In thk spirit of weber 255 and security in business transactions. In practiceflexibility - a flexibility that put you in the position of an entrepreneur if you desired it, that gave you the legal regime you wanted, the adjudicators you wanted, that allowed you to avoid the state legal order when you wanted to, but to use its coercive might when you needed it - these, were the pre-eminent virtues of the English legal system, albeit, that this flexibility was often facilitated by and mediated through the Kafkaesque world of the law.'^^ In other words, the dominant tradition tends to conflate predictability and certainty with the state legal order. In fact, much certainty and predictability was secured socially and culturally. The state law order did not exist in isolation for other regulatory systems - social, cultural, and indigenous. To break with the assumption that law and state have a monopoly over ordering and organisation also entails a rejection of the notion that social interaction can be almost exclusively encapsulated in terms of purely economic considerations such as class interests. Here, for example, one thinks of the collaborative, the sacrificial, and the reciprocities of everyday life. In short, that social relations involve more than economic exchange or legal contract.The subtle links between the economy and politics are more likely to be grasped if power is conceived in non-economic as well as economic terms. “If modern societies are, in some ways, similar, modernising routes have differed greatly.Soto recognise is to reinstate the indigenous, vernacular, cultural and political values of societies as well as their cultural and political individuality. Recent work on the Third World and within anthropology repudiating modernisation and world systems theory is, in this respect, a persuasive exemplar. So, too, is that work emanating fromwithin social history and the law and society and critical legal studies movements, which stresses the plurality of ordering and organisation; and the indeterminacy of legal doctrine.In fact, the 168 See the references collected in note 30 above. See, also, Corrigan and Sayer, op. cit., pp. 22-4, 41-3. Sec, M. Ignatieff, “State, Civil Society and Total Institution; A Critique of Recent Histories of Punishment”, in D. Sugarman (ed.. Legality, Ideology and the State op. cit., pp. 183-211., especially, pp. 201-6. Johnson, op. cit., p. 51. '*** See, for example, Worsley, op cit., passim; Shanin, op. cit.,; p. Fitzpatrick, “Law, Plurality and Under-development”, in D. Sugarman, (ed.), op. cit., pp. 159-182. Sec, for example, E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century”, Past and Present, No. 50, 1971, pp. 76-109; J. Brewer and J. Styles, (eds.). An Ungovernable People, (London: Hutchinson, 1980); Ignatieff, “State, Civil Society and Total Institution”, op. cit., passim; M. Galanter, “Justice in Many Rooms”, Journal of Legal Pluralism, 1, 1981, pp. 1-48; J. Griffiths, Is Law Important?”, NewYork University LawReview, 54, 1979, pp. 339-74; F. M. L. Thompson, “Social Control in Victorian Britain”, Economic History Review, 34, 1931, pp. 189-208; Hartog, op cit., passim; S. Macaulay, “Non-contractual Relations in Business”, American Law Review, 28, pp. 55-70; “Elegant Models, Empirical Pictures, and the Complexities of Contract”, Law and Society Review, 11. 1977, pp. 507^2 and “An Empirical View of Conlb6 169
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