John Henry Schlegel

Flight from Fallibility: How Theory Triumphed over Experience in the West. By Henry J. Perkinson. Westport, CT: Praeger Press, 2002. Pp. x, 154.

All historians tell stories. Some rely on explicit narrative; others, on the narrative implicit in their analytic framework. Professor Henry J. Perkinson prefers explicit narrative, and for good reason. At his best he is very good at it. His pocket examinations of Anglo-American political and economic history are often perceptive and always quite delightful. Overall his stories are of decline—the decline in our understanding of knowing after Plato, the decline in Anglo-American governance after Lincoln, the decline in the free market after Adam Smith, and the decline in moral behavior after Rousseau. Now, I have nothing against stories of decline. Still, there is something quite bothersome in Perkinsons narratives. My bother begins with his hero, Karl Popper, and his treatment of that hero. Popper understood that human reason is fallible, as Perkinson asserts, but more importantly, Popper attempted to define “science,†to demarcate it from other human activities. In so doing, Popper asserted that knowledge does not come from the identification of correct ideas either by confirmation through experience or experiment, or by relation to foundational principles. For him both are logically impossible. Rather knowledge comes from the falsification of a factual proposition logically deduced from a stated hypothesis.

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As one who has suggested in print that Christopher Columbus Langdell was a loony, I am singularly pleased that Bruce Kimball has so carefully demonstrated that Kit was a regular guy just trying to teach his classes and learn some law. But this observation seems to me to be not particularly relevant to the debate about Langdell that I have mostly watched, but occasionally commented on. I shall try to recreate that debate as best I can, to show where it stands, and so, to identify where an understanding of Langdells teaching places us.