Book excerpt: The isolation of law as a discipline has ensured that the theoretical preoccupations of legal scholars have remained insulated from the social sciences. But the concept of law and its relationship to morality is of crucial significance to social theory, and this impressive book examines some of the major sociological and jurisprudential writers on rationality and its relationship to action. Analysing the interdependency of philosophy, sociology and law, it shows that the central methodological problems of the social sciences require an objective morality for their resolution - a theory of Natural Law. Indeed, this challenging investigation illustrates that such a theory is available, and that a social science built upon these ethical foundations must serve as the basis of any rational legal praxis.