In recent years political movements of a decidedly ‘anti-establishment’ character have taken many countries by storm, and many observers by surprise. Among the characteristics these movements share is that they, and more particularly their leaders, claim uniquely to represent the true, real people of the country, a claim that does not depend upon, but frequently can boast confirmation in, electoral victory. For unlike standard-issue coup-ists and putsch-ists, communists and fascists (also anti-establishmentarian until they become established), these movements are not shy of elections. They feed off them.

This chapter explicates, explores, and commends Patrick Glenn’s choice to recognize and emphasize the significance of tradition, his master concept for understanding law, in the workings of all legal orders. However, it does not share the evangelical enthusiasm that Glenn suggests should flow from this recognition. That enthusiasm is based, I argue, on a quite idiosyncratic and contestable conception of what traditions ‘truly’ involve, absent contingency or corruption. Glenn believes that recognizing the traditionality of legal orders allows us to see them as open to greater mutual recognition, tolerance, conciliatory living together, than we commonly recognize when we speak in other terms, say, of legal systems, cultures, families, and so forth. Without his excessively sunny conception of the nature of tradition as its foundation, however, a lot of the ‘conciliatory’ hopefulness so winning in Glenn’s writings seems to rest on shifting and uncertain ground. We should acknowledge that law is typically founded on and in traditions, that complex legal orders indeed typically are traditions, simply because these are facts, and important ones. I fear, however, that such acknowledgment will of itself do little to advance the mutual accommodations among legal and social orders that Glenn admirably favours.

Introduction

On reading Philip Selznick's “Sociology and Natural Law” (1961), Philippe Nonet wrote him to ask if he could come from Belgium to UC Berkeley to study with him. He went on to become for a long time his closest collaborator. Nonet (2002, 50) later observed, somewhat Delphically but insightfully, that “those who look to Philip's work for contributions to this or that ‘field’— ‘sociology of organization,’ ‘industrial sociology,’ ‘sociology of law’— will doubtless find something, indeed a great deal, but they will miss all that matters.” This observation, perhaps overheated but in the right direction, resonated with me since I too have long thought that much that was most distinctive and distinguished about Selznick's thought is not well captured within conventional frames or characterizations. I have speculated about what is missed ever since I heard Nonet's remark. I have several candidates but here will focus on matters of sensibility.

In Philip Selznick: Ideals in the World, I claimed that

In the main, in that book and other essays (e.g., Krygier 2002d), I approached these matters indirectly, interstitially, and implicitly, as they appeared in Selznick's treatments of the particular subjects of his published writings. I am here interested in the sensibility that shaped, framed, and infused those works and gave them their distinctive contours and tones.

In a way, this chapter serves, and not only by its placement, as the other bookend to Paul van Seters's introduction, between which the other chapters discuss Selznick's treatment of particular subjects.

Democracy and the rule of law are both “essentially contested concepts” in common use; indeed both are hurrah terms to which virtually everyone these days seeks to lay claim. In this brief chapter, rather than survey contestants I opt for stipulation. My stipulations are intended to be fairly undemanding, indeed deliberately unoriginal. They might well exclude legitimate contenders and not be uncontroversial, but they are intended to reflect not only my own preferences but central themes in long traditions of thought about these matters.1