LAW, CULTURE AND SOCIETY. LEGAL IDEAS IN THE MIRROR OF SOCIAL THEORY by ROGER COTTERRELL
| Published date | 01 December 2007 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6478.2007.00408.x |
| Author | Pierre Guibentif |
| Date | 01 December 2007 |
Book Reviews
LAW, CULTURE AND SOCIETY. LEGAL IDEAS IN THE MIRROR OF
SOCIAL THEORY by ROGER COTTERRELL
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006, 199 pp., £22.50)
Intellectual work, as we understand it in modern academic business, suffers
from the severe tension between the need for permanently transforming ideas ±
in order for our thoughts to develop ± and the need for giving them a coherent
expression, of presenting them as a final product ± in order for our thoughts to
have an impact. As a productive thinker, Roger Cotterrell knows well how to
deal with this tension. One means is to make a paradoxical use of books. That
which has the most convincing appearance of a final intellectual product, a
book, documents, throughout the papers collected, provisional versions of a
theory in the very process of its development. This is the case for Law, Culture
and Society,aswell as for Roger Cotterrell's earlier book Law's Community.
1
More strikingly, these books, which could easily be considered as milestones in
an intellectual development, might not correspond to the substantially most
relevant steps, but should rather be read as workshop material collected before
the decisive step could be taken. The pace of publication is prudently discon-
nected from the pace of theoretical progress. So Roger Cotterrell recognizes:
(. ..) it was only in the year after Law's Community appeared that I developed
what I now think is a defensible concept of community for the specific purpose
of legal studies.
2
Similarly, Law, Culture and Society, having outlined an `ambitious agenda',
gathers what has to be considered, for the time being, as `merely explanatory
essays' (p. 8).
3
This is why it is particularly important briefly to remember the steps in the
recent development of Roger Cotterrell's social and legal theory, as the
background of Law, Culture and Society. According to Law's Community's
concluding chapter, there is a `paradox' undermining law's authority: law
needs political authority as a condition for its enforcement; it also needs
moral authority as a condition for its social recognition; but:
the extension of law's political authority has a seemingly inevitable tendency
to weaken or deny this moral authority and hence, in an important sense, to
undermine law itself.
4
633
ß2007 The Author. Journal Compilation ß2007 Cardiff University Law School. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd,
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
1R.Cotterrell, Law's Community (1995).
2 id., p. 7.
3 All page references in the text are to Law, Culture and Society.
4 Cotterell, op. cit., n. 1, p. 315.
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