DORSEY Gray L., Jurisculture, vol 3 : China, New Brunswick, Londres, Transaction Publishers, 1993, XIII + 182 p.

[Réponse de l'auteur au compte rendu publié dans Droit et Société, n° 27-1994, p. 501-504].

In his review of Jurisculture, vol 3 : China, M. Cabestan crédits me with undertaking to write an encyclopedia of the juridical cultures of the principal human societies of our planet. I hasten to disavow such a grand undertaking and to reject the structure of inquiry it would entail. Jurisculture seeks to understand the influences of fundamental ideas upon the organization and régulation of human societies in various times and places. By « fundamental » I mean ideas about the world, human nature, what is worth having, how we know, and who can know. I assume that human beings need society to survive and prosper and that we live in the world as we understand it to be. It follows that human beings form societies for the practical purposes of survival and well-being, but the organization and régulation of the auxiliary and complementary sets of activities that (functionally) constitutes society is necessarily done in terms