There is an image by M.C. Escher in which a staircase rises in perfect geometrical order, each step aligned, each angle exact — yet the ascent loops back upon itself. The movement is continuous, coherent, even rigorous; what unsettles is not disorder but correspondence. One climbs, and finds oneself where one began. In The Wrong of Law, Valerie Kerruish identifies a comparable motif at the heart of modern rationality. Across Hegel’s identity of method and content, Marx’s definition of value as a self-reproducing abstraction, Frege’s reduction of arithmetic to logic, and Gödel’s incompleteness proofs, she traces a single architectonic problem: the attempt of a system to ground itself from within. The trajectory of The Wrong of Law is organised around what Kerruish calls “thought surprising itself”: the moment in which a system that seeks to secure its own foundation discovers that its ground cannot be established without remainder. In her reading of Hegel’s Science...