1. The problem of jurisprudence, or telling the truth of law : an entry into recurring questions?
2. Origins : classical Greece and the idea of natural law
3. The laws of nature, man's power and god : the synthesis of mediaeval Christendom
4. Thomas Hobbes and the origins of the imperative theory of law : or mana transformed into earthly power
5. David Hume : defender of experience and tradition against the claims of reason to guide modernity
6. Immanuel Kant and the promotion of a critical rational modernity
7. From Rousseau to Hegel : the birth of the expressive tradition of law and the dream of Law's ethical life
8. Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill : the early development of a utilitarian foundation for law
9. John Austin and the misunderstood birth of legal positivism
10. Karl Marx and the Marxist heritage for understanding law and society
11. Weber, Nietzsche and the Holocaust : towards the disenchantment of modernity
12. The pure theory of Hans Kelsen
13. The high point of legal positivism : HLA Hart and the theory of law as a self-referring system of rules
14. Liberalism and the idea of the just society in late modernity : a reading of Kelsen, Fuller, Rawls, Nozick and communitarian critics
15. Ronald Dworkin and the struggle against disenchantment : or law within the interpretative ethics of liberal jurisprudence
16. Scepticism, suspicion and the critical legal studies movement
17. Understanding feminist jurisprudence
18. Concluding remarks : or reflections on the temptations for jurisprudence on post-modernity.