The Enchantment of Knowledge and its Apotheosis: Gustave Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet

Abstract

Chapter 1 offers a metaphorical reading of Gustave Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet to illustrate how the process of differentiation of knowledge culminated in the positivist thought of the nineteenth century. It suggests that legal practitioners should develop narrative intelligence in order to understand in which ways the law follows out of the narrative of the facts, ex fabula ius oritur, and what it is that they do when in practice they construct legal narratives.The chapter offers a blueprint for the whole book in that it lays bare the very real epistemological questions that contemporary legal theory (doctrinal and interdisciplinary) and legal practice have to confront: the construction of, and/or the contempt for facts, and linguistic perversions of the language of concepts.