WilliamW. Fisher III ticular? Reviewed beloware eight candidates. Some are familiar, others less so. With respect to each of the eight possible purposes, the essay asks: w'hich if any of the four ways in which legal historians might harness intellectual history is promising? (1) Explain why events transpired as they did - and why they did not come out differently. Most historians, when asked why they do what they do, will at least include this objective in their answers. It is commonly thought that to understand an event entails identifying its causes and its effects.Legal historians are typical in this regard. Tracing chains of causation, locating the origins and impacts of legal rules and ideas, is central to the aspirations of almost all. An important variant of this objective is the explanation of why the victims of legal developments failed to resist (or to resist effectively). Apersistent puzzle for legal historians studying ostensibly democratic societies such as the United States is why legal rules that benefited a minority and disadvantaged a majority of the population were adopted and obeyed. Roughly speaking, the farther left on the contemporary political spectruman historian is located, the more pressing and difficult this explanatory challenge will seemto her. Of the four variants of intellectual/legal history. Structuralism is the least helpful in advancing this end. Foucault, the most influential of the Structuralist intellectual historians, was altogether uninterested in questions of this sort. Efforts to trace chains of causation he regarded as hopelessly naive. In his own intellectual histories (which he called “archeologies”), he scorned “the staple of conventional history of ideas: continuities, traditions, influences, causes, comparisons, typologies, and so on. He is interested, he tells us, only in the ‘ruptures,’ ‘discontinuities,’ and ‘disjunctions’ in the history of consciousness, that is to say, in the differences between the various epochs in the history of consciousness, rather than the similarities.The legal historians who have been influenced by Foucault and his predecessors have been less adamant in eschewing causal explanations, but they too have been concerned primarily with mapping the structures of legal consciousness in discrete periods, rather than in determining why one system of ideas gave way to another. In the lead essay of the genre, for example, Duncan Kennedy insisted: “what I have to say is descriptive, and descriptive only of thought. It means ignoring the question of what brings a legal consciousness into being, what causes it to change, and what effect it has on the actions of those who live it.”^5 When Kennedy and the legal historians who have followed him have permitted themselves to speculate See, c.g., Social Science Research Council, Committee on Historiography, Bulletin 64, in The Social Scctnces in Historical Study (New York, 1954) (“The truly scientific function begins where the descriptive function stops. The scientific function involves not only identifying and describing temporal sequences; it also involves explaining them.”), quoted in Megill, supra n. 23, 632. For many additional examples of this orientation, see Megill, supra n. 23, 632-34. See White, supra n. 12, 27. ”Blackstone’s Commentaries,” supra n. 39, 220. 52
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