Origins of order : project and system in the American legal imagination / Paul W. Kahn.

An examination of how two fundamental concepts of order influence our ideas about sovereignty, citizenship, law, and history Western accounts of natural and political order have deployed two basic ideas: project and system. In a project, order is produced by the intentional act of a subject; in a sy...

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Bibliographic Details
Online Access: Full Text (via De Gruyter)
Main Author: Kahn, Paul W., 1952- (Author)
Format: eBook
Language:English
Published: New Haven : Yale University Press, [2019]
Series:Yale Law Library series in legal history and reference.
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Summary:An examination of how two fundamental concepts of order influence our ideas about sovereignty, citizenship, law, and history Western accounts of natural and political order have deployed two basic ideas: project and system. In a project, order is produced by the intentional act of a subject; in a system, order is immanent in the world. In the former, order is made; in the latter, discovered. Paul W. Kahn shows how project and system have long been at work in our theological and philosophical tradition. Against this background, Kahn explains the development of the modern legal imagination in the nineteenth century as a movement from project to system. Americans began the century imagining the constitutional order as their common project: a deliberate construction of We the People. They ended the century imagining that order is continuous with the common law: an immanent development of the principles of civilization. This imaginative shift affected ideas of legal text, sovereignty, citizenship, interpretation, history, and science.
Physical Description:1 online resource (xvii, 325 pages)
Bibliography:Includes bibliographical references (pages 257-311) and index.
ISBN:9780300249446
0300249446
Source of Description, Etc. Note:Print version record.