ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the dimensions of legal practice that diverge most strongly from the theoretical assumptions implicit in both positivism and idealism, and which are, as a necessary consequence, largely ignored in modern legal theory. It suggests that many of the intellectual disagreements on which modern jurisprudence is centred are in fact merely differing embodiments of an overarching set of ideas that constitute a taken-for-granted background to modern philosophical thought. The distortive impact of the ideas upon understanding of legal reasoning tends to go unnoticed in part because of the suggestion of a gap between the 'surface' level of mundane rule-application and the 'deep' structure of moral and political values that underpin them. Legal reasoning then resembles less a sustained tradition of theoretical reflection, and more an intellectual tug-of-war between the specific forms of rule-application and the more abstract flights of political theory.
