Morton's Metanarratives: Trope and Genre in Transformation I and Transformation II

Abstract

The publication of Morton Horwitz’s brilliant 1977 study of early-Republic private legal doctrine, The Transformation of American Law: 1780–1860 (Transformation I), marked a significant turn in American legal history. Both within the legal academy and among historians more broadly, Transformation I was a lightning rod that divided orthodox legal thinkers and set the historical-legal agenda for the next decade. It fundamentally challenged received legal wisdom and tradition, as well as refuting the “consensus” historiography that had dominated the field following the Second World War. More importantly, it presaged a critical movement in American legal thought that would shake the academy to its foundations. Horwitz’s second history of American jurisprudence, The Transformation of American Law: 1870–1960 (Transformation II) was published in 1992 under very different intellectual circumstances. The critical movement that Horwitz had helped deliver was all but dead, and while Transformation II was generally well-received, it was not nearly the bombshell that the first iteration had been. In Horwitz’s own words, “it is a very different book.” Horwitz’s second text is no less erudite or technically skilled than his first, yet unquestionably something was different — either in the academy, with the reading public, or in the text itself — and any of these explanations might account for the book’s tepid reception. This paper is an attempt to understand that reception through an analysis of these possible explications.