It is one of the central paradoxes of any legal system that it should appear at once so central to the imposition of decisive pronouncements aimed at the very structure of social relationships yet remain dependent on forces beyond its direct control for the acceptance and implementation of these strictures. This peculiar status of laws and legal institutions gives rise both to exaggerated claims for its impact on social change and equally unrealistic assertions that all legal systems merely follow and support processes whose fundamental operations are carried out in the broader spheres of social and political life. Like other institutions, a legal system performs distinctive tasks in accord with its own internal history and logic. But in its very design and operation it is deeply influenced by the struggles for control and influence that occur among its own personnel, and between them and other sectors of society. Being neither self-executing nor independently defined, statutory propositions and judicial opinions have impacts which are as difficult to trace in detail as they are wide-ranging and interconnected at large. Even in societies with elaborated and sharply delineated legal institutions, the role of the legal system in shaping or reflecting social and political patterns partakes of this confusion of distinctiveness and derivativeness.

In the spring of 1907, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Herbert Asquith, was asked in Parliament for his opinion on taxing the growing number of private automobiles in Great Britain. Such a measure, Asquith replied, would be an ‘almost ideal tax, because it is a tax on a luxury which is apt to degenerate into a nuisance’. This remark was typical of the British upper-class attitude toward the motor car in theearly decades of this century: it was unlikely that the automobile would become widely owned by the middle classes, and unthinkable that it could be owned by the lower classes. Such motoring as was to be done by men of humble station would be as chauffeurs and lorry drivers. The wealthy would continue to use their new self-propelled playthings for weekend pleasure trips in the country.

Before Denmark finally achieved parliamentary democracy in 1901, it was already well on the way to becoming a thorough-going welfare state and was, until about the Second World War, a leader in developing the institutions and ideology of welfare capitalism. The contrast with the United States, where democratic political institutions are much older, but where welfare institutions have developed more slowly and in very different form, is striking. The two countries, of course, vary enormously in size and circumstances, but as with any industrializing nation, they have some things in common: cities, an urban poor, an organized demand for the passage of social welfare legislation. A comparative view may reveal aspects of each country in sharper perspective than an examination of either in isolation. The question is: How is it that welfare institutions were so much more intellectually available in Denmark than in the United States? The conclusion is that institutions of modern welfare capitalism in Denmark were designed to resemble as much as possible traditional pre-democratic—and pre-socialist—Danish institutions, and that the institutions were successful precisely because they did not require any break with historical continuity and fit so well into long-familiar traditions and habits of thought.

Despite the historical significance of European decolonization after the Second World War, there has been no serious interpretive account of it as an overall process. A number of excellent case studies exist analyzing specific policies or periods in the imperial capitals or in the colonial territories, and there are several chronologically complete surveys of the decline of European rule overseas. These have neither been directed nor followed, however, by studies attempting to conceptualize synthetically the entire period. In default of a wide-ranging debate over the character of decolonization as an historical movement, a kind of conventional wisdom has grown up attributing the differences in the British and French experiences to a combination of their respective imperial traditions and the governing abilities of their domestic political institutions. As yet, there has been no systematic attempt to separate carefully the chief variables to be analyzed, to assign them weights of relative importance, and to coordinate them in an historical and comparative manner. This essay hopes to open discussion of these questions.

In this article I want to discuss a number of issues that have arisen out of my research into the structures of underdevelopment in Indonesia. First, some concepts that have been used in the analysis of Indonesian social structure will be examined. I shall show that these concepts, used in many cases as analytical tools are, in fact, aspects of peasant ideology. As such they should be objects of analysis rather than tools for analysis. The three concepts discussed in the first section of this paper are: the aliran, or vertical alliances described by Geertz and other members of the Modjokuto research team; ethnicity; and patron–clientage.

Primitive societies and barbarous societies and the historical societies of Europe and the East exhibit almost every conceivable variety of institutions, but in all of them, regardless of the form of social structure, men are always in the ascendancy, and this is perhaps the more evident the higher the civilization … so far as I can see, it is a plain matter of fact that it is so. Feminists have indeed said that this is because women have always been denied the opportunity of taking the lead; but we would still have to ask how it is that they have allowed the opportunity to be denied them …