This paper describes a topology of legal thought and the social conditions (the larger social construction of reality) of which that topology, that thought, is a component. Part I is a description of the structure of legal thought; Part II of the social conditions (a theory of the state, or political economy). The Conclusion considers the place of traditional legal practice on a new landscape. I experience legal thought, roughly speaking, as a progression from the first year of law school, with its emphasis on common law and legal method, through the second and third year courses on statutory law and regulation of the economy, to later experiences of sociology of law, policy analysis, and critical thought. Consequently, in its entirety, legal thought could be represented by the curriculum and scholarship of any large, sophisticated modern law school, like my own. But legal thought is both larger than the academy (drawing on countless authoritative legal acts: cases, statutes, debates, etc.) and different than legal practice (whose relationship to legal thought is unclear).1 In general, I propose that legal thought is composed of a core and periphery and that the whole structure roughly corresponds to the dichotomous and fragmented political economy of the modern democratic welfare state. Thus, the movement of this paper is from legal phenomenology (the experience of legal thought) to a corresponding kind of cultural organization, called political economy.2 The problem that I am trying to confront is a sense of both disintegration and integration (or progressive movement) in the law. After an initial period of infatuation with its conceptual power and elegance, the observer of legal thought begins to see fragmentation, an assortment of epistemologies, social philosophies, and policy instruments, full of conflicts, sloppy patchwork, and disorienting gaps or discontinuities. At the same time, there seems to be both a structure to the disorder (though fragmented, the law is not a chaotic pile of rubble) and a progressive movement toward broader and more efficient social problem solving. In this paper, I would like to illuminate this sense of orderly disorder and progress flawed every step of the way by conflicts and confusion. By looking first inside legal thought, then outside to its broader cultural context, I hope to avoid arid idealism or conceptualism and achieve a kind of energy and depth of explanation not otherwise possible. (I also am implicitly rejecting an interpretation of legal thought as exclusively an ideological product of the legal academy. I regard legal thought as at least partly a product of a larger, indeed society-wide, construction of reality).
