race the rudimentary forms of
all later discussions. But it is not until later, that is to say, in the
Hellenistic epoch, when the limits of Greek life were sufficiently
enlarged to be mingled with those of the civilized world, that, in the
cosmopolitan environment which carried with it the need of searching in
each man for the generic man, the rationalism of justice arose--of
justice or of natural right in the form given it by the stoic
philosophy. The Greek rationalism which had already furnished a certain
formal element to the logical codification of Roman law reappeared in
the eighteenth century in the doctrine of natural right.

That ideology, whose criticism has served as an arm and an instrument
for giving a juridical form to the economic organization of modern
society, has had, consequently, various sources. Yet, in fact, this
juridical ideology reflects, in the struggle for law and against law,
the revolutionary period of the bourgeois spirit. And, although it takes
its doctrinal point of departure in a return to the traditions of the
ancient philosophy, in the generalization of Roman jurisprudence, in
everything else, and in all its development, it is completely new and
modern. Roman law, although it was generalized by scholasticism and by
modern elaboration, still remains within itself a collection of special
cases which have not been deduced according to a preconceived system,
nor preordained by the systematic mind of the legislator. On the other
hand, the rationalism of the stoics, their contemporaries and their
disciples, was a work of pure contemplation, and it produced no
revolutionary movement around it. The ideology of natural law, which
finally took the name of philosophy of law, was, on the contrary,
systematic, it started always from general formulae, it was aggressive
and polemic, and still more, it was at war with orthodoxy, with
intolerance, with privilege, with constituted bodies; in fine, it fought
for the liberties which to-day constitute the formal conditions of
modern society. It is with this ideology, which was a method of
struggle, that arose for the first time, in a typical and decisive form,
that idea that there is a law which is one and the same with reason. The
laws against which the struggle was carried on appear as deviations,
backward steps, errors.

From this faith in rational law arose the blind belief in the power of
the legislator, which grew into fanaticism at the critical mom