209 Law in Time: Legal Theory & Legal History reason in the world – “of the works of this mind history is the record,” as Emerson (2000) also saw it. At the same time, the legal historicism of Savigny appealed to legal reason in order to scientifically (as legal science) capture and conceptually stabilize legal historical matter. The resulting intellectual rapprochement of rationalism and historicism was so compelling, prestigious and authoritative that the ruled masses could hardly resist buying into it. The accession of popular will to the compact is the root of whatever stability as constant change that modern societies achieved. Since then, modern law and the main schools of enclosed legal explanation have remained bound to this convergence of reason and history in the face of will. Even the enclosingdiachronic model of legal explanation embodied in grand legal history unfolds withinThe Great Allianceparadigm. As constitutional essentials15 were carved onto modern institutional imagination byThe Great Alliance , legal thought towards the end of the nineteenth and by the beginning of the twentieth centuries became increasingly devoted to retooling the law to meet the perceived needs of the age and its rising social groups. 16 From then on, good law was considered that which worked as efficient means to deal with functional adaptive problems, producing social coordination out of the increasing complexity of social challenges. But the real action was in solving problems in ways that were compatible with the values codified by the axiological axis ofThe Great Alliance . The bracketing of wholesale questioning of constitutional essentials was therefore rendered plausible by two factors: first, the imaginative authority of the constitutional settlement ofThe Great Alliance ; and second, the urgency with which novel tail-wind adaptive pressures demanded legal institutional responsiveness, leaving little time for institutional or axiological “big thinking.” For the legal actors who inhabit and constantly act outThe Great Alliance , the background intellectual environment for the evolution of law as a social problem-solving instrument was already firmly in place – as “the conditions for evolution are 15 To use Rawls’ felicitous expression, see Rawls (1971). 16 “The debates are over. Controversies over great ideas have subsided. The scene is finally dominated by those whom Oliver Wendell Holmes long suspected to be mere businessmen. Law is a trade. If you are smart and know how to enact your craft, the forthcoming financial rewards will be sizeable. You’d better adapt.” (SOMEK, 2011).
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