The World's Legal Philosophies

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Description
The present volume treats of the historical evolution of the philosophy of law and economics in their bearing upon contemporary interests and movements. The political and legal institutions of former periods are included only in so far as they show influence upon later developments. Avoiding the usual text-book account of the successive contributions to the philosophy of law, I have confined the presentation to that of the successive cultural stages in terms of their distinctive ideas, principles, conceptions, and doctrines, and of their practical issues and demands. For this purpose the historical survey must go back further than the customary point of departure in ancient Greece, and include the legal and economic institutions of Egypt, Assyria, India, Judea, and Phenicia, from which the theory and practice of the Græco-Roman legal philosophy were derived. The emphasis is to be placed not upon the doctrines, but upon the form and development of the legal principles which they illustrate. I have considered the philosophy of law not from without, as summarized in the presentations of writers on legal philosophy, but from within, as a natural and cultural product. While philosophers stimulate and lead their contemporaries, they are themselves products of the culture of their day: for they reflect the limitations of the available data and scientific curvey
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Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1 : Origins of Oriental Civilization
Chapter 2 : The Ancient Commonwealth : Greek Civilization
Chapter 3 : The Civic Empire of Ancient Rome and the Moralization of Roman Law
Chapter 4 : The Bondage of Mediaevalim
Chapter 5 : Civic Emancipation : The Rise and Decline of "Natural Law"
Chapter 6 : The Emancipation of the Proletariant
Chapter 7 : Legal Sociological Reconstruction of Legal Philosohy
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Author Details
Fritz Berolzheimer
President of the International Society of Legal and Economic Philosophy at Berlin 
Translated from the German by Rachel Szold Jastrow, of Madison, Wisconsin
With an Introduction by Sir John Macdonell, Professor of Comparative Law in University
College, London and by
Albert Kocourek, Lecturer on Jurisprudence in Northwestern Univresity