Pels D. - Property and Power in Social Theory[c] A Study in Intellectual Rivalry (1998)(en)

INSIDE THE DIAMOND: RIVALRY AND REDUCTION

parliamentary bodies as the ultimate depository of all public authority. As a perfect parallel to this search for the true sovereign power in the realm, disputes about the distribution of property rights came increasingly to be dominated by the question: where resides the true owner?

EARLY PRIORITY DISPUTES

Naturally, these twin questions did not emerge as simply parallel, since a particular answer to the one narrowed down the range of possible answers to the other. Although the line of division between sovereignty and property was drawn with increasing determination by all thinkers, royalists, and republican liberals alike, it was clear from the outset that the two totalizing conceptions could coexist peacefully only to a limited extent, because they embodied a political and intellectual contradiction which was soluble only if the balance was tilted in favour of one or the other. The question of the precise locus of sovereignty or property was never clearly separable from the question of ultimate precedence. An emphasis upon private property as a unitary and unconditional right, grounded in natural law, logically precipitated a notion of popular sovereignty and a theory of rulership and public office which focused upon its fiduciary, derivative, and thus revocable character. This was already the theory of Bartolus and Marsiglio in the fourteenth, that of the so-called Monarchomachs in the sixteenth, and of the Levellers and Locke in the seventeenth century.

If, on the other hand, the case was made for the unconditional unity and supremacy of sovereignty, the normal corollary was a kind of retarded ‘feudalism’ in the theory of property rights. These were often denied a natural origin and interpreted as products of convention, i.e. as ultimately constituted by the public power and therefore limited in scope and subject to recall. This tended to be the basic theory of all monarchist political writers from Alciato and Du Moulin through Bodin and Loyseau to Filmer and Hobbes. Chasseneuz and Du Moulin, for example, retained a theory of property which recognized a series of varying and superimposed rights—although both also tended to see allodial property which could be owned completely as a more distant ideal.

Both writers also reaffirmed the basic sectoral distinction of private and public law, as it was typically expressed in the sixteenth-century maxim that fief et justice n’ont rien de commun. The king, in other words, was not the owner of all real property in the realm, but acted as supreme overlord and administrator in the political sense (Gilmore 1967:39–40; Church 1941:158, 174–5, 181–3). For Bodin, private property likewise set the most important limitation upon sovereign authority. Invoking Seneca’s familiar rule that authority belonged to kings but property to private persons, he maintained that the prince was bound by both divine and natural law and was therefore limited in his fiscal and economic rights: ‘Since the sovereign prince has no

54

INSIDE THE DIAMOND: RIVALRY AND REDUCTION

power to transgress the laws of nature, which God, whose image he is on earth, has ordained, he cannot take the property of another without a just and reasonable cause’ (Bodin 1962:204, 210, 707; Franklin 1973:23–6, 84–5; Church 1941: 225, 234). This coupling of the practical inviolability of private property and the overarching right of the absolute sovereign produced somewhat of a logical difficulty of which Bodin himself remained largely unaware.

The reduction problem itself had long been familiar to political theorists and doctors of the law in Bodin’s age. The disputes between the Politiques and the Huguenot republicans in sixteenth-century France largely copied those which had absorbed the legal humanists of Alciato’s school and the Bartolists in the fifteenth century, and reached back in turn to the famous differences among the Roman lawyers of the Bologna school. Two of these disputes need a brief mention, because their terms are so similar, and because they served as complementary theoretical matrices for many subsequent disputes far into the seventeenth century. The first one dated from the first half of the twelfth century and opposed Bulgarus and Martinus, the two most celebrated of the four doctors from the second generation of the Bolognese glossators of the Roman law. The second controversy erupted almost a century later within the same school, and was widely known and cited as the dispute between Lothair and Azo (Vinogradoff 1961; Skinner 1978 I:127–9; Gilmore 1967:15ff.).

When the lawyers of Bologna attended the Diet of Roncaglia in 1158, where the emperor Barbarossa proclaimed his sovereignty over the whole of the regnum italicum and his right to tax the wealthy cities, they broadly favoured the emperor’s claims without agreeing upon the precise limits of the imperial prerogative. A famous anecdote relates that when Frederic was riding one day with Bulgarus on his right side and Martinus on his left, he asked them whether the emperor was not by right dominus of everything that was held by his subjects. Bulgarus courageously answered that he was lord in the political sense but not in the sense of an owner; Martinus instead concurred with the emperor. The controversy was recalled much later by Bartolus, who recorded that his predecessors of the Glossator school overwhelmingly sided with Bulgarus, adopting the latter’s view that the emperor’s supremacy did not interfere with private ownership also as his own (Woolf 1913:22–4, 46; Skinner 1978 I:51ff.; Carlyle and Carlyle 1909:72–3).

The second classical debate was conducted about a century later between Azo and Lothair on the concept of merum Imperium in Justinianus’s Codex. The anecdote was the same one of riding with the emperor (Henry VI this time). Azo’s answer to his query to whom the merum Imperium belonged was that, although it belonged to the emperor par excellentiam, it also belonged to other magistrates. Opposing him, Lothair maintained that the emperor was the sole depository of public authority in the realm. Four centuries later the dispute was reported by Loyseau in his Cinq Livres du droit des offices (1610), who also mentioned that, while at first Azo’s opinion

55

INSIDE THE DIAMOND: RIVALRY AND REDUCTION

had enjoyed dominance among the Roman lawyers, Alciato had reverted to Lothair’s view, followed by Du Moulin and Bodin. Lothair’s notion about the basic integrity and indivisibility of imperium therefore exercised a permanent attraction upon the long succession of legal theorists who wished to strengthen the prerogatives of the crown. Azo’s conception of divisible imperium instead strengthened the legitimation of the institutions of republican city government, and resonated well with the defence of a naturalistic view of property such as could also be encountered in Bartolus and Marsiglio. Bartolus’s reorientation of the theory of imperium canvassed the idea that, although de iure the emperor alone wielded sovereign power, the cities de facto possessed the merum imperium in themselves. This early conception of popular sovereignty was compatible with the view that the public domain was divisible across a hierarchy of magistratures, whose powers were essentially limited and revocable.4

Although the early Civilians remained ambiguous with respect to the natural or conventional character of ownership, a global connection persisted between the conventionalist idea of property as a creation of the law and an absolutist emphasis upon the eminent domain of the sovereign, as was evident in Martinus, Placentinus, or Lothair. A similar connection held between the idea of property as an institution of natural law and Bulgarus’s denial, subsequently reaffirmed by Azo and Bartolus, that the sovereign was also the supreme owner of the goods of the realm. In the preceding Augustinian or feudal tradition, the priority question had not commanded much attention, since government and property were blended and were both seen as divine remedies for human weakness; neither were to be found in the state of innocence but arose from human convention. As soon as the Civilians had rediscovered the Roman distinction and the Roman idea of property as deriving in principle from naturalis ratio, there was once again room for dispute about logical and factual precedence. Along the stretch of six centuries which separated the first Romanists from Hobbes and Locke, this dispute tended to focus upon the dilemma of whether or not sovereignty or property were conventional or natural in origin. If sovereignty was accorded primacy through natural or divine institution (e.g. through an irredeemable original alienation by the people, or by direct investiture by God), property tended to be seen as a grant by the sovereign power which was essentially revocable. If property, in turn, was located in the state of nature preceding any social compact, sovereignty was rather seen as a temporary commission which could be retracted at will or renegotiated in a new contract between ruler and people (cf. J.Coleman 1988:614).

But even if sovereignty was thought to derive from immediate divine authorization and conceived as a personal right to the entire chose publique, civil law still placed definite limitations upon its discretion. Although Bossuet, in his La Politique tirée de l’Ecriture sainte (1679), went much further than Bodin or the Politiques in affirming the immediate divine investiture of absolute royal authority, he admitted the existence of fundamental laws which protected the liberty of persons and the inviolability of properties. Even a proud advocate

56

INSIDE THE DIAMOND: RIVALRY AND REDUCTION

of royal absolutism such as James I Stuart (Trew Law of Free Monarchies, 1598) felt himself obliged to recognize that the law of God had ordained private property, and that the king should at least have a just occasion for disinheriting his subjects. Hence Filmer the royalist, against whom John Locke was to marshal his powerful polemic wit, could defend the theory of divine right as a most reasonable and safe theory of property: the owner enjoyed greater security of possession when his title was based on a royal grant than when it derived from a conventional agreement or from a natural right which Filmer saw as fictitious (Schochet 1975; Tully 1980).5

Another champion of unconditional sovereignty—though not of divine right and not necessarily of absolute monarchy—was Thomas Hobbes. If we contrast his complementary theories of sovereignty and property with those of his great liberal counterpart John Locke, we once again witness the familiar reversal of last instances, their alternative grounding in nature or convention, but also the retention, despite this switch of master concepts, of a similar theoretical essentialism in both. In Hobbes’ state of nature, before the institution of the commonwealth, there is ‘no Propriety, no Dominion, no Mine and Thine distinct; but only that to be every mans, that he can get; and for so long, as he can keep it’. Property rights are only established by the sovereign and his ‘Lawes civill’; since they are a creation of the state, it follows that the rights of ownership are not valid against the sovereign: ‘Propriety therefore being derived from the sovereign power, is not to be pretended against the same’. Although Hobbes defined property in the characteristically modernist or bourgeois sense as an individual right ‘that excludes the Right of every other Subject’, it could never exclude the sovereign power, without which the commonwealth would not even exist (Hobbes 1968:188, 234, 296–7, 367–8, 384; Goldsmith 1966:197–9).

The key idea of liberal contractualism, on the other hand, was that the agreement which introduced private ownership preceded the institution of the sovereign power, and that governments were basically established in order to protect the unconditional exercise of property, not to interfere with it. Though anticipated by Althusius, Grotius, and the Leveller democrats in the period of the English Civil War (Woodhouse 1938; Hill 1974), this liberal contract theory was perfected by Locke in his classical Two Treatises of Government (1690). Locke’s central concern was to establish individual, exclusive property on the unshakeable ground of natural right, and to justify limited government by consent, including a guarded right of resistance and even deposition of the ruling sovereign. Absolute monarchy was inconsistent with civil society, and hence could be ‘no Form of Civil Government at all’. It was not social convention which had created the right of ownership; the social contract was only agreed upon in order to provide natural and pre-existing rights with the additional guarantee of human institution. The right of ownership was one of those innate and inalienable rights which accrued to the individual in his natural state, which was a state of perfect freedom and exclusive disposal over both one’s own person and one’s material possessions. No longer was freedom, as with Hobbes and other

57

INSIDE THE DIAMOND: RIVALRY AND REDUCTION

absolutists, something which depended upon ‘the silence of the law’. Man in the natural state was ‘absolute lord of his own person and possessions, equal to the greatest and subject to nobody’ (1975:129–41, 179–90; Buckle 1991:125ff.; Waldron 1988:137ff.).

The derivation of property from innate liberty was effected by the interposition of a crucially important middle term: the appropriation of nature by individual labour. In a celebrated paragraph in the Second Treatise Locke developed the metaphor of the embodiment of external nature:

Though the Earth and all Inferior Creatures be common to all Men, yet every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly His. Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he has mixed his Labour with it, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property.

This notion of natural self-propriety fortified the individual property right to an unprecedented degree. First, it was withdrawn from the inconstancy of human convention and hence made virtually unconditional upon the performance of social functions. Second, its beneficiary was only answerable to the public body in so far as he delegated specific discretionary powers to it, retaining his most essential innate liberty. Sovereignty should therefore ultimately retreat before property rights:

the Supreme Power cannot take from any Man any Part of his Property without his own Consent. For the Preservation of Property being the End of Government, and that for which Men enter into Society, it necessarily supposes and requires that the People should have Property.

In the priority dilemma, Hobbes and Locke therefore stood as polar opposites. Over against the former’s all-encompassing notion of power as including command, honour, wealth and knowledge (1968:150ff.), the latter entertained an equally broad notion of property as a right to ‘life, liberty and estate’. And even though Hobbes also saw property as including a right to ‘actions’ as well as ‘goods’ (1968:234), and the demarcation between the two master concepts remained slippery and vague, both Hobbes and Locke reaffirmed the overall distinction and, more interestingly, an inverse order of constitutive priority.6

TWO MASTER SCIENCES: POLITICAL THEORY

VS. POLITICAL ECONOMY

So far, I have argued that the development of the pointlike, emanative conceptions of sovereignty and property is incomprehensible if we do not

58

INSIDE THE DIAMOND: RIVALRY AND REDUCTION

reckon with the context of progressive theoretical polarization which enveloped and partly defined them. Sovereignty and property gradually adopted the form of sublimated absolutes which could coexist only in a state of logical tension even if they were set up in their own house, i.e. were relegated to the separate institutional realms of the state and civil society. This in effect amounts to saying that social and political tensions (between economic or political classes) were translated to the level of logical tensions between concepts, and that two partisan projects of political dominance (of the royal or statal prerogative vs. that of the people as gathered in parliament) were universalized and provided with an unshakeable epistemological foundation in the nature of things. This process of theoretical articulation therefore included a specific form of dissimulation, a politics of legitimation which solidified a partisan project into indubitably natural or divine principle.

However, monistic property and sovereignty constituted much more than interested myths in the customary sense of being ideologically serviceable to external political interests, because in form and content they also expressed the strategic, competitional interests of the intellectual spokespersons themselves—even if these were still largely subordinate to those of more powerful strata than their own. The true functional complexity of the essentialist, dialectical notions of sovereignty and property becomes visible only if one views them also as vehicles of a politics of theory or as stocks of theoretical capital, and recognizes their implication in historically stable configurations of intellectual polarization, rivalry, and reduction.

The persistent polemic between such master concepts, I am suggesting, does not issue from a predestined inclination of free-floating theories to overstep their limits and engage in contradiction, but are only intelligible sociologically as forms of expression of knowledge-political rivalries between groups of intellectuals who compete for hegemony both in the scholarly or educational and in the organizational and political field; intellectuals, moreover, who are likely to dissimulate their own partiality through the invention of reified essences which appear to be energized by an innate polemical drive. Master concepts such as sovereignty, property, state, civil society, production, polity, and economy do not simply describe entities or instances in the real world, or serve the legitimation needs of the individuals or classes which intellectuals are hired to glorify, but also and simultaneously serve the legitimation needs of the legitimators themselves. They are hiding places for intellectual ambition, laudatory substitutes with which intellectuals identify themselves, but through which they also hide their will to power and their desire for the certainty of irrefutable dogma. The absolutism and holism of such concepts are one form through which the universalizing and conquering impulses of intellectuals are externalized, who discover fixed and firm principles of natural or divine law and then, in deceptive modesty, set themselves up as privileged mandatories of these self-created idols.

59

INSIDE THE DIAMOND: RIVALRY AND REDUCTION

If sovereignty and property are master concepts in this sense, they are also organizing centres of two larger theoretical systems which stand in a similar position of symbiotic antagonism, and in which the same strategies of intellectual capitalization can be studied anew. These two master sciences, as I will call them, are likewise structured by a dialectical interchange of part and whole. By manoeuvring their core concepts into the position of privileged ‘last instances’, they claim precedence both in the hierarchy of the sciences and in terms of an exclusive ‘property’ of scientific truth. Their theoretical imperialism comprises two demarcative efforts: to stake out the largest possible intellectual territory, and to stabilize certainty of methodical grounding. The (partial) domains of state and civil society may both be magnified into originary and grounding social wholes, so that the sciences of state and society may also offer themselves as rivalling Grundwissenschaften which imperially subordinate the lesser human sciences, and pose as exclusive depositories of scientific truth. This dialectic of parts and wholes, as crystallized in the causality of last instances, therefore produces a typical ambiguity with respect to their territorial expanse, since it enables them to enlarge their partial object into a totalizing project. In this fashion, the dialectic becomes a vehicle of a politics of theory which is simultaneously made to disappear in the articulation of the object itself.

Reporting back to our historical scheme, we may observe that the uneven process of bifurcation of sovereignty and property was paralleled by the rise of two basic discourses about social and political reality, which even in their relatively inconspicuous thirteenth-century beginnings displayed a marked difference of emphasis. The split did not develop in linear progression but in a discontinuous manner, through lags and advances which were interspersed with reductionary disputes such as we have previously summarized. The first phase was inaugurated by the Civilian school of Bologna, which began a careful restoration and an initially timid but increasingly audacious work of glossation of the Roman law corpus. Since the reception of Roman law developed in the ‘anachronistic’ atmosphere of a commercial revolution and the emergence of an archipelago of free, prosperous communes, the emphasis initially fell upon the restoration and contemporary adaptation of Roman civil jurisprudence and commercial law. This ‘civil science’ was the first one to be exalted as a master science in the modern secular sense, i.e. as an independent branch of human study, but also as the apex and self-evident foundation of all other branches of human learning. In this capacity, the Roman codex enjoyed an incomparable prestige among many generations of law doctors, and was celebrated as ratio scripta far into the sixteenth century.

However, as soon as the study of Roman jurisprudence spread to the cities of Languedoc and Catalonia, and from thence to Orléans and Paris, a gradual shift of emphasis occurred. The law began to be studied with a different eye, because it was now revived within the contrasting atmosphere of a developing national state, and was soon made serviceable to the ambitions

60

INSIDE THE DIAMOND: RIVALRY AND REDUCTION

of a new type of temporal rulers. From at least the reign of Saint Louis (1226–70), the lawyers-bureaucrats trained at Montpellier, Orléans, Toulouse, and Paris grouped themselves around the sovereign and developed theories of public law which legitimized the gradual emancipation of temporal authority from the authority of the church and the centralization of all dispersed powers in the hands of the prince. A new class of educated officials or literati emerged which staffed the developing institutions of monarchical power. They were recruited from the bourgeois middle strata and from the lesser nobility, and had received a humanist education at the new universities of the realm (Tigar and Levy 1977; Vanderjagt 1988).

The Aristotelian renaissance of the second half of the thirteenth century in many ways enhanced and accelerated this recuperation of Roman law. Arriving by a different channel, through the great universities of Moslem Spain, it founded its first Western bulwark at the University of Paris, which became a point of dissemination from whence it spread in reverse direction to the Italian cities. In this novel confluence of Aristotelianism and Roman jurisprudence, the initial and decisive emphasis was upon a naturalistic theory of politics and public authority. After centuries of oblivion, the idea was revived that political philosophy constituted a separate discipline which was worthy of being studied in its own right and could lay claim to a distinct, relatively autonomous object. Not only was politics once again interpreted as a self-contained autonomous sphere of human activity; the communicatio politica was simultaneously valued as the highest form of community, so that political science positioned itself at the apex of the scientific pyramid. Already for Latini (c. 1220–94), who taught as a Florentine exile in France and might be considered the first political ‘scientist’ in the above sense, politics constituted ‘the noblest and greatest of all sciences’, as he thought Aristotle had proved beyond controversy (Skinner 1978:349–50; Canning 1988:360–1; Viroli 1992b:26–8).

In Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, the science of politics was indeed introduced as the study which exercised ‘most authority and control over the rest’ (1977:26–7). Political philosophy, as was clear from the opening paragraphs of the Politics itself, was the study of human association, and especially of the supreme association which embraced all the others: the city or state, to which both households and villages tended as their natural model of perfection. The state enjoyed priority over the households as the whole enjoyed priority over the parts (1979:21, 25ff.; Wiseman 1972; Frisby and Sayer 1986). Book 1 of the Politics already contained the principal ingredients of what I have called the master science of politics. First, the ambiguous demarcation of the field of enquiry, through the familiar identification of social man as a political animal; second, the moral elevation of the state and the presumptively natural ubiquity of the ruler-ruled relationship; third, the instrumental and limited character of property and wealth, which were considered necessary preconditions for virtuous citizenship; and crowning the edifice, a dialectics of statehood which Hegel

61

INSIDE THE DIAMOND: RIVALRY AND REDUCTION

was able to adopt almost ready made. Notwithstanding their many differences, for Aquinas, Alciato, Bodin, Hobbes, and other champions of the Aristotelian conception, the list of priorities and the sequence of deductions remained effectively the same.

It is crucial to bear in mind that, in speaking about an ‘Aristotelian’ master science, I am referring to the reception and reworking of Aristotle by early Western political thinkers rather than to the original texts themselves. For thirteenth-century political theorists, it was of course not the small polis but the large sovereign state, not the amalgam of civil and political relations but their developing separation (and the maintenance of primacy of the political over the civil-economic) which commanded all analytic attention. As Runciman has reminded us, the crucial distinction in Aristotle was not between state and society but between polis and oikos, or between the undifferentiated political-cum-social realm and the private household (1963:25). It was only much later that economics, which in Aristotle remained subordinate not so much to the polity but to household management, became visible as a social activity in its own right (Polanyi 1957; Tribe 1988:22–3). If, therefore, Aristotelian political science appeared to argue the primacy of the political over property (Mathie 1979:17, 29), this formulation was clearly informed by its thirteenth-century reorientation to the novel problem of the sovereignty of the national state vs. modern market liberty.

This recovery and critical reception of Aristotelian political theory effectively began around the middle of the thirteenth century, when Albertus Magnus and his pupil Thomas Aquinas lectured at the University of Paris. The early 1260s also saw the first integral Latin translation of the Politics by Willem van Moerbeke (Viroli 1992b:30ff.). Aquinas’s writings were thoroughly Aristotelian in at least a threefold sense. First, by marking a distinction between rulership and ownership, contrary to their amalgamation in the writings of Ambrose, Augustine, and other fathers of the church. Second, by denying that property and political authority were necessary evils and the product of original sin, and claiming instead that they were natural instruments of the good life and of well-ordered society. And third, by affirming the emergent claims of political sovereignty over against property, by virtue of the originary character of the state as embodying the ‘perfect community’. It was the legislator, Aquinas held, who was ultimately responsible for distributing and regulating private property for the common good. On all three points of doctrine, the philosopher’s authority was expressly invoked (Schlatter 1951; Parel 1979).

It is intriguing to observe that, as Aristotelianism travelled to the Italian city-states, its theoretical emphasis was once again deflected. Political theory was disseminated through direct contact with Paris (Aquinas, Marsiglio) as well as through the lawyers of the Bolognese school, of whom Bartolus had been an early example. But the ‘Italianization’ of Aristotle by Bartolus, Ptolemy of Lucca, and Marsiglio of Padua also entailed a critical distanciation from Aquinas’s apology of royal sovereignty and his idea that rulers should always

62

INSIDE THE DIAMOND: RIVALRY AND REDUCTION

be legibus solutus. Bartolus and Marsiglio rejected Aquinas’s assumption that monarchy was always the best form of government, and defended a form of popular government as most fitting and productive for free cities. Whereas Aquinas maintained (as all advocates of absolute sovereignty would do after him) that the institution of the sovereign power was an act of original alienation or forfeiture on the part of the people, Bartolus and Marsiglio held that the body of citizens retained the power of legislation ultimately in their own hands; public authority was only assigned by temporary delegation. Thus a difference arose between the original Aristotelian notion of state sovereignty and that of the Italian defenders of republican libertas, which never acquired the supremacy which was ascribed to the former. Marsiglio, for that matter, chose the term civitas as his translation of Aristotle’s polis; Moerbeke’s translation rendered Aristotle’s ‘political’ as ‘civil’ (cf. Gewirth 1956:lxvii, lxxx).7

Nevertheless—or perhaps because it permitted such ambiguities to persist —the grammar of Aristotelian political theory long reigned supreme as the highest order of knowledge and tended in all respects to absorb and surpass the study of Roman jurisprudence. Its century-long domination left little room for the development of a science of ‘civil society’ outside of the Aristotelian framework, and the cycle of political bureaucratization and progressive ‘monarchization’ of the city-states left too little time for the development of an independent economic science in the modern sense of this term. Although Bartolus’s theory of private property was reproduced as a matter of course through the ages, and the quattrocento even saw the first inklings of political economy in the writings of humanists such as Bruni, Poggio, Palmieri, and Alberti, there remained a large chronological gap between Bartolus and Locke which was filled by Aristotelianism, so that all relevant controversies tended to be conducted in the hospitable vocabulary of political theory. Although the idea of the natural origins of property and its priority as a principle of social organization was gradually perfected, the idea of a sphere of civil society which was autonomous from the political commonwealth only emerged in vague outline in the writings of Locke. Locke’s notions about labour, property, and civil society, however, offered only the first premonition of what would be established a century afterwards as a veritable science of political economy in the writings of the Physiocrats and the Scottish Enlighteners. Only in Adam Smith do we see the articulation of a scientific project which was comparable in scope and purpose with the Aristotelian one. It was only at that period, when a new and more comprehensive commercial revolution had consolidated a new type of world economy, and property had scored its first political successes against sovereignty, that the second master science veritably came of age.8

The lawyers of the Bolognese school had not developed a sharply delineated theory of civil as distinct from political society, despite the fact that they revived the Roman distinction between imperium and

63