LAUSR

Ruth Dukes has written an important and timely book, especially as Europe’s social model is increasingly fragile and the crisis and austerity policies have been used to justify weakening collective and autonomous workers’ voice. The Labour Constitution: The Enduring Idea of Labour Law reminds us that one of the original goals of labour law was to bring democracy to the market and to limit the coercive and corrosive effects of capitalism as a total social system. Through her reconstruction of Hugo Sinzheimer’s conception of the labour constitution in the early years of the Weimar Republic and Otto KahnFreund’s idea of collective laissez-faire to capture what was distinctive about industrial relations and the law in the UK in the 1950s, which she brings into conversation with the law of the labour market approach to labour law that has predominated in the UK since the late 1980s, Dukes emphasises the relationship between ideas and the social context in which they are produced and circulate. She abstracts Sinzheimer’s idea of the labour constitution from the political, economic, and social context in which it was developed in order to revitalise a too-long dormant political imaginary of labour law, one which emphasises the need to impose democratic constraints on the operation of capitalist labour markets. As the series editors of the Oxford Monographs on Labour Law, of which Dukes’ book is a part, note, Dukes turns ‘historical insights into a critical searchlight’ which she trains upon the work of ‘a composite genre of writing by a group of authors’, including two of the three series editors, who conceptualise labour law as the law of the labour market. She is critical of this approach because its focus on the market’s economic function ignores both the political and social functions of capitalism, as well as the political and emancipatory lineage of labour law. Dukes reminds labour law scholars that Kahn-Freund, the doyen of British labour law, adopted a sociological or socio-legal methodology. For Kahn-Freund, the sociology of law established ‘the social effect of the norm,... the way in which it appears in society and... its social function’. Dukes embraces this methodology, demonstrating a fluent understanding of German industrial relations, labour law and politics from the Weimar