ABSTRACT

Legal pluralism presents an alternative paradigm of law to that of legal modernity. As discussed above, the dominant legal understanding that emerged from the eighteenth century onwards saw law as one of the principal achievements of Enlightenment rationality. This view emphasised law’s singularity, its universality and its effectiveness. Law was regarded as a coherent body of norms, emanating from a single source – the State; rational law was the culmination of human progress, and the aspiration and mark of all ‘civilised’ societies; and law was one of the primary instruments of social engineering available to the State, shaping society through various inducements and sanctions. Legal pluralism challenges not only the State-centredness of legal modernity, but also its main attributes. In place of singularity and unity, legal pluralism sees multiplicity and relative disorder; in place of universality, legal pluralism sees legal modernity as but one, deeply contingent, way of imagining law, tied to a particular (European) time and place; in place of effectiveness, legal pluralism highlights the ways in which State law is often stymied by non-State law, and so fails to live up to its own standards of instrumental rationality.