Book Reviews : PETER FITZPATRICK, The Mythology of Modern Law. London: Routledge, 1992, ISBN 0-415-04380-8, 0-415-08263-3 (pbk), xv + 235 pp., Sociology of Law and Crime Series
| Published date | 01 June 1994 |
| DOI | 10.1177/096466399400300213 |
| Date | 01 June 1994 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
314
realist ideas? Further, we do not even get much of a sense of the broader impact of the
realists’ academic and political writings on other legal intellectuals. Did they have much
substantive impact outside of the handful of elite law schools where they had a marked
presence, or was the impact of their ideas mostly limited to those circles? None of these
issues are adequately addressed by Horowitz.
In short, throughout the text the assumption that legal thought actually had causal
importance for the development of American law operates but is not satisfactorily
defended. Horowitz ultimately fails to deliver on the claim to offer an explanation of the
transformation of American law. To raise such criticisms against a straightforward
intellectual history would be somewhat unfair, criticizing Horowitz for the book he
didn’t write rather than the one he did. But inasmuch as Horowitz’s ambitions go beyond
a retelling of the history of legal ideas to demonstrating the sources of the transformation
of American law, it is fair to ask for the incorporation of a wider range of empirical and
historical materials, and more of an institution-centered focus. In the end, Transformatton
II offers powerful new readings of selected episodes in the history of American legal
thought, but fails to achieve its larger goal of offering a satisfactory explanation of the
sources of legal change.
JEFF MANZA
Department of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA
PETER FITZPATRICK, The Mythology of Modern Law. London: Routledge, 1992,
ISBN 0-415-04380-8, 0-415-08263-3 (pbk), xv + 235 pp., Sociology of Law and Crime
Series.
Fitzpatrick’s book is an archaeological exploration of the classic works of modern, and
particularly Anglo-Saxon, jurisprudence. It challenges the central assumption of modern
society that myth, however significant it may have been for traditional and ancient
societies, is not relevant to modernity. Instead he suggests that the masters of modern
jurisprudence, whether analytical, sociological or autopoietic from Hobbes, Austin and
Hart to Stone, Luhmann and Teubner are involved in the construction and reconstruction
of a mythology of modern law - a mythology which requires the presence and
construction of an other such as ancient, customary or religious legal systems to confirm
itself as its opposite. The work owes much to Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge, yet in
its central ideas of white mythology and of the other it is also influenced by Derrida,
Eliade, Balibar, Levinas and Said. I have been told, not only by students, that the book is
difficult to read. Certainly, the language is dense, yet it is a density that sparkles with
meaning. It is tough but riveting. The toughness derives from the juxtaposition of a variety
of vocabularies, of law, anthropology, sociology and political economy as well as of
post-modernism, both of the Foucault and Derrida varieties. Reading the book reminded
me of endeavours with Foucault’s Pendulum (Eco, 1989) and Satanic Verses (Rushdie,
1988). These difficult works attempt to integrate intellectual, historical and physical
universes...
To continue reading
Request your trial