In the fourth chapter of the book I examine the third and last moment of the genealogy of modern comparative law: comparative law as an autonomous discipline. The mythical moment in which the discipline emerges is the First International Comparative Law Conference organized in Paris in 1900. This conference established the discipline's general objectives - on one hand, the unification and harmonization of legal systems. This purpose, animated by the cosmopolitan spirit of its promoters, emphasized the similarities that the legal orders of the world have and evaluated the idea of unity of law positively. On the other hand, the creation of taxonomies that allow for ordering, describing, and understanding the complexities of the legal world. The paradigmatic product generated by the realization of this objective was the concept of legal families. This idea constitutes one of the axes of twentieth-century comparative law and remains relevant in the happenings of the twenty-first century.The concept of legal families is articulated and developed paradigmatically in the work of René David, in France, and K. Zweigert and H. Kötz, in Germany. In this chapter, I examine the types of subject, geographies, and ideas of legal history created by the legal families narrative constructed by these paradigmatic authors.

In the last chapter of the book, I examine the theoretical perspectives that question the narrative created by comparative modern law. Comparative law’s thought structures dominate an important part of the modern legal and political imagination. Nevertheless, these structures do not absolutely govern the way in which moderns give meaning to their experience. In its margins, there are theoretical perspectives that question them and try to articulate alternative normative horizons. Three of these perspectives are the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), the postcolonial studies of law, and critical comparative law. Each of these intellectual movements pursues distinct, precise objectives, such as the questioning of the imperial dimensions of international law, the critique of neocolonial legal relationships, or the questioning of the traditional methods and objectives of comparative law. Nevertheless, these movements share some elements that constitute this chapter's object of analysis. The aim of the chapter is thus not examining all dimensions, arguments, and authors that form each of these perspectives. What the chapter seeks is to describe and analyze how the three interact with the structures of thought of comparative law that form the basis of modern law. These intellectual movements describe these structures of thought as dominant, evaluate them negatively, and intend to replace them.

Legal Barbarians has two general objectives that intersect and complement each other. On one hand, the book seeks to describe and analyze how modern comparative law has contributed to the construction of modern subjectivities. On the other hand, it seeks to describe and analyze how this field of law has contributed to creating conceptual geographies and ways of understanding history that have influenced the legal conscience of individuals directly or indirectly, implicitly or explicitly, linked to enlightened modernity.

In the first chapter, I explore the relationship between narrative and identity. More precisely, in this chapter, I argue (i) that narratives construct and give unity to individual and collective identities; (ii) that modern law, understood as part of modern culture and not as its consequence, constructs a narrative that has contributed to the creation of the modern subject – a narrative that is built around the conceptual opposition "subject of law/legal barbarian"; and (iii) that comparative law has played a central role in the formation of this conceptual opposition. Comparative law has been fundamental for forming the legal “self” and "other" of modernity.