We have rediscovered the social diversity of law. From now on, legal pluralism becomes a paradigm to win over our preconceptions and ideologies of law, a fact to be constructed on the basis of a multidisciplinary theorization.

Between 1930 and 1945, Georges Gurvitch devoted several books to the exposition of his “theory of social law.” Since 1968, Ian R. Macneil has extensively developed his “relational theory of contract.” Their common ambition was to overcome the dominant legal doctrine by showing how and why it arbitrarily ignores some fundamental aspects of the social reality of law and contract. Despite their exceptional merits, both theories have failed to exert any significant influence among contemporary jurists. Two fundamental reasons account for that failure. First, Gurvitch and Macneil give an uncompromising priority to the objective of knowledge over the objective of action by trying to reflect systematically the complexity of the social reality of law and contract. On the contrary, the dominant legal theory submits itself to political and professional pragmatism and its needs of logical simplification. Secondly, Gurvitch and Macneil's failure has much to do with their commitment to the ideals of solidarity and autonomy while most of the contemporary jurists espouse an authoritarian conception of law and society.

The leading argument of the paper is that the paradigm of legal positivism upon which the prosperity of the jurists was founded since the mid-19th century has now become detrimental to their innovative capacity. Three major trends are considered indicative of a process of paradigm shifting: the ever-increasing specialization of academic and practicing lawyers; the dialectical blurring of the separation between law, politics and morals; the declining intellectual autonomy of the legal science through interaction with the new technosciences. The segmentation of occupational interests and the class conflict opposing the new generations to their predecessors could announce the end of professional corporatism as the official mode of representing and organizing the legal community. Law professors and, first of all, law and society scholars can play a crucial role by providing a better understanding of the current transition to a new paradigm of law.

In history of legal ideas of the last generation in Canada, legal pluralism deserves an important place. There is a Quebec genre in the legal literature on pluralism that, for reasons one might well suspect, is less well-known elsewhere. The scholarship of Professor Jean-Guy Belley, one of the leading figures in the field, is deserving of a wider readership among non francophones. A translation on one of his most important papers, published at a critical moment in his personal development as a scholar, is presented here in the hope of introducing his work to new readers.

In this article Jean-Guy Belley examines the dichotomy between individuals and organizations, considered explicitly in connection with the development of the idea of legal pluralism. This idea—not the concept, which came later—had appeared in the early twentieth century, thanks to militant jurists who challenged the dominance of formal positivism and had an interest in legal sociology and anthropology. Their approach fitted in with legal realism (broadly understood), but specifically questioned the central role of the state in the production of law. That initial form of legal pluralism fuelled the renewal of legal thinking and fostered the development of the sociology of law, but it did not lastingly challenge the dominant status of positivism among jurists. In contrast, the “new legal pluralism” that has been rapidly growing in the last decades presents itself as new legal orthodoxy: paradoxically, the idea of legal pluralism, which originally illustrated the quest for intellectual emancipation from the formalist straitjacket (perhaps even emancipation of social life vis-à-vis the state), has turned into a new orthodoxy in the second era of modernity. That legal doctrine is clearly in harmony with the impersonal domination of private legal orders (especially of large economic organizations) over contemporary society.