ABSTRACT
Current knowledge lacks the intellectual resources for transcending legal order. Only in a critical understanding of legal order one can begin to break out of the boundaries of existing intelligence. The search for order has been the principal concern of the social theorist. Indeed, the very emergence of the social sciences was a reaction to social and political change. In recent years a body of knowledge has developed regarding law as a social phenomenon, subject to sociological investigation. Criminology is concerned with the immediate application of knowledge to programs of crime control. A critical philosophy has seldom guided the scholarship of social scientists. Only a critical social theory allows us to move beyond the assumptions and realities of the Violence Commission. A conception of social order, or the social system, presupposes the control and manipulation of human beings.
