"If Ronald Dworkin were a hotel he would be the Savoy, but a Savoy that is genuinely open to all, doors always open, guests spilling into the reception rooms, talking, arguing and laughing too."
That's how one reviewer (here) described the philosopher in a review of Justice for Hedgehogs. Here's how the review opens:
The first thing to strike you about this remarkable book is its ambition. Academic scholarship these days is more like staying in a hotel than a home: full of rooms offering the prospect of a well-furnished stay but with never a suggestion that you should talk to the guests next door. There is no meeting of minds even in the grander reception spaces, given over as these invariably now are to fundraising and graduate recruitment drives (or pretences at welcoming poorer students). Whenever the likes of philosophy, politics and law meet in the lift in such a place they gaze at the floor indicator in embarrassed silence before rushing off to talk incomprehensibly to their own kind.
This is not Ronald Dworkin’s way of doing things. He would be in that elevator chatting away.
This is one of the funniest ledes I've stumbled across in a long time.
I couldn't help myself thinking of the famous hotels that could be assigned to other legal philosophers, based on intellectual style. The Paris Ritz, the Waldorf, the Plaza....
Comments