In the fourth chapter of the book I examine the third and last moment of the genealogy of modern comparative law: comparative law as an autonomous discipline. The mythical moment in which the discipline emerges is the First International Comparative Law Conference organized in Paris in 1900. This conference established the discipline's general objectives - on one hand, the unification and harmonization of legal systems. This purpose, animated by the cosmopolitan spirit of its promoters, emphasized the similarities that the legal orders of the world have and evaluated the idea of unity of law positively. On the other hand, the creation of taxonomies that allow for ordering, describing, and understanding the complexities of the legal world. The paradigmatic product generated by the realization of this objective was the concept of legal families. This idea constitutes one of the axes of twentieth-century comparative law and remains relevant in the happenings of the twenty-first century.The concept of legal families is articulated and developed paradigmatically in the work of René David, in France, and K. Zweigert and H. Kötz, in Germany. In this chapter, I examine the types of subject, geographies, and ideas of legal history created by the legal families narrative constructed by these paradigmatic authors.

In the last chapter of the book, I examine the theoretical perspectives that question the narrative created by comparative modern law. Comparative law’s thought structures dominate an important part of the modern legal and political imagination. Nevertheless, these structures do not absolutely govern the way in which moderns give meaning to their experience. In its margins, there are theoretical perspectives that question them and try to articulate alternative normative horizons. Three of these perspectives are the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), the postcolonial studies of law, and critical comparative law. Each of these intellectual movements pursues distinct, precise objectives, such as the questioning of the imperial dimensions of international law, the critique of neocolonial legal relationships, or the questioning of the traditional methods and objectives of comparative law. Nevertheless, these movements share some elements that constitute this chapter's object of analysis. The aim of the chapter is thus not examining all dimensions, arguments, and authors that form each of these perspectives. What the chapter seeks is to describe and analyze how the three interact with the structures of thought of comparative law that form the basis of modern law. These intellectual movements describe these structures of thought as dominant, evaluate them negatively, and intend to replace them.

The third chapter of the book analyzes the second moment in this genealogy of modern comparative law: comparative legislative studies. This second lapse in the construction of comparative law has its primary development in the nineteenth century. In this chapter, in particular, I examine Henry Summer Maine's work. The specialized literature recognizes him as another of the founding fathers of the discipline. The analysis of Maine's work revolves around three axes. In the first, the most important, I examine the concept of evolution as progress that the author is committed to. The historical method and the comparative method are the instruments that, for Maine, allow for describing and examining the legal and political evolution of humanity. For Maine, Europe is the locus of progress while India, as a paradigmatic representation of the Orient and of an undifferentiated "rest of the world," is the locus of barbarianism. The line that contains history is also occupied by a dual conceptual geography: on one hand, modern Indo-Europe and barbarian Indo-Europe, on the other, modern and barbarian Indo-Europe (that have a common culture) and the rest of the uncivilized world. In the narrative that Maine constructs, this spatial and temporal axis is also inhabited by particular subjectivities: the modern European, the Indian (as a representative of the oriental) and the individual from the savage rest of the world.

Legal Barbarians has two general objectives that intersect and complement each other. On one hand, the book seeks to describe and analyze how modern comparative law has contributed to the construction of modern subjectivities. On the other hand, it seeks to describe and analyze how this field of law has contributed to creating conceptual geographies and ways of understanding history that have influenced the legal conscience of individuals directly or indirectly, implicitly or explicitly, linked to enlightened modernity.