W. T. Murphy, The Oldest Social Science? Configurations of Law Modernity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. xii + 269 pp. $60.00. In one of his lesser known fictions, Utopia of a Tired Man, Borges (1982) depicted the paradoxical image of a distant sparsely populated society in which individuals could choose the time of their death. If one could live as long as one wished, then the moment of was not to be determined by political, economic, medical, or legal considerations but rather according to the satisfaction or accomplishment of one's desires. Once individuals had fulfilled their projects, usually the practice of one of the arts, or philosophy, or mathematics, they would grow tired of life choose to die: When he wants to, he kills himself. is master of his life. He is also master of his death (Borges 1982:68). One interesting feature of Utopia of a Tired Man is the context of the sovereign individualism that allowed the subject a power of life over self. The utopian society was preceded by a period of breakdown in industrial urban culture by the gradual disappearance of collective ghosts such as nation city. Most particularly, social interest in political culture waned: They called elections, declared wars, collected taxes, confiscated fortunes, ordered arrests, tried to impose censorship, but nobody on earth obeyed them (Borges 1982:69). As political ennui set in, the media began to stop following photographing the activities of leaders, equally ceased reporting the deeds determinations of political bodies. In consequence, over a period of several hundred years, the political system died out by virtue of a complete lack of public interest in what it was saying doing. Neither knowing nor caring about political events, individuals increasingly focused their attention on questions of lifestyle the art of living of dying. The culture of politics was displaced by a dispersed aesthetics of the everyday. In a book of formidable learning remarkable scope, Tim Murphy has addressed the long-term history or longue duree of in Western society has traced a comparable displacement of the role function of law. Drawing heavily on the work of Foucault the concept of the episteme, which term refers here to the way in which society knows itself in consequence governs itself, Murphy argues that a dramatic shift has occurred in the form logic of government.l In a series of detailed theoretical studies, he argues persuasively that is increasingly marginal to the methods by means of which science apprehends regulates society. It follows, in this view, that as a form of knowing is no longer central to the exercise of power or governance of the social. If legal knowledge, based on experience addressed to the ethical individual to her rights duties, or his innocence guilt, no longer accurately reflects the modern bureaucratic state, its technologies of rule, its systems of calculative governance, then new forms of analysis need to be developed. In short, has been displaced as the paradigm of modernity, its future is correspondingly fragmentary uncertain. The consequences of this broad argument as to the escape from law (Murphy, pp. 122-23) are initially spelled out in negative terms. The loss of the legal of sociality reflects the of the classical model of law, and the effect of this transformation is to leave its seemingly foundational role in instituting the relation between ruler ruled in an obscure place.... Should we not let go of our memories? Should we not allow ourselves to be open to the future, learn to live without the fantasy of security paternity which the older vision held out to us? (p. 34). In answer to these rhetorical questions, Murphy suggests a variety of means of coming to terms with the new positivities of the modern social sciences the anguish of the split between the individual the statistical (p. …