Table Of ContentHistory, Law
and the Human Sciences
Professor Donald R. Kelley
Donald R. Kelley
History, Law
and the Human Sciences
Medieval and Renaissance Perspectives
VARIORUM REPRINTS
London 1984
British Library CIP data Kelley, Donald R.
History, law and the human sciences.
—(Collected studies series; CS205)
1. Historiography—History
I. Title
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ISBN 0-86078-153-4
Copyright © 1984 by Variorum Reprints
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CONTENTS
Introduction ix-xi
I Gaius Noster: Substructures
of Western Social Thought 619-648
The American Historical Review 84.
Washington, D.C., 1979
II Clio and the Lawyers.
Forms of Historical Consciousness
in Medieval Jurisprudence 25-49
Medievalia et Humanistica, new series, 5.
Denton, Texas, 1974
III De origine feudorum:
The Beginnings of an Historical Problem 207-228
Speculum XXXIX.
Cambridge, Mass., 1964
IV Vera Philosophia:
The Philosophical Significance
of Renaissance Jurisprudence 267-279
Journal of the History of Philosophy XIV.
St. Louis, Missouri, 1976
V The Rise of Legal History
in the Renaissance 174-194
History and Theory IX.
Middletown, Ct., 1970
Civil Science in the Renaissance:
Jurisprudence Italian Style 777-794
The Historical Journal 22.
Cambridge, 1979
Civil Science in the Renaissance:
Jurisprudence in the French Manner 261-276
History of European Ideas 2.
Oxford, 1981
The Development and Context
of Bodin’s Method 123-150
Jean Bodin: Verhandlungen der
Internationalen Bodin Tagung, ed. H. Denzer.
(Miinchener Studien zur Politik, 18.)
Munich: C. H. Beck, 1973
Louis Le Caron philosophe 30-49
Philosophy and Humanism. Renaissance
Essays in Honor of Paul Oskar Kristeller,
ed. Edward P. Mahoney.
Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1976
Murd’rous Machiavel in France:
A Post Mortem
545-559
Political Science Quarterly LXXXV.
New York, 1970
History, English Law and the Renaissance 24-51
Past and Present 65.
Oxford, 1974
Vll
XII Vico’s Road: From Philology
to Jurisprudence and Back 15-29
Giambattista Vico’s Science of Humanity,
ed. G. Tagliacozzo & D. P. Verene.
Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1976
XIII The Prehistory of Sociology:
Montesquieu, Vico and the Legal Tradition 133-144
Journal of the History of the Behavioural
Sciences 16.
Brandon, Vermont, 1980
XIV The Metaphysics of Law:
An Essay on the Very Young Marx 350-367
The American Historical Review 83.
Washington, D.C., 1978
XV Hermes, Clio, Themis:
Historical Interpretation and
Legal Hermeneutics 644-668
Journal of Modern History 55.
Chicago, Illinois, 1983
Index 1-7
This volume contains a total of 334 pages.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
The articles in this volume, as in all others in the
Collected Studies Series, have not been given a new,
continuous pagination. In order to avoid confusion,
and to facilitate their use where these same studies
have been referred to elsewhere, the original
pagination has been maintained wherever possible.
Each article has been given a Roman number in
order of appearance, as listed in the Contents. This
number is repeated on each page and quoted in the
index entries.
INTRODUCTION
It is not retrospective illusion, I hope, that gives these essays a
certain coherence and constancy of direction, despite their
chronological and international sprawl. The underlying question
is one that has preoccupied me even before beginning my
historical apprenticeship. “How curious, after all, is the way in
which we moderns think about our world!” I remember being
struck by this opening sentence from E. R. Burtt’s Metaphysical
Foundations of Modern Science and thinking later how much
more curious, perhaps, was the way in which we think about the
world of culture — our culture and those which we can penetrate
to some extent. I still think so, even though we may be, many of
us, post-modern and little subject to such sentiments of
wonderment.
All of these papers, stretching back over some twenty years,
are directed to the question of how western scholars have tried to
investigate and to interpret their (and to some extent our)
cultural world. My point of departure was the sixteenth-century
phase of Renaissance humanism. This is the subject of essays III,
V and VIII-X, all of them byproducts of my Foundations of
Modern Historical Scholarship (1970), which I hoped would recall
and cut a small parallel to Burtt’s classic work. From this limited
base I moved into other cultural contexts, especially Italian,
German and English (e.g., essays VI, XI, and XIV); ranged
backwards and forwards in time from antiquity and the middle
ages (I and II) to the present century (XV); and shifted emphasis
from historiography to the European legal tradition, which has
always seemed to me the principal vehicle of social and cultural
thought.
More especially, my first area of study was the study of history,
its theory as well as practice, in the sixteenth century, including
not only humanist perspectives on “antiquity” but also more
conservative notions of “tradition”. The link with law was
essential for two reasons. The first is the importance of
jurisprudence for historical method (the Italian ars historica being
transformed into the French methodus) and universal history —
X
the “law of nations” (jus gentium) becoming the target of a series
of historical and comparative studies leading from Bodin to the
work of Vico, Montesquieu and others (nos. VII, XII, XIII). The
second reason is the potential of legal scholarship for the
development of political, institutional and social history. This in
turn encouraged me to examination of the mainstream tradition
of professional jurisprudence, extending ultimately from Gaius to
Savigny (and his student Marx, who was in a sense a renegade
jurist) and beyond, especially as it related to the history of society
and culture. Most important here were legal discussions of the
origins of laws and particular institutions (such as feudalism) and
the importance of history in the development of legal
hermeneutics.
Various expeditions into the European legal tradition,
especially in the medieval period, persuaded me that interest in
“historical consciousness,” even very broadly defined, did not at
all adequately express the value of jurisprudence for social and
cultural studies. For “civil science” (as medieval jurists called
their discipline) entailed a philosophy of society as well as a
normative art of judgment and legislation; and it posed many
fundamental questions about the human condition and its shifting
patterns. A growing awareness of the “philosophical significance"
of jurisprudence led me to examine the grand tradition of legal
systematics, “Gaianism” I termed it, which established an
anthropocentric and voluntaristic model of social thought which
had stood in somewhat the same relation to the human sciences as
Aristotelian naturalism has stood to natural philosophy. Like
Aristotelian philosophy, Romanoid legal thought has been
expanded, interpreted, criticized, transmuted and displaced over
the centuries under the impact of various lines of thought and
investigation, including scholasticism, humanism (“civil human¬
ism”, as 1 think of it) and modern natural law. Through
inspiration, interpretation and various sorts of revulsion it has
helped to spawn a number of newer and more specialized human
disciplines, including political economy, sociology and anthropo¬
logy; and it served as a sort of archetype for modern cultural
philosophies, such as those of Marx, Weber, Betti and Gadamer.
Different aspects of this argument are presented in historical
terms in essays I, IV, VI-IX, XII-XIV, and more philosophically
in essay XV.
