3 - Path Dependence and the Law
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2009
Summary
Law is a presence of the social past. Law is an organizing of the social present. Law is a conditioning of the social future.
Philip AllottOn September 20, 1938, Ernst Fraenkel, a German labor lawyer and social democrat, fled the Nazi dictatorship. From his exile in the United States, he published The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship in 1941. The Dual State remains one of the most important books on the origins of authoritarianism and totalitarianism. It constitutes the first comprehensive analysis of the rise and nature of National Socialism, and remains the only such analysis completed within the belly of the behemoth.
Ernst Fraenkel conceived, and secretly wrote, most of what became The Dual State in the Berlin of the mid- and late 1930s. The concept of the dual state first found its way into print in 1937 in a series of articles that Fraenkel wrote under the pseudonym “Conrad Jürgens” for the Sozialistische Warte, the periodical of the Internationaler Sozialistischer Kampfbund. The articles chronicled the breakdown of democracy and the rise of dictatorship in Weimar Germany. The articles quickly turned into a clandestine manuscript. The draft book, written in German, found its way to the United States via France by way of a French embassy official. The official hid this Urdoppelstaat in his luggage upon leaving Germany in the late 1930s – thus securing the work's survival.
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- The Legacies of LawLong-Run Consequences of Legal Development in South Africa, 1652–2000, pp. 42 - 80Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008