During the second decade of the twentieth century, in the midst of a radical transformation of legal reality in Europe and North America, Max Weber drafted the component parts of what would be titled, “The Sociology of Law.” For nearly half a century the status and function of law had been changing in a fundamental way, summed up in the following oversimplified manner: law became less of a purportedly discrete safeguard of society against the state and more of a multifaceted state agent of social restructuring. In some instances this restructuring was society-generated, as in the case of social welfare, or state-initiated, as in administrative policy directed at “regulation” of various kinds. This transformation from a state that was bound by the liberal rule of law, or Rechtsstaat, to the administrative/welfare state, or Sozialstaat, was experienced in particularly dramatic ways in Central Europe. Perhaps as a result, it inspired some of the most sensitive analyses of the relationship of government, society, and the law produced anywhere in industrial societies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Moreover, the transformation itself would reach a more catastrophic culmination in Central Europe than anywhere else in the first part of the twentieth century. As stated in the previous chapter, Weber's study of law is certainly emblematic of the high level of legal analysis in the period, and his related political writings of the same time are often associated with the calamity of the era.