<p>Not every law book can be read with pleasure. Sometimes the enjoyment of a text is intrinsically compromised by its subject matter; at other times it can be hamstrung by the author's personal style. Happily neither hazard pertains to this highly enjoyable and informative monograph. Substantively, McLean's project, to search for and enunciate a conceptualisation of the state in “British” legal thought, is a daunting one in many respects, addressing as it does elements of history, politics, philosophy and law.</p>
<p>McLean's starting point is that, traditionally, British legal thought has not been overly concerned with defining an abstract theory of the state. Such an omission has been said to explain the traditional absence of a distinct system of public law, and the administrative and judicial institutions that would be required to underpin such a system. McLean seeks to assess critically this orthodox understanding of British legal thought. The enquiry is confined to “legal thought”, though it does of course recognise that the formants of that thought will be drawn from a wider disciplinary base. The realisation of a monograph on this careful focus is what makes the text important. The history of ideas in Britain has developed and wrestled with the nature of the state for centuries; however, legal thought has not, so the orthodoxy goes, honed a comprehensive conceptualisation of the state. Looming large, however, is the notion of the Crown. What, asks McLean, is to be made of the Crown? The answer is much, perhaps even a great deal, but not everything. The institution of the Crown can be used with varying degrees of comprehensiveness, and from differing normative starting points, to constitute a manifested vision of the state, and hence provide a basis for law to attach to it. Nevertheless, cautions McLean, conceptualisations of the Crown are not habile to constitute a definitive and comprehensive account of the state and its actions. Internal variants of the state's manifestations (including different instantiations of the Crown and judges), and the rules generated by and attaching to them, make for a non-unitary picture. Similarly, external or extra-state actors which make claims to authority, such as those associated with European or international law, add further diversity. Developing a theory of the state beyond the Crown in this pluralistic context means that key questions relating to sovereignty must be raised, revisited, and addressed. The answer to...</p>
