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2 Social & Legal Studies 5 (1993)

handle is hein.journals/solestu2 and id is 1 raw text is: FROM PROPERTY TO CONTRACT: POLITICAL ECONOMY AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF VALUE IN ENGLISH COMMON LAW JAMES HENRY BERGERON University College Dublin, Ireland INTRODUCTION FFER, ACCEPTANCE and consideration are the fundamental rules defining contract in the Anglo-American tradition. During the Formal- ist period in legal reasoning, these rules were applied as a non- ideological process of deduction. They still are in some law schools and casebooks. Behind the apparent doctrinal purity of contract law, however, lies a menagerie of political and economic values. The law is seldom ideologically whole; rather, contract embraces tensions wrought of the uneasy coexistence of competing philosophies. The received tradition, the basic curriculum of every LLB student, makes two fundamental assumptions. The first is that contract is not property. The two concepts are rigidly divided, both conceptually and in the organization of teaching and scholarship. Little comment is made on the historical tensions between property-based and contractual paradigms of legal relationships. Yet this eighteenth-century legal crisis was central to the creation of modern contract law. That crisis was linked to the development of the second assumption of the SOCIAL & LEGAL STmDIES (SAGE, London, Newbury Park and New Delhi), Vol. 2 (1993), 5-23