Book, Magic and the Law, A 1/14[LS]

Rereading Gurvitch's study allows us to reestablish, in the history of sociological thought, a certain truth: that sociologists, ethnologists and anthropologists did not wait for structuralism to understand that magic forms a well-articulated system and, in fact, bearer of its immanent rationality. The study of science, as well as epistemology and systemicism, had already demonstrated this. And in this fruitful perspective, Gurvitch showed what the refinement of sociological concepts, in terms of social times, particular groups or “levels of depth”, could bring to jurists. For a century, consciously or not, the law has benefited from this, in the sense of a better symbiosis of the general and the particular, the abstract and the concrete, the sacred and the profane, the mystical and the political, the East and the West , of fundamental and profoundly innovative writings, such as those of Max Weber. But it would be unfair to ignore Gurvitch's place at his side. The present reissue tends precisely to do justice to it regarding the relationships between law, magic and nature.