Responsive Interdisciplinarity—new Beginnings and Unrealized Opportunities

As Chap. 3 has shown, nineteenth-century jurisprudence gave rise to a reflective-theoretical concept of double autonomy, which manifested itself in in interdisciplinary discourses of indifference (Ehrlich), of factual hierarchy as dominance either of jurisprudence (Kantorowicz) or sociology (Marx, Durkheim, Tönnies), but also already brought to light approaches of more responsive thinking (Weber, Geiger). While the discourses characterized by the autonomization of jurisprudence externalized the question of its social practice to sociology—which thereby gained autonomy in its own right—, the new autonomy of sociology as an empirical science surprisingly quickly led to the outsourcing of practical references to legal theory (Weber) or remained without lasting influence in the history of sociological theory (Geiger). The founding phase of the sociology of law, as should have become clear from the previous considerations, was characterized by a mixture of contradictory reflective discourses from which no identity of the interdisciplinary field could form.