Community organizing within local faith-based institutions (churches, synagogues, mosques, etc.) is now widespread in the US and has seen adoption in several other countries. As congregation-based organizing has grown and matured as a field over four decades, leaders have drawn strong connections between the social and political goals of community organizing and the religious traditions and values of the participating congregations. This blending of organizing practices and religious traditions has been crucial to the success of this approach. This chapter describes some of the practices that congregation-based community organizing initiatives employ to build power among residents who are actively participating in defining and deciding how to alter the systems that affect their lives. A statewide organizing federation (PICO California) and the reflections of influential organizer Jose Carrasco serve as a case example of the intertwining of interfaith values with a power-based organizing approach.

Chapter 2 presents the theoretical approach that informs the argument and analysis. I view the generation and distribution of power in society, and how and why that evolves over time, as inherently linked and thus the fundamental context for social inquiry. The chapter defines social power, arguing that power needs to be understood as something distributed among agents. Thus the definition of social actors is also central, and especially the fact that in the modern period these are increasingly collective, corporate entities, based on modes of association other than kinship. The sharpening and proliferation of such corporate actors, and the domestication of competition, are reciprocal processes. Competition and competitors are mutually defining. Drawing on the tradition of cultural ecology, I also clarify what I mean by ‘social evolution’, emphasising a shift in focus from ‘societies’ to forms of social organisation as the key units of analysis.

This chapter transports us to Hellenistic Rome, and to the issuance of a legal privilege from the Senate of Rome to the polis of Delphi. The chapter shows how empirical formality and substantive rationality in law came together to enable ancient legal documents to work as instruments of legal power. In seeing how Rome deployed instruments of legal power - legal privileges that performatively created and memoralized patronage relationships with subordinated peoples - to forge an empire, we see how instruments of legal power were used to create governing communities and zones of exclusivity in Mediterranean antiquity. We also see how zones of exclusivity granted to city-states like Delphi are analogous to the zones of exclusivity granted to modern corporations like Facebook, in the form of intellectual property.

This chapter introduces a basic theoretical conception of law as an obliging force, which binds us together in governing communities, thereby enabling property of various types to exist. The chapter also sketches a stylized historical narrative, drawn from Max Weber's developmental sociology of law, about how intellectual property emerged, as a new type of legal property. The stylized narrative envisions three basic "layers" to the modern institution of intellectual property, which roughly correspond to three different paradigms for the obliging force of law: empirical formality, semantic formality, and substantive rationality. The historical development and weaving together of these three "layers" in the obliging force of law thus becomes an overarching narrative (or meta-narrative) for the book.

Property and social privilege are two of the most enduring forms of authority, and families often jealously guard the control and transfer of these sources of influence. This chapter explains the social conventions around the Hindu extended family (encompassing control of property, social alliances, and the politics of mobility and public voice) that govern the intrahousehold distribution of power. After exploring how they have been constructed, I study the unintended consequences of multiple attempts during British colonial rule to legislate gender-equalizing social reforms. The British attempted to homogenize diverse religious, spiritual, and pragmatic traditions into a single code with a tiny elite of highly educated Brahman men at the top. Comfortably, the elite’s sense of “tradition” looked much like the male British colonial ideal of “classical patriarchy” in terms of control of property and social authority. Ironically, this British-Brahman imposition has become integral to India’s legal code. The chapter next details the changes to the ecosystem of norms around women’s traditional property rights, and their enforcement, from independence to contemporary India. Where relevant, I include insights from my field research about the continuity of familial expectations around what it means to be a “good” Hindu son or daughter.

In this chapter I present a new theoretical proposal based on the distinction among several modes of production of law that operate in society in articulation with as many modes of production of power and knowledge. The main features of this framework are the following. Capitalist societies within the world system are constituted by six structural places, six basic clusters of social relations, which define the horizon of relevant determination. This horizon establishes both outer limits and possibilities, thereby allowing for a minimalist order, a chaos-friendly order, an ordering principle that operates through complexity, fragmentation, hybridization and, above all, through constellation. My argument is that the political character of social relations of power does not lie in one particular form of power, namely citizenplace power (domination), but rather in the aggregate power resulting from the constellations among the different forms of power in different social fields. Similarly, the legal character of social relations of law does not derive from one single form of law, namely from citizenplace law (state law), but rather from the different constellations among different forms of law. Finally, the epistemological profile of social relations is not provided by one specific epistemological form, namely the epistemological form of the worldplace (science), but rather by the different constellations of knowledges that people and groups produce and use in concrete social fields.