The second great transition is the organic development of the Western legal system – from legal frameworks for succession and transmitting landed property to the oaths of fealty, on into a macroscopic nexus of institutions, practices, and beliefs that formed a hypernetwork within the wider society. The evolution of the legal tradition, forging a system of strong but limited states, is a story of increasing returns. No legal document or pact like the Magna Carta exists in China. Its aristocracies never gained sufficient military, political, or ideological strength to demand rights that could constrain the sovereign via institutions. Imperial officialdom did not intend to negotiate with a corporate body in possession of its own resources and rights. Nor did the bureaucratic clans have any incentive to stem the centralization of authority. They acted as representatives of the state’s interests, not those of civil society. The legalist/Confucian state exercised authority over economic resources to an extent that no European monarch could hope to accomplish. It also counterbalanced power with a code of ethical responsibilities to ensure the basic needs of the population.

Harold J. Berman, a Jewish convert to Christianity, was a pioneer in the study of legal history, legal philosophy, and law and religion. He mapped the deep Christian and post-Christian foundations of the Western legal tradition as a whole and of many of its particular legal doctrines. He developed an integrative jurisprudence that transcended many of the dualistic dialectics of the past, and that reconciled natural law theory, legal positivism, and historical jurisprudence with each other on the basis of a holistic theory of God and humanity. He offered creative explorations of the roles of language, speech, and dialogue in the development of local and global legal communities. And he developed an innovative theory of the religious dimensions of law, the legal dimensions of religion, and the need for a healthy interaction of legal ideas, institutions, and methods in a just and orderly society. Despite the tensions that exist in all societies between religious faith and legal order, he argued, law and religion inevitably interact, and neither can maintain its vitality independently of the other. At the highest level, surely the just and the holy are one.