The Historical Argument in American Legal Culture 201 hold immanent norms of freedom that could, that would with fighting human agents at their side, be gradually realized with unfolding time — that in the words of the Langston Hughes poem, “America, which never was, will be.” The reformer’s most effective ideological weapon has always been the metaphor of America’s unfulfilled promise. Exploding this myth, one might well think, is not the most helpful advice the historian can bring to the Party of Humanity. On the other hand, maybe it is — if the myth is that the liberal societies like the USA have already fulfilled their promise, or can do so by pruning their legal systems down to some minimalist classical core — a legal order that never existed and caused much unnecessary suffering to the extent it did exist. Here the argument for complexifying our viewof the past through history is an argument for showing how multiple and conflicting the traditions are, all the different kinds of narratives that can be told about the past, the kind of thing I’ve been doing in this essay. We open up a space for freedomand innovation, not in the escape fromhistory, but in choosing which traditions and trajectories to attach ourselves to. The importance of a history that complicates narratives is chiefly in the way it reveals embedded alternatives in actual lived practices - not always admirable alternatives, to be sure, but suggestive of the variation we might look for in our possible futures. If we want to put history to present use - and because we cannot think without narratives we will do so whether we want to or not - this is a better use of legal history, it seems to me, than the attempt to find in history binding rules or commands, or some single Platonic essence or master meaning that attempts to fix our destiny to following some narrowand predetermined evolutionary path.
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