The Invention of Law in the West

Law is a specific form of social regulation that is distinct from religion, ethics, and even politics, and is endowed with a strong and autonomous rationality. The invention of law, a crucial aspect of Western history, took place in ancient Rome. Aldo Schiavone, a world-renowned classicist, reconstructs this process with clear-eyed passion, following its track and structure over the centuries, setting out from the earliest origins and moving up to the threshold of Late Antiquity. The consolidation of the Roman Empire reinforced this foundational movement. The Empire, after all, was marked by an unprecedented accumulation of power capable of creating the conditions for transforming an archaic predisposition to ritual into an unrivaled science and technology for the control of human relations. Schiavone offers us a closely reasoned interpretative essay, set against the vast backdrop of a thousand years of Roman history. He returns us to the primal origins of Western juridical machinery and the discourse that was constructed around it--formalism, the pretense of neutrality, the relationship with political power. This is a landmark work of scholarship whose influence will be felt by classicists, historians, and legal scholars for years to come.

ISBN 0674047338   Pages 640 ISBN13 9780674047334 (What's this?)   Weight (grammes) 666 Publisher Harvard University Press   Reprint date 28-Jan-2011 12:00:00 am Imprint The Belknap Press   Published in Cambridge, Mass. Format Hardback   Height (mm) 235 Publication date 07 Dec 2011   Width (mm) 162 Translator Jeremy Carden, Antony Shugaar   Spine width (mm) 15 DEWEY 340.56   Academic level Postgraduate, Professional / Scholarly DEWEY edition DC22

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