Deep Inside the Bramble Bush - Complex Orders and Humanities

Pier Giuseppe Monateri, University of Turin

Abstract

This article is an investigation on Humanities, an attempt to justify their privileged role in understanding cultural orders, including Law. The underlying purpose is to cast a new light on the specific issue of interdisciplinary approach and especially on its proper expressions of Law and Humanities, Law and Politics, Law and Literature, Law and Philosophy.

At this aim Hayek's theory of Spontaneous Complex Orders - born to challenge State intervention in the market domain - is used to purport the independence of Humanities against actual Scientism, insofar as it could replace Human Studies standards with standards derived from the so called 'Hard Sciences'. Moving from Hayek's thought on the ideological value of scientistic methods and assumptions, this paper defines the structural complexity of Human science as the better paradigm fitted to the radical comprehension of Law, as the emerging shape of the darker side of social reality, and of Politics, as the inner framework that legitimates a specific 'historical existence'.