The Turn to Process: American Legal, Political, and Economic Thought, 1870–1970

Kunal Parker'sThe Turn to Process offers an elegant and insightful account of what Parker identifies as the modernist "turn to process" in the disciplines of law, political science, and economics from 1870 to 1970 in the United States.The book charts how pre-20 th -century truths that had been thought of as foundational, such as the common law, the group, money/man/labor and market, became "methods, techniques, process."Modernism for Parker is "an entire orientation toward the world" (9) which focuses on how things are done (as in the work of Jackson Pollock, who adorns the cover) rather than on what things are.If for Pollock, a painting becomes an impression of how one paints that emphasizes how painting happens, rather than what a painting is of, then Parker suggests that similar transformations hold in many other fields, from sociology to music.Law for instance, Parker shows, becomes how one does law; knowing law involves learning methods as substance.So too, politics and economics become matters of process or method.