ion of
the theory which maintains that history is dominated by the progress of
independent legislation.

With the precocious dissolution of the feudal society in certain parts
of Central and Northern Italy, and with the birth of the Communes, which
were republics of production grouped in trade guilds and merchant
guilds, the Roman law was forced into a place of honor. This law
flowered anew in the Universities. It entered into a struggle with the
barbaric laws and also in part with the canon law; it was then evidently
a form of thought which answered better to the needs of the
bourgeoisie, which was beginning to develop.

In fact, considering the peculiarities of rival laws, which were either
customs of barbarous nations, or corporation privileges, or papal or
imperial concessions, this law appeared as the universality of _written
reason_. Had it not arrived at the point of regarding human personality
in its most abstract and human relations, since a certain Titius is
capable of becoming debtor and creditor, of selling and buying, of
making a cession, a donation, etc.? Roman law, although elaborated in
its last editing at the command of emperors by servile parasites,
appeared then, amid the decline of mediaeval institutions, as a
revolutionary force, and as such it constituted a great step of
progress. This law, so universal that it gave the means of overthrowing
barbaric laws, was certainly a law which corresponded to human nature
considered under its generic relations; and by its opposition to private
laws and privileges it appeared as a natural law.

We know, moreover, how this ideology of natural law arose. It acquired
its greatest distinction in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries;
but it had long been prepared for by the jurisprudence which took for
its base the Roman law, whether it adopted it, revised it, or corrected
it.

To the formation of the ideology of natural law another element
contributed, the Greek philosophy of later epochs. The Greeks, who were
the inventors of those definite arts of the mind which are sciences,
never, as is known, drew from their multiple local laws a discipline
corresponding to that which we call the science of law. On the contrary,
by the rapid progress of abstract research in the circle of their
democracies, they arrived very soon at a logical, rhetorical and
pedagogical discussion on the nature of justice, the state, the law,
penalty; and in their philosophy we may t