In the spirit of weber 259 some of its guises, some long-standing philosophical ideas have been packaged as a novel and profoundly anti-empirical/historical solvent. Nonetheless, a growing body of historical and anthropological work testifies that the methodologies generated by the critique of reflective theories of knowledge and a greater sensitivity to the work and importance of language is one of the most important and refreshing areas within which the traditional stories of how we got from “there” to “here” and the meaning of modernity are being re-written. My conclusion, then, is that it is time to jettison the dichotomies between pre-modern/modern, irrational/rational, pre-scientific/scientific, change/continuity, elite/popular, high/lowat least as they have been traditionally understood. For these sharp dualism’s obscure the union between irrational/rational, pre-modern/modern, elite/popular, high/low as well as the role and functions of irrationality in law, state and society. This represents an important step towards breaking with the evolutionary functionalism of much social theory and history which tends to assume that the modernity required one or more of the following: a) Increasing rationality, exemplified in the legal realm above all by absolute private property and freedomof contract. b) The ascendancy of the middle class and its values. c) The assumption of increasing working-class radicalism and divergence’s between elite and popular culture. d) The elimination of peasantry; the victory of town over countryside. e) The growth of state intervention (especially in the area of welfare) which a significant proportion of the working-classes welcomed. f) That modernity required new institutions of control such as prisons and police. And when historians and theorists find that the facts do not fit their model, they have elaborated major debates concerning, for example, the failure of the middle classes or working-classes to fulfil their revolutionary paths - and they have had to invent explanations such as the feudal character of England, the tenacity of the landed or the existence of a labour aristocracy that sold out its birthright - without challenging the underlying assumption that there was or should have been one universal road to modernity. Weber’s discussion of England is of special interest precisely because it is a unique instance of Weber conceding in rich and suggestive vein, the importance and roles of irrationality in modern western society. Indeed, it can be interpreted as arguing against his own thesis - not only the causal importance of rational law; but also as disproving or deconstructing his association of modernity with rationality in any simple sense. Does this mean that we should treat everywhere as a deviant England: that everywhere is “peculiar”; and that parallel trends as between nations are illu-
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