Rational Law and Boundary Maintenance: Legitimating the 1971 Lockheed Loan Guarantee

Abstract

Neo-Marxian critiques of Max Weber's theory of rationality have stressed the ideological role of legal formalism. At the analytic level, however, Weber's theory points to sources of potential conflict between legal formalism and economic rationality. This paper critically reconstructs Weber's perspective for analyzing the boundary maintaining categories of legal discourse. A case study of the 1971 federal loan guarantee to Lockheed Aircraft Corporation demonstrates that while both market ideologies and administrative principles partially bounded the debate over the legislation, this debate did not resolve the question of which businesses should potentially receive government support. This substantive issue raised problems of legal particularism that undermined the universal claims of legal rationality and required an expansion of boundary categories beyond legal formalism, yielding a more economically and politically open discourse.