Law and Unified Social Theory

An economist who talks about unified theory to lawyers and social scientists gets welcomed rather like the British expedition to Afghanistan in 1840. The Afghanistanis preferred to fight rather than join the British empire, and many social scientists are similarly disposed towards the economics empire. Like the nineteenth-century British, however, economics imperialism has succeeded remarkably. Economic models of rational behaviour have affected all the social sciences in the last thirty years, as well as history, philosophy, and law. Everyone in social science, whether friend or foe of economics, should want to understand its success. In this essay, I will try to explain the success of the economic analysis of law, but I will not merely praise the subject. My own feelings are too complicated for that. Like others in my generation of undergraduates, I had a special aversion to materialism. Microeconomics concerns the efficiency of markets, but I was more interested in the majesty of law, the struggle of politics, and the deciphering of culture. My explanation of the successes o