Abstract

Analogical reasoning provides the starting point for Nerhot's analysis of the nature of legal interpretation. In the first part of the book, which concentrates on the modern European tradition, he develops a hermeneutical stance on questions of reality, truth and rationality - especially in relation to the focal status of the text as posed in legal science - and more widely in the work of key political theorists such as Bobbio. Part II pursues these themes through an 'archaeology' of the modern. Linking the development of legal knowledge to Christian concepts of time, and posing the role of philology as the 'political science' of pre-modernity, it ultimately disrupts some of the current conventions about the status of modernity by showing the active influence of legal knowledge in forming a pre-modern Western rationalist tradition.