In terms of the history of the social sciences, the latter quarter of the nineteenth century was characterised in no uncertain manner by neo-Kantianism. The revival in question was aimed at rehabilitating the Kantian concept of science as a system, unified essentially by the idea of a system, rather than by any more realistic or historical classification of its subject matter.² The most notable and far-reaching effects of this revival were to be the constitution of the sciences of linguistics and of law. In both cases, the major portion of the nineteenth century had been dominated by attacks upon the received othodoxies of universal grammar and of exegetical legal studies, respectively, and their displacement by the uncertainties of creationist and historical methodologies. It was only towards the beginning of the twentieth century that the fully scientific and objective status of the disciplines in question could again be proclaimed and the community of the faithful be reassured. The manner of such reassurance was strikingly similar within the disciplines of language and law. It may be characterised broadly as that of the project of constituting autonomous sciences or axiomatic normative systems, whose principal value adherence was to transpire to be the positivistic postulate of order and of the logic of its internal development within a social life rationalistically conceived as being governed and regulated by imperative linguistic and legal codes.