ABSTRACT
To grasp the potential of legal analysis to become a master tool of institutional imagination in a democratic society we must begin by understanding what is most distinctive about law and legal thought in the contemporary industrial democracies. The failure to turn legal analysis into institutional imagination — the major consequence of the arrested development of legal thought — has special meaning and poignancy in the United States. The most important reasons for the arrested development of legal thought lie in the history of modern politics. Rationalising legal analysis is a way of representing extended pieces of law as expressions, albeit flawed expressions, of connected sets of policies and principles. As it spreads through the world, rationalising legal analysis helps arrest the development of the dialectic between the rights of choice and the arrangements that make individual and collective self-determination effective — a dialectic that is the very genius of contemporary law.
