Twentieth-Century Legal Metaphors for Self and Society

Abstract

Contract was a powerful trope at the nineteenth century’s end, representing society as a dynamic field of competing and transacting wills. This paper traces the emergence of other legal metaphors for society in twentieth century American legal thought, social thought, and popular culture. The newer legal metaphors included interests, claims, process, institutions, and transactions. Taken together, these metaphors testified to a new experience of the self as a contingent performance enabled by an institutional medium or network.