The market and the family, the sacred and the secular in modern comparative law

Abstract

This paper explores the operation of the distinctions between the market and the family, the sacred and the secular in Euro-American comparative legal scholarship. It contributes to existing debates by exploring the potential of the lenses of inclusion and exclusion to address the political implications of the two dichotomies. Starting from the observation that the two distinctions are often inseparable, since market law is constituted in opposition to religious family law, it puts emphasis on the ways in which the exclusionary dimension of such construction is produced. It also shows that exclusion stands in tension with comparative law’s own promise of inclusion. In this sense, the field is reducible neither to inclusion nor to exclusion, and yet it contains both. Capturing this ambivalence in the works of some of the most important Euro-American comparatists, the paper concludes with some tentative thoughts on a critical praxis of particularism.