The Limits of the Legal Complex raises the scholarship on legal complexes to a new level of scholarly refinement. This superb combination of empirical studies on Nordic countries, and its broad, constructively critical, theoretical extensions, notably advance comparative and historical theory on the conditions under which legal complexes have, and have not, mobilized for basic legal freedoms, an open civil society and moderate state—key elements of
political liberalism—since the 17th century in Europe and across the world thereafter.