No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Extract
A recent book by Anthony S. Mathews bears the sort of impressive title which will no doubt attract a much wider readership than the limited audience of legal and constitutional law specialists which the author in his preface appoints for the work. Law, Order and Liberty in South Africa (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972) will excite the interest of many people both in and outside South Africa who have come to associate law and order in that country not with liberty and freedom but with the very processes and mechanisms of its denial. The reader's hope will be for insight into how law and order in South Africa—up to now an implement of repression and an aid to the securing of privilege for a racial minority—might be employed for the reversal of present conditions. Those less optimistic would be content with an analysis of the place and role of law in a society characterized by racial discrimination. The expectations of most readers will remain unfulfilled.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © African Studies Association 1974
References
1 Mathews’ own philosophy of history is evidently that history is based on objective facts which are supposedly the same for everyone irrespective of social and class situation. This is a thoroughly conservative standpoint which misconceives history altogether. As the eminent historian E.H. Carr observes, “It used to be said that facts speak for themselves. This is, of course, untrue. The facts speak only when the historian calls on them: it is he who decides which facts to give the floor, and in what order or context.“ [see E. H. Carr What is History? (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), p. 9.]
2 Unger, R.M., “The Place of Law in ‘Modern Society',” (Harvard Law School Library, n.p.n.d.).Google Scholar
3 Blumer, Herbert, “Individualization and Race Relations” in Guy, Hunter (ed.) Individualization and Race Relations (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 238.Google Scholar