Distopyalarda Hukuka Biçilen Rol Üzerine Bir Değerlendirme

Abstract

Proceeding from the premise that theoretical questions regarding law cannot be answered purely from within the law itself, this study examines the nature, functions, and boundaries of law through dystopias as a literary genre. Emerging from a deeply rooted utopian tradition, dystopia provides a fertile ground for discussing the existential boundaries and conditions of law and social life. Indeed, this study assumes that law sustains its existence between two "limit points": one negative and one positive. The negative limit point corresponds to a state-of-nature phase where social bonds dissolve, whereas the positive limit point corresponds to a stage where law becomes redundant in the state's control over the individual and society. The dystopias analyzed in this study are examined within a tripartite classification. In early dystopias written by H. G. Wells and Jack London, law is portrayed as an instrument that reproduces the capitalist mode of production and safeguards ruling-class interests. In anti-totalitarian dystopias such as We, Brave New World, and Nineteen Eighty-Four, it is concluded that a positive limit point is reached where law becomes superfluous through disciplinary apparatuses that grant the state absolute dominion over the biological and psychological integrity of the individual; it is observed that law finds a fissure to survive within social spaces deliberately left unregulated by the state; and the validity of natural law perspectives is debated within an understanding that reduces truth and justice to the will of the state. In post apocalyptic dystopian fiction or state-of-nature dystopias such as The Road, The Scarlet Plague, or Lord of the Flies, as law reaches its negative limit point, it comes to the fore through its functions of order, security, and peace, yet fails to sustain its existence without coercive enforcement power. In conclusion, it can be argued that dystopias—by laying bare the structural tensions among coercion, ideology, social life, and the legal order—offer a fruitful conceptual foundation for theoretical legal studies by accentuating the existential boundaries of law, its sociological dimension, and its role as a terrain of struggle.