In thf spirit of weber 219 works, although insightful and suggestive, are locked into notions of evolution and progress — as well as conceptions of modernity — which are more difficult to believe in the light of what has happened to the world since they wrote. “Edward Shils, commenting on what he calls ‘the generously stimulating tyranny of our classics’, has aptly said that one of our great difficulties is that we cannot imagine anything beyond variations on the theme set by the great figures of nineteenth and twentieth century sociology. The fact that the conception of post-industrial society is an amalgamof what Saint-Simon, Comte, de Tocqueville and Weber furnished to our imagination is evidence that we are confined to an ambiguously defined circle which is more impenetrable that it ought to be”.^ This essay is a conscious attempt to transcend that “ambiguously defined circle”. It is part of a wider revisionist movement which seeks to challenge the conventional categories and assumptions used to denote modernity and the emergence of industrial capitalist society.^ The most persistent features of modern law and society becomes an empirical question rather than a requirement t:)f theorv. The new revisionism asserts that there is no teleological pattern to history and there are no general laws in sociology, but only general concepts. Thus, it challenges long-standing assumptions about the unitary character of social (and legal) systems.*^ How, then, does this essay contribute to debates about the foundations of modernity? Firstly, it seeks to problematise those simple duality’s that are a staple of history and sociology. In particular, it demonstrates that the English path to modernity has entailed a complex juxtaposition of the “rational” and “irrational” -the “pre-modern” and “modern” - rather than simple stark discontinuities conjured within a linear historical periodisation. Change there undoubtedly was; but the features of that change require rigorous and careful attention. 7 Ibid. ** See, for example, D.V. Sabean, Power in the Blood (Oxford: Blaekwell: 1984). C. Sabel. Work and Politics, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982); M. Sonenscher, “Journeymen, the Courts and the French Trades 1781-1791”, Past and Present No. 114, 1987, pp. 77-109; K. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971); C. Ginzburg, “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method”, History Workshop Journal, No. 9, 1980. pp. 5-36; W. Prest, “Why the History of the Professions Is Not Written” in G. Rubin and D. Sugarman (eds.). Law. Economy and Society. 1750-1911: Essays in the History of English Law (Abingdon: Professional Books, 1984), pp. 300-320; P. Worsley, The Three Worlds; Culture anef World Development, (London; Weidenfcld and Nicolson, 1984), pp. 296-348. See Michael Mann’s outstanding history of power. The Sources of Social Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) vol. 1. See also, J. Hall, Powers and Liberties: the Causes and Consequences of the Rise of the West, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985); M. Jay, Marxismand Totality, (Oxford: Polity Press, 1984); and N. Abercrombie, S. Hill and B. S. Turner, Sovereign Individuals of Capitalism (London: Allen and Unwin, 1986). For a recent study emphasising that law is not a unity, see J. Brophy and C. Smart (eds.). Women in Law: Explorations in Law, Family and Sexuality(London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1985).
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