Abstract

The long‐awaited second volume of Morton Horwitz's history of American legal thought covers the period 1870 to 1960. The focus is on academic law. Horwitz's thesis is that every generation rebels against the existing conceptual structure of law, but then establishes its own equally formalistic structure to replace it. The cycle can be broken only if the essentially political character of law is faced up to squarely. Unfortunately, Horwitz has attempted to reduce a century of American legal history to an academic debate over formalism, which, in turn, he reduces to the personal idiosyncrasies of some of the participants. However, the book also contains a valuable, close‐grained intellectual history of the legal profession's struggle to adapt legal categories to changed social and economic conditions.