Reviews for Law and the Rise of Capitalism

The average rating for Law and the Rise of Capitalism based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-09-18 00:00:00 Howard Kim Tigar and Levy first published "Law and the Rise of Capitalism" in 1977 as one part of a series of interventions made by leftwing attorneys and legal scholars seeking to analyze Western law from a Marxist perspective, which would eventually become known as the critical legal studies school of jurisprudence. Their book is a sweeping account of the origins of bourgeois law from around 1000 AD in the early forms of mercantile law and the surviving legal traditions of the Roman Empire, through to the thought of crucial legal theorists of the absolutist states of Europe such as Philippe de Beaumanoir and Sir Thomas More, and finally to the triumph of the bourgeois revolution in England and France which led in different ways to the codification of new legal norms. The book is a very well written and lucid account which successfully balances European political history, economic development and legal theory in a way that gives short shrift to none - which is scarecely short of incredible in terms of the law, one of the thorniest and densest of academic subjects. In their view, bourgeois law emerges from the medieval sources including the Roman and Byzantine traditions, feudal/seigneurial obligations, the canon law of the Roman Catholic Church and early international mercantile law, which is constantly reworked, adjusted and repurposed according to the requirements of the time. Their account centers on the contract as the center of bourgeois legal ideology, which was the outward form of the revolutionary rise of capitalism, replacing feudal ties and obligations with the freedom of individuals to make agreements and its codification (some would say ossification) in the contractural form. Tigar, being an activist lawyer, concludes the book and its new afterward with some thought-provoking observations on "the jurisprudence of insurrection," the name by which he refers to revolutionary lawyers who take the side of the oppressed, exploiting the contradictions of bourgeois law and forcing the ruling class to recognize the content rather than just the forms of individual liberty and freedom of association. In his view the law, contra bourgeois schools of jurisprudence, is not a system but a process which is contested and subject to constant change by different classes in society. While this is certainly a reasonable and correct conclusion, much of the ending is marred by Tigar's, an associate of the Monthly Review school of Sweezy and Baran, belief that the states of Eastern Europe, China and Cuba were socialist and that therefore their inability to replace bourgeois jurisprudence was merely due to the persistence of old norms and ways of thinking. Similarly, Tigar and Levy's account of the rise of capitalism in this light could be criticized as what Robert Brenner calls "neo-Smithian Marxism." Without taking a hard Brennerite position, their view of capitalism as beginning with the spread of commercial relations within the towns and feudal communes that marches onward, with a few interruptions, to trimuph in 1640, 1776 and 1789 ignores the vast differences in social relations between the high middle ages and emergent capitalism from the 16th century or so. A sense of the novelty of the revolution that replaced feudal social relations with capitalist ones would have made their history stronger and more sensitive.

Review # 2 was written on 2021-03-09 00:00:00 David Shea The jurisprudence of insurgency! Loved this book. A great read for a lefty lawyer.