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tions) and held that the common law doctrines of precedent and stare decisis were simply extensions of a Marxian analysis of law. A group of philosophers and sociologists deriving from the Frankfurt School (University of Frankfurt 1923 +) extended this thinking into epistemology via the new sub-discipline of the sociology of knowledge.

• The Resurrection of Relativism. It is important to get the right opposites. The opposite of relative is absolute (not objective). The opposite of subjective is objective (not absolute). Something can be relative and objective (e.g. space) and something can be absolute and subjective (e.g. my sensation of pain). Moral (or ethical) relativism is the view that whether something is right or wrong, good or bad, is always relative to a society or culture. Long thought discredited by Plato over two millennia ago, it underpins the postmodern political doctrine of multiculturalism which, originating in Canada (where it replaced Anglo-French bi-culturalism, in deference to other significant ethnic minorities, notably Ukrainians) and South Africa (where it was an intellectual underpinning of apartheid) in the 1960s, attempts were made in the 1970s (with partial success) to extend this doctrine to the UK, France, Germany, and Australia, and (with more limited success) to USA. Postmodernists generally reject the nineteenth century doctrine of liberal pluralism as developed notably by John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), and saw it as being displaced by multiculturalism. Cultural moral relativism says that whether something is right or wrong, good or bad, is always relative to the standards of a particular culture. As a description of when something is regarded as right etc. this is (fairly) uncontentious. But the relativist holds that this is constitutive of rightness etc. There is no right or wrong, good or bad, beyond conformity or disconformities with the standards of a particular culture. So (it is argued) is wrong for one culture (say, a majority culture in a culturally mixed society) to impose its standards on the members of another culture. But, as Plato pointed out, this is itself a moral judgement which has been generalised transculturally. And consider the case, within a culture, of the moral crusader, who wants to reform the standards of his or her own culture (e.g. as in 18th century England, to persuade people that slavery is wrong). Ex hypothesis it is the reformer who is morally wrong – always and everywhere!

• The linguistic legacy of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). He drew a sharp distinction between the language in the mouth of the individual speaker and the common tongue. That each of us is using any word in precisely the same sense as every one of our fellow speakers is a constantly tested but never provable hypothesis. Suppose a world in which all and only cubes are red, and the language has one word for such ‘rubes’. Then tonight a foreigner brings in a red sphere (they have never seen a sphere before). Half say it is a rube. Half say it can’t be – both say, “but look at it – can’t you see?” Did they mean something different by ‘rube’ all along? This can be asked regarding every word in every language. For some this leads to scepticism regarding all meaning. This is reflected in the postmodernist theory of deconstructionism; that the only worthwhile way of considering a text is as a social object (whatever that means!)

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