Paulo Barrozo 202 They also either explicitly or implicitly favor macro-structural or micro-individualistic ontological and causal models in their narrative construction. Regardless, a helpful schema on the nature and evolution of law must reflect the differentiation between natural and human history while being compatible with structural and individualistic ontologies and causalities. Its objective is to assist legal history in making explicit that which is implicit and obscured, as well as making that which is merely explicit to be so in a reflectively coherent way. We must start with a question addressed to the first condition of possibility of legal history: why is there any history other than natural history? Why not simply conflate human history with the natural history ofHomo Sapiens ? In other words, what events lead to the ascent of human history from natural history, such that no account of natural processes is able fully to explain societies? What evolutionary process sparked the initial and thenceforth cumulative differentiation of humanity from the rest of nature? In the sequence, this Subsection discusses ontological and methodological implications of classical answers to this threshold evolutionary question. […] B. Paradigms In theorizing legal evolution, Hauke Brunkhorst articulates a connection between the adaptive and normative dimensions of legal revolutions. He explains legal revolutions as being “triggered” by linguistically expressed legitimization crises in a context of functional differentiation and class conflict that occasionally leads to leaping normative learning: “Functional differentiation causes certain social problems which the systems themselves cannot solve. These problems consist, in particular, of structural social differences that are latent class conflicts. […] Once latent conflicts […] become manifest within the political sphere of public debate and the struggle for public law […], they will routinely lead to a legitimation crisis. A crisis of legitimization if the trigger of (progressive or regressive) normative learning processes of the affected society as a whole. In an extreme case, a crisis of legitimization can cause revolutionary change. The great
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