Empire of the Rule of Law
There is a traditional narrative about law and legality that scholars have told, in various forms, since the late nineteenth century.1 In this telling, generalized, formal law emerged as an institutional response to sociopolitical flattening and socioeconomic distancing. As societies transitioned from “status to contract,” abandoning traditional hierarchies in favor of ideals of individual equality, formal equality before the law became more attractive.
Similarly, as economic activities expanded beyond the horizon of closely knit social networks, the institutional need for stranger-oriented transactions and collaboration created immense demand for formal legal institutions that supplied uniformity and reliability across highly diverse socioeconomic terrain.2 Correspondingly, new ideas of “law,” “legality,” and “the rule of law” emerged.
What has too often been missing from these narratives is a compelling account of the transition itself: how socioeconomic need translated into concrete political, intellectual, institutional change. The idea that demand produces supply over the long term may well be correct, but the specific mechanisms of that supply nonetheless deserve careful study, not least because it tends to affect the final institutional product in both form and substance.
In Redefining the Rule of Law: An Eighteenth-Century Case Study, Christian R. Burset provides a precisely argued, expertly documented, and intellectually sophisticated account of one such mechanism. Through an examination of legal-political dialogue in the eighteenth-century British empire, Burset demonstrates that the specific experience of colonialism generated much of the intellectual and political energy behind modern “rule of law” ideals that have gained both dialogical and institutional dominance in the Anglosphere. Continue reading "Empire of the Rule of Law"
