LtlGAL HISTORY ANl> INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 53 on the latter question, their explanations have usually focused on arguments internal to the legal profession (e.g., on howefforts by one generation of legal theorists to simplify and purify a doctrinal system made its weaknesses more evident to the next generation). To the large majority of other legal historians, explanations of that sort have seemed at best radically incomplete. In sum, for assistance in explanatory projects, legal historians should probably not look first to Structuralism. Contextualism, by contrast, has great potential for suggesting or refining causal explanations. Central to contextualist Inquiries is showing how concepts were developed in some discursive communities and then transmitted to others. As we have seen, legal historians have employed investigations of these sorts to trace the roots of legal doctrines and ideas — to explain, for example, why international legal theory between the world wars or the criminal law of slavery in the American South took the shape they did.*^^ The contextualist approach also holds great promise in explaining why the lower classes in the United States were unable to prevent the promulgation and enforcement of legal rules that hurt them. A fine illustration of the power of the method is provided by William Forbath’s recent book on the history of labor law.^^^ The central puzzle in American labor history is why American workers, unlike their European counterparts, failed to forman effective classbased political movement capable of forcing the state tt^ promote or protect their economic interests. Most labor historians have sought answers to that question in a combination of two circumstances; (i) the ability of American capitalists to mobilize force (in the forms, for example, of strikebreakers and labor injunctions) to discourage collective action by workers and (ii) social and ideological conditions - e.g., ethnic and racial divisions, the relative affluence of American workers, the availability (or mirage) of social mobility, and the ethos of individualism- that have inhibited class consciousness among workers.‘^*^ Forbath does not contend that these factors were unimportant; indeed, he buttresses the first of the theories by showing m great detail how judgemade law strengthened the hands of capitalists. But he argues that they were insufficient. A persuasive explanation must account for a dramatic shift during the two decades surrounding the turn of the century in American workers’ ideals and self-images - from a statist and radical t:)utlook grounded in the worldviewof classical republicanismto a liberal, laissez-faire outlook centered on the principle that the “best thing the State can do for Labor is to leave See text aeeompanying notes 54-57, supra. William E. L'orbath, Laiv and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1991), 7, 131. See, for example, Selig Perlman, A Theory of the Labor Movement (New York: Macmillan, 1928); David Brodv, ed.. The American Labor Movement (New York: Harper & Row, 1971); David Montgomer\’, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925 (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987).
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