ABSTRACT
Subjects regulate, and are regulated, through diverse and changing political discourses. For instance, medieval texts attending to the ‘rule of law’ authorised multiple juridical institutions to decide communal disputes, bearing the ancestral weight of ‘natural law’ precepts developed by such thinkers as St Thomas Aquinas and Hugo Grotius (Tuck, 1993). These discourses divined law as a moral authority, and its practitioners were charged with regulating subjects’ lives on that basis (Agamben, 1998; Carson, 1985a,b; Cotterrell, 1984; Fine, 1984). From the seventeenth century, however, natural law images increasingly confronted rival disciplinary powers seeking order by creating normal, free ‘individuals’ in liberal ‘societies’ (Donzelot, 1991; Foucault, 1991; Gordon, 1991). Discipline redefined the tenets of regulation within modern, western, liberal democracies and helped to recast the identity of medieval law (Foucault, 1980). One discipline – sociology – was key in promoting the ‘social’ as a central concept in social welfare states. This concept was also key in a related ‘sociological movement in law’1 that was allied to a wider social constructionist agenda (Hacking, 1999).2
