Pragmatism, holism and the concept of law

When discussing O. W. Holmes’s answer to the question What constitutes the law? Morton White underlines the fact that Holmes’s inquiry didn’t focus on developing the concept of law. White states: ‘...Holmes said little in The Path of the Law about the notion of legal authority, perhaps because he was interested not in what he called a “useless quintessence of all legal systems” but in “an accurate anat- omy of one”’. Such ambition (or lack of ambition) is charac- teristic of many pragmatic enterprises in the field of jurispru- dence. However, sometimes the opposition between legal pragmatism and other legal theories is built upon a refer- ence to the notion of the ‘nature’ or ‘essence’ of law. Many legal philosophers who aim to reveal the very ‘nature of law’ (or ‘the concept of law’ as H. L. A. Hart did) try to interpret Holmes and other pragmatists as offering a com- petitive view to their own. I will follow White’s early intu- ition that such a construal of the controversy is simply wrong. Afterwards I will sketch a portrait of legal pragma- tism in the context of White’s own inquiry and his version of ‘holistic pragmatism’; thirdly, I will present in brief the main reasons for exploring the concept of law in the contempo- rary analytic philosophy of law. Then I will show that tradi- tionally ‘pragmatic’ and ‘analytic’ efforts in legal theory are situated on different levels of generality and conceptuality. However, these efforts can be, at least to some extent, reor- dered under the aegis of holistic pragmatism