"Cunning Passages": Comparison and Ideology in the Law and Language Story

Il saggio propone una originale interpretazione dei rapporti di simmetria tra Legge e linguaggio, sia sotto il profilo della comune struttura di rappresentazione, sia sotto il profilo della individuazione delle rispettive origini e dei rispettivi sviluppi. Inoltre si prospetta un’interessante comprensione dei rapporti strategici che sussistono tra le operazioni concettuali compiute in sede di comparazione giuridica e quelle definite in sede di traduzione linguistica. Comparazione e traduttologia sono così rivisitate in funzione degli obiettivi di governance cui concretamente possono tendere. ENGLISH: The Author's standpoint in this paper is that, in affording the subject of Law and Language, we face a mass of "local issues" and "local puzzles", but we still lack a theory to grasp with the bulk of the matter. This becomes peculiarly embarrassing in the age of development of "English-only" movements, and facing the rise of a rather new and framed field of studies like "traductology" that would, of course but do not actually, interplay with comparison especially in the field of Law. In this essay the Author tries to look around the package of some received ideas, in order to clean the blackboard before trying to build up something newer. Thus in the first section the Author copes with two prevailing theories: 1) the theory of the language as a "social glue", which is dominant and emerging from the present American political debate; 2) the theory of the "analogy" between Law and Language as spontaneously ordered complex phenomena. In the second section the Author tries to trace back these ideas in the time of the "Birth of Comparativism" in the early 19th century. In so doing i deal with: 1) the birth of Indo-European Family in Comparative Linguistics, and, 2) the birth of Legal Comparativism within the context of the German Legal Historicism, in the same span of time. Finally the Author tries to show how all these conceptions are nested details of a more general consciousness with broad political implications in terms of projects of governance. According to the Author's view, neither language studies, nor traductology can be treated as pure subject deprived of a strong political commitment: both are field where "choices for candor" are not at hand.