Modernity, state law, and bad maps

The process of modernisation, as described by Giddens (1990), involves scale enlargement. Within this process, social relationships come to operate on a larger scale and become “disembedded” from a specific place or time.

State law came to serve as a trust system (in the words of Giddens [1990], an “expert system”) not bound by time or place, coexisting with the personal (locally and temporally embedded) trust of pre-modern society. The technological and societal forces driving the changes towards modernity came to full blossom in the nineteenth century and accelerated during the twentieth century. Those forces first coincided with large codification projects. Later, they occurred alongside top-down, state- led, regulatory lawmaking. These modern types of Western lawmaking arrived at colonial and other developing nations through processes of legal transplantation (Watson 1993; Nelken 2001).

Modern state law has served as a system of trust, enabling modern large-scale social relationships and providing unity and certainty. It has simultaneously become a space (in the sense of Giddens [1990]) disembedded from any specific place or time in which social interaction is possible. Modern state law has thus become a sphere outside of society that enables social relationships to operate at a larger scale. For this to be possible, the law had to loosen its relationship with society by cutting loose its local and temporal social ties. This section will show how the disembedding of modern law has led to contradictions between state law and local norms, worsening legal failure.