The third chapter of the book analyzes the second moment in this genealogy of modern comparative law: comparative legislative studies. This second lapse in the construction of comparative law has its primary development in the nineteenth century. In this chapter, in particular, I examine Henry Summer Maine's work. The specialized literature recognizes him as another of the founding fathers of the discipline. The analysis of Maine's work revolves around three axes. In the first, the most important, I examine the concept of evolution as progress that the author is committed to. The historical method and the comparative method are the instruments that, for Maine, allow for describing and examining the legal and political evolution of humanity. For Maine, Europe is the locus of progress while India, as a paradigmatic representation of the Orient and of an undifferentiated "rest of the world," is the locus of barbarianism. The line that contains history is also occupied by a dual conceptual geography: on one hand, modern Indo-Europe and barbarian Indo-Europe, on the other, modern and barbarian Indo-Europe (that have a common culture) and the rest of the uncivilized world. In the narrative that Maine constructs, this spatial and temporal axis is also inhabited by particular subjectivities: the modern European, the Indian (as a representative of the oriental) and the individual from the savage rest of the world.

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.

In the second chapter of the book I explore the first moment of the genealogy of modern comparative law. This first moment, instrumental comparative studies, is where modern comparative law emerges. In this stage, comparative law is not interpreted as an autonomous discipline within the law. Rather, comparative studies are an instrument for the advance of other disciplines or of other areas of law. In this section of the book, more precisely, I focus on the analysis of Montesquieu's work. This author is particularly important given that the specialized literature recognizes him as the father of modern comparative law. Montesquieu has been interpreted by this literature as the person who uses the comparative method paradigmatically in this first moment of the discipline; his work has come to represent emblematic forms of the use of this method; some of his conclusions have become part of the canon of modern law and politics. In The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu uses empirical information on the law and politics of European and non-European countries to justify his theses on the relationship between natural law and positive law and on the links between positive law and the geographic and psychological characteristics of peoples, as well as to promote a normative political agenda: a legally limited monarchy for his political community. In the process, Montesquieu constructs subjectivities that are central in the creation of modern law: the European and the Asian. In addition, Montesquieu constructs an imagined space that these two types of subjects inhabit: Europe and Asia. Finally, Montesquieu imagines legal and political time in a dual manner: inertially static and dynamic in potency