The decline of private law: a philosophical history of liberal legalism

A large-scale historical reconstruction of liberal legalism, from its inception in the mid-nineteenth century, the moment in which the jurists forged the alliance between political liberalism and legal expertise embodied in classical private law doctrine, to the contemporary anxiety about the possibility of both a liberal solution to the problem of political justification and of law as a respectable form of expert knowledge.

Each stage in the history is a moment of synthesis between a substantive and a methodological idea.