| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Terence C. Halliday and Lucien Karpik, editors. Lawyers and the Rise of Western Political Liberalism: Europe and North America from the Eighteenth to Twentieth Centuries. (Oxford Socio-Legal Studies.) New York: Clarendon Press, Oxford University. 1997. Pp. 379. $28.00.

Since the 1980s, totalitarian and authoritarian regimes have yielded before the pressures of global democratization and political liberalism. Why have these changes come about? Scholars in the new academic discipline of "transitional studies" usually point to economic pressures, notably the emerging global marketplace. This book, however, offers a different explanation. Editors Terence C. Halliday and Lucien Karpik, both sociologists of law, insist that lawyers are among the most, if not the most, potent agents of global liberalism. They make their case through sophisticated historical essays about the rise of modern legal professionalism in England, France, Germany, and the United States. According to Halliday and Karpik, market forces are a necessary but not a sufficient condition to develop a liberal political culture. Instead, they shift attention toward political life, civic affairs, and the place of lawyers in both. Politics, not economics, shaped the liberal state; lawyers emerged in the last century as the facilitators and mediators of that state. . . .

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