Parker's "Turn to Process"

Kunal M. Parker, University of Miami School of Law, has published The Turn to Process: American Legal, Political, and Economic Thought, 1870–1970, in the series Cambridge Historical Studies in American Law and Society, edited by Christopher L. Tomlins.

In The Turn to Process, Kunal M. Parker explores the massive reorientation of American legal, political, and economic thinking between 1870 and 1970. Over this period, American conceptions of law, democracy, and markets went from being oriented around truths, ends, and foundations to being oriented around methods, processes, and techniques. No longer viewed as founded in justice and morality, law became a way of doing things centered around legal procedure. Shedding its foundations in the 'people, ' democracy became a technique of governance consisting of an endless process of interacting groups. Liberating themselves from the truths of labor, markets and market actors became intellectual and political techniques without necessary grounding in the reality of human behavior. Contrasting nineteenth and twentieth century legal, political, and economic thought, this book situates this transformation in the philosophical crisis of modernism and the rise of the administrative state.

Here are some endorsements:

‘Ranging widely across disciplines, crossing political boundaries, and unsettling conventional wisdom at every turn, The Turn to Process provides a brilliant new synthesis of a transformative period in American intellectual life.’

Angus Burgin - Johns Hopkins University

‘This book is a real tour de force, a return to intellectual history in the grand manner. In Kunal Parker’s synthesis, the leading theorists of law, political science, and economics in the twentieth century all contributed to, and followed, a shift away from theorizing their sciences as means to substantive ends such as justice or morality, to thinking about them only as methods or procedures. The book is marked by deep learning in the sources of all three fields and an uncommon lucidity in exposition.’

Robert W. Gordon - author of Taming the Past: Essays on Law in History and History in Law

‘In this revelatory account of ‘a world rendered process’, Kunal Parker brilliantly reframes the history of modern American knowledge-making. As foundational certainties faltered in the late nineteenth century, he contends, the language of tools, methods, and techniques remade entire disciplines and professions - with enduring consequences for how we understand law, democracy, and markets.’

Sarah Igo - author of The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America

Professor Parker discusses the book here.

--Dan Ernst