Law and the Rise of Capitalism
Jonathan Pearce
Issue date: 9/1/02 Section: Arts & Leisure
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Professor Michael E. Tigar has released a new and updated edition of his book, Law and the Rise of Capitalism. Originally published in 1977, this book provides a voluminous history of the role of legal ideologies in the fall of feudalism in Europe and in the beginning of capitalism. He further delineates his thoughts on the role of lawyers as active participants in social change.
Tigar describes 800 years of legal history beginning with the Crusades and continuing through the emergence of the nation-state as a means to protect and simplify commerce. This very slow yet gradual change Tigar describes requires a "jurisprudence of insurgency," which he believes was formidably at work in the aggregation of capitalism taken from the hands of feudal leaders.
At the heart of the jurisprudence of insurgency is the idea that, "legal ideology is the expression of social struggle," Tigar says in the final chapter of the original book. In the efforts of the feudal bourgeois to gain control over capital, property and even rights to contract, they utilized the powers of various courts and tribunals in conjunction with their own legal ideologies in order to slowly bring about the desired changes and then to protect those changes under the power of the state. Finally, as Tiger says in striking resemblance to Marx, "The principles of personal freedom and fairness to individuals have come under increasing attack from elements within the ruling class as it has shed its revolutionary sentiments and has itself been challenged; needless to say, the bourgeoisie has no desire to see itself displaced by a group taking advantage of the very freedoms it once relied upon and championed."
Tigar believes that lawyers have a unique role to fill within all societies. There are always social changes that need to be affected, especially in a modern world complete with highly advanced technological societies living in coordination with countries of limited scientific knowledge. Because of these and countless other conflicting situations, the world is constantly undergoing social upheavals in both small and drastic ways.
Tigar describes 800 years of legal history beginning with the Crusades and continuing through the emergence of the nation-state as a means to protect and simplify commerce. This very slow yet gradual change Tigar describes requires a "jurisprudence of insurgency," which he believes was formidably at work in the aggregation of capitalism taken from the hands of feudal leaders.
At the heart of the jurisprudence of insurgency is the idea that, "legal ideology is the expression of social struggle," Tigar says in the final chapter of the original book. In the efforts of the feudal bourgeois to gain control over capital, property and even rights to contract, they utilized the powers of various courts and tribunals in conjunction with their own legal ideologies in order to slowly bring about the desired changes and then to protect those changes under the power of the state. Finally, as Tiger says in striking resemblance to Marx, "The principles of personal freedom and fairness to individuals have come under increasing attack from elements within the ruling class as it has shed its revolutionary sentiments and has itself been challenged; needless to say, the bourgeoisie has no desire to see itself displaced by a group taking advantage of the very freedoms it once relied upon and championed."
Tigar believes that lawyers have a unique role to fill within all societies. There are always social changes that need to be affected, especially in a modern world complete with highly advanced technological societies living in coordination with countries of limited scientific knowledge. Because of these and countless other conflicting situations, the world is constantly undergoing social upheavals in both small and drastic ways.