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Why a Serf is Not a Slave: Humans and Land in the Medieval Scholastic Imagination.
Conte, Emanuele
Conte, Emanuele
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Abstract
James Whitman observed more than once that historians of law should boldly set out to formulate 'grand theories,' long-term interpretive hypotheses that draw together the infinite number of details into an overall picture, rather than merely proposing detailed studies of individual sources or particular legal institutions.
While specialists in legal history dwell on the details, these overviews are offered by others: economists, anthropologists, and now even social psychologists, who attribute a key role in the interpretation of the world to the transformations of legal institutions. 1 Some of us acknowledge these and other shortcomings in our own fields, yet we tend to advise others how to go about addressing these issues rather than personally engaging in the work. For more than three decades, however, Whitman has been offering 'grand theories,' ie, interpretations of major historical and social phenomena, demonstrating that the contribution of legal history can still be fundamental to understanding social transformations: on dignity, on the status of persons, on the responsibility of the judge, on the ambiguous relationship between libertarian and capitalist ideologies in twentieth-century America. Now he addresses the immense problem of property rights in Western legal consciousness in his latest book, which is being published as I write this article.