EPISTEMOLOGY AND OPPRESSION

RETURNING, and returning for the purposes of seeing a beginninganew: I take that as my frame for this article and its engagement withImages of Law. The occasion for the return, the counting of years, would be empty of meaning were the possibility of ideas for a forward jour-neying not there. I suppose too that there could be little ground for return-ing other than the coercion of duty or interests, had, in between, it been concluded that the whole thing was a mistake from the beginning, the whole thing being politically motivated critique of law. There are and should be doubts. There are questions of the politics of critical legal theory and more specifically of the relation between politics and epistemology. In my view, however, the leitmotif of Images, the idea that it is a legitimate aim of legal theory to describe and subvert an ideology inhering in legal institutions, practices and thought which presents the possibility of freedom as an illusion, is more than ever defensible. The conviction of chapter 5, ‘Epistemology and Oppression’, is that a particular epistemology is necessary for effective, emancipatory political action. What raises the necessity is the belief that legal discourse, broadl