Book Reviews : JEFF WEINTRAUB AND KRISHAN KUMAR (EDS), Public and Private in Thought and Practice: Perspectives on a Grand Dichotomy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997, xvii + 380 pp., $60.00 (hbk), $19.95 (pbk)
| Date | 01 December 1998 |
| Author | Margaret Thornton |
| Published date | 01 December 1998 |
| DOI | 10.1177/096466399800700411 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
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delimit its domain of effective social regulation. If we evaluate state law as a formal
and conscious product of public discourse and not as an alternative to socialization,
then we realize that the second part of Tamanaha’s thesis, which disputes that the core
activity of law is social control, is far from convincing.
My other objection pertains to his conclusion that most sociologists of law only
imagine that the law through juridification and legaliszation of various spheres of
human activities has played a central role in the construction of modernity. Tamanaha
argues that our everyday concrete experiences of social life offer no proof of this
assumed juridification: ’people still generally do not know what the law is, and still
give hardly a thought to it when engaging in routine behaviour’ (p. 125). Assuming
that Tamanaha’s statement about the relationship between people and the law is
correct, it still does not refute the theoretical value of such concepts as juridification.
Contrary to Tamanaha’s presentation, juridification of social spheres does not necess-
arily impose legal knowledge or legal consciousness on social actors. Juridification is
the formal regulation of interactive human behaviour, which delimits the possibility
of communicative action in various spheres of social life. If the iron cage of the law is
closing on us, then it is through bureaucratization of such social, cultural and moral
spheres of action, which were previously regulated through extra-legal mechanism
and not, as Tamanaha seems to suggest, because people are forced to take the law into
consideration whenever they act. Tamanaha’s interpretation and presentation of jurid-
ification is of utmost importance, not only because it too casts doubts over his overall
thesis regarding law and social order, but also because it illustrates the shortcomings
of his positivistic methodology.
Notwithstanding the criticism above, Tamanaha’s Realistic Soao-Legal Theory is in
many ways rich in content and what it tries to achieve is hardly exhausted through
this brief review. It contains many provocative analyses that will hopefully bring
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