This chapter is concerned with ‘the awakening of the modern spirit’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It explores the response of lawyers and writers to the growing gap between the traditional normative world of custom and rules on the one hand, and ‘the wants of their actual life’ on the other. Matthew Arnold registered ‘this strange disease of modern life’, in poems like ‘The Scholar-Gypsy’:

Arnold saw the rapid changes of modernity as traumatic. Marshall Berman, writing one hundred years later, shared Arnold's sense of ‘the maelstrom of modern life’, but viewed it more ambivalently as ‘an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world – and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are’.