis. As populism surges, social fractures deepen, and democratic institutions strain under unprecedented pressure, jurisprudence remains paralyzed by what I call the "Barbarism of Reflection"—an excessive rationalism that dissects law while becoming disconnected from its moral and imaginative foundations. Drawing on Giambattista Vico's concept of "poetic wisdom" (sapienza poetica) and Shakespeare's insight that one must "see feelingly," this article proposes Humanistic Jurisprudence as a synthetic framework that transcends the limitations of analytical, critical, and historical approaches to law. Humanistic Jurisprudence operates on three principles: (1) the primacy of creative imagination in shaping legal concepts and institutions; (2) critical reflection on the stories we tell about justice; and (3) genealogical understanding of how power structures have shaped our legal traditions. Rather than privileging analytical clarity as the foundation of legal thought, this approach recognizes that grand visions—born from imaginative engagement with human complexity—precede and inform analysis. The article argues that law's power lies not merely in its logical precision but in its capacity to articulate visions of justice that inspire collective action. Through synthesis of philosophical, literary, and legal historical sources, I demonstrate how jurisprudence can reclaim its poetic dimension without sacrificing intellectual rigor. This transformation is not merely academic: it offers practical frameworks for addressing climate crisis, technological disruption, and the erosion of democratic values—challenges that resist purely analytical solutions. The stakes are clear: either law recovers its imaginative power to shape collective futures, or it risks irrelevance in an age where narrative and myth increasingly determine political reality. Humanistic Jurisprudence provides the theoretical foundation for this recovery, offering legal philosophy a path beyond conceptual puzzles toward engagement with the profound moral and existential questions of our time.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Gould on Democracy and the Vernacular in Vico's Plebian Philology @rrgould

Rebecca Gould, University of Birmingham; Harvard University, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, is publishing Democracy and the Vernacular Imagination in Vico's Plebian Philology in History of Humanities (Forthcoming). Here is the abstract.

This essay examines Giambattista Vico’s philology as a contribution to democratic legitimacy. I outline three steps in Vico’s account of the historical and political development of philological knowledge. First, his merger of philosophy and philology, and the effects of that merge on the relative claims of reason and authority. Second, his use of antiquarian knowledge to supersede historicist accounts of change in time and to position the plebian social class as the true arbiters of language. Third, his understanding of philological knowledge as an instrument of political change, and a foundational element in the establishment of democracy. By treating the philological imagination as a tool for bringing about political change, Vico’s plebian philology is radically democratic, and a crucial instrument in the struggle against the elite, from antiquity to the present.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Sherwin on Vico's Providence Today @RKSherwin

Richard K. Sherwin, New York Law School, has published Vico's Providence Today. Here is the abstract.

According to Vico, it is piety, the way divine providence breaks into fractured time, that teaches the ideal patterns of history. Today, we stand in need of a post-secular, metaphysical framework for this Vichian insight in order to counter the nihilist impulse that has swept through late modernity. Vico had already identified nihilism as the dark secret of Cartesianism. Indeed, it is the historical vicissitudes of that dark secret for which he presciently sought to prepare us. Piety finds its roots in something beyond the subject, beyond the will. It is that disruptive, ineffable force that resists the impulse toward totality (the will to power) in whatever historic form it may take: from the totalizing mechanics of Hobbes’ Leviathan state to the totalizing algorithmic programming that covertly constructs and drives today’s digital social media and the so-called ‘Internet of Experience.’

Download the article from SSRN at the link.