Mid-Twentieth Century Legalism

U-turnS Event

Speaker: Jacco Bomhoff, Professor of Law, LSE Law School.

This book project proposes a cultural and critical study of Euro-American legal thought in the middle decades of the twentieth century, set in its intellectual contexts. In both Western Europe and the United States, legally trained experts and their rapidly growing arsenal of technical tools played central roles in the building and rebuilding of markets and public institutions, during the early decades after World War two.

How and why did these turns to law make sense to those involved? The book approaches this question by exploring the ways in which technical legal knowledge practices were implicated in the construction of new domestic and transnational juridical worlds. The relevant instruments, and the broader outlook that sustained them and they worked to make real, are what the book calls mid-century legalism.

The book argues that this particular law-oriented worldview was characterised by its commitment to, and faith in, distinctive and closely intertwined forms of commensuration and ordering. The tools of mid-century legal thought, in other words, worked to create smooth, orderly worlds by drawing things into relation.

Today, we largely continue to govern with, be ruled by, and understand the world through, the same narrow set of legal tools with its origins in this period. But many of the background ideas initially sustaining them have become implausible, while much of the political and distributional work they do has grown invisible. Uncovering the characteristics of mid-twentieth-century legalism can therefore contribute to our understanding of both the staying power and the exhaustion of our modern juridified worlds, and, ultimately, to a critical reckoning with law’s contemporary ‘excess’ (Goodale & Zenker 2025).