摘要:In the 20th century, a specifically normative integration of Western civilization collapsed – and in the 20th century all paradigms corresponding to this system lost their meaning. The symbols of a great Western (legal-) society regressed into nothing more than shallow and abstract nationalisms; visions of a just community were transformed into the law of nation-focused social engineers on both sides of the iron curtain. Expedience, practicability, and the reduction of law to an apparatus of technical tricks, replaced fundamental legal convictions. A world ends when its metaphor has died. These are the core theories in Harold J. Berman’s book Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition, which made him famous.