Law, Capitalism, and the Liberal State: The Historical Sociology of James Willard Hurst

Abstract

Two legacies vie to take the measure of the work of Willard Hurst. The first understands Hurst primarily in his formal role as the “founding father” of an academic sub-specialty known as “American legal history”—the author of a canonical textLaw and the Conditions of Freedom, and the coiner of interpretive phrases like “legal instrumentalism” and “the release of energy” that established the boundaries of disciplinary debate for two generations of acolytes and dissenters. The second legacy flows from the substantive range of Hurst's research and writing as a whole—the depth and breadth of an intellectual project that tears at and transcends the very disciplinary borders being constructed by his texts and phrases. In this essay, I will ignore the first perspective, which tends to dominate hagiographic and commemorative commentaries.