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Many studies on legal consciousness suggest that the poor and working class are fundamentally excluded or disadvantaged, having a different legal consciousness from others that is “against the law” or cynical and dismissive about the law. My study is the first to examine polyvocality and change in legal consciousness among the poor. The women in my study are disadvantaged, to be sure, and face barriers to learning and mastering the law. But the interviews conducted for this study revealed that a remarkable shift in legal consciousness could take place as a result of the interface of perceptions, experience, and interaction with legal services, courts, and other members of the community. In this chapter, I develop a theoretical framework of legal entitlement in order to provide a more nuanced understanding of the variations and changes in legal consciousness among low-income mothers as well as how these differences impact the ways in which marginalized group members come to develop and exercise legal consciousness and also to mobilize the law.

People subjectively engage in the production and reproduction of what constitutes “feeling normal.” Objective standards of normalcy for the able-bodied are created and maintained by institutions (e.g., medicine, the state, business, the mass media, and family), and these standards are learned by individuals who socialize the next generation in a continuous cycle. Having a disability does not exempt a person from standards and values of “able-bodied normalcy,” nor does it prevent her/him from reproducing these standards for future generations. Thus, it is possible, if not probable, that persons with disabilities live in and reproduce the able-bodied lifeworld, sustaining, what is for the person with a physical disability, an unattainable standard of normalcy. Approximating and ultimately achieving “normalcy” in this situation or at least the presentation of “normalcy” (Goffman, 1959, 1963) may occupy a sizeable portion of everyday life. More importantly here, “feeling normal” emerges when the social constructions of reality allows the person with a physical disability to be part of a generation and everyday life. There is, in other words, a “frame” for defining normality, and physical disability is a key to changing this frame (Goffman, 1974).

To elucidate issues involved in the problem of scale, in particular the relations, analytical and dialectical, among first-person experiences of theorist and theorist’s object-complex of individual actor, group, society, motives and causes, intended and unintended effects, and so forth, as these experiences are manifest in an aesthetics of the judicial moment of perception, and enunciated as first-person accounts directly or indirectly, of third-person accounts, sometimes via explicit but usually via virtual or even vicarious second-person accounting practices.

Discussion begins with some classical formulations by neo-Kantian theorists (Simmel, Durkheim, Weber) regarding relations of “individual and society.” Brief citations of various twentieth century responses to the problem of scale follow. Attention then becomes more intensively focused on the basic problem of first-person experience and accounts with respect to the problem of scale, using Coleman’s “foundations” work as guidepost for navigating issues of effects of cognition, consciousness, and action in still mostly obscure processes of aggregation. This leads to explication of the thesis of “impossible individuality,” in present-day theoretical contexts and in the context of post-Kantian romanticism, with special attention to Hölderlin and the feeling/knowing dialectic, Benjamin’s treatment of temporality with respect to metrics of history, and the question what it means to “theorize with intent.”

The discussion ends with some tentative resolutions and several lacunae and aporia which are integral to the current face of the problem of scale (i.e., processes of aggregation, etc.).

The discussion builds upon the work of many others, with first-person illustrations.

The appearance of the present chapter six years after the publication of Marx's Capital and more than a year after its translation into Russian might seem somewhat untimely, if not entirely superfluous. Who in our country has not read Marx's works, or at least heard of him; who does not know that besides interesting and instructive facts, his work contains new and important socio-political truths? No doubt many have read it and heard of it, but I permit myself to doubt, and not only in an a priori fashion, but on the basis of extensive observation, whether many have gained from a reading of the book a clear and precise understanding of the topics which are treated therein. Are there many who have managed to distinguish in it what is significant from what is of small importance, who have noticed what constituted the core elements or the framework of the whole theoretical edifice as opposed to the detail, which serves only to decorate it, who have been properly aware, what Marx introduced that was new into the consciousness of his contemporaries, and what, on the contrary, did not belong to him, but to his predecessors? We repeat that from frequent observations we have become convinced of the contrary. With some very few exceptions, we have so far not managed to come across people who have understood the significance of Marx's researches in their entirety. Some – and these constitute the majority – are barred on the way to an elucidation of the essence of the matter by Marx's doctrine of the forms of value; others – by the difficult, and, if the truth be told, somewhat scholastic language in which a considerable part of the book is written; and others again are put off by the unaccustomed complexity of the subject and the ponderous argumentation encased in the impenetrable armor of Hegelian contradictions. And not only in Russia, but abroad as well Marx has fared no better. One only has to read reviews by some Baumert, Siebel or the reviewer in Bruno–Hildebrand's Jahrbücher, R. (presumably Rössler) to see at once that all these gentlemen possess one important advantage over the majority of Russian readers in that they not only could not, but also would not understand Marx's investigations. Thus, the above reviewer puts to Marx, among others, the following question: “we would like it if someone were finally to explain to us why the food which finds its way into the stomach of a worker serves as the source of the formation of surplus value, whereas food eaten by a horse or an ox lacks the same significance.” If such a “someone” were really to be found, in which the author of the review expresses serious doubt, then he would probably explain the matter in the following way: that economists and sociologists, to whose number Marx belongs, had to date the weakness to think that the chief object of their investigations was human society, and not the society of domestic animals, horned or otherwise, and therefore they are concerned with that surplus value which is produced by human beings. If, like Darwin, they studied natural science, they would probably have found something like surplus value among various other animals, for example, among different species of ant or bee. Generally speaking, not counting Lange's book on the worker question, and the reviews of some people directly involved with the practical consequences of Marx's ideas, the foreign press presents almost not a single line which would evince in its author the desire and the ability to understand the general significance of Marx's work. These deficiencies, especially the second one, are characteristic of even those writers, like Schäffle, who are quite favorably disposed towards Marx and are aware of his scientific achievements.