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Epistemology and Social Order

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Max Rheinstein
Max Rheinstein
Affiliation:
Max Pam Professor of Comparative Law, University of Chicago
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Extract

The rise of the nations of Asia and, as one ought to add, Africa, and the invention of atomic weapons are two developments which threaten to shake the way of life the Western World has developed. Is there a way to ban these dangers and to provide for the world an harmonious order? These are the momentous questions to which the author of The Meeting of East and West has addressed himself in his new book. Although of the thirty-two chapters of this work, thirty are adaptations of articles published at earlier dates, the book constitutes a coherent whole and an impressive testimony to the consistency of the thought of the author as it has developed during his incumbency of the philosopher's chair at the Yale Law School. As the title of the book indicates, the author is concerned with human experience, i.e. epistemology in general, and more particularly, the relations between epistemology and man's ways of social order as expressed in ethics and law.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 3 , Issue 1 , October 1960 , pp. 12 - 24
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1960

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References

* Northrop, F. S. C., The Complexity of Legal and Ethical Experiences (Boston, 1959), XVI, pp. 331Google Scholar.

1 “What Should be the Relations of Morals to Law”, Journal of Public Law, I (1952), p. 287Google Scholar.

2 Op. cit., p. 107.

3 “The Matchmaker, or Toward a Synthesis of Legal Idealism and Positivism”, Journal of Legal Education, XII (1959), p. 1Google Scholar.

4 Law in Economy and Society, ed. Shils, Edward and Rheinstein, Max (Cambridge, 1954)Google Scholar.

5 It is not fully certain, however, whether this holds true for those classical jurists of the 2nd and 3rd centuries, who were the master architects of Roman law. Of the much older Scaevolas, who are repeatedly mentioned by Northrop, we know too little fully to estimate their significance. See Kunkel, W., Herkunft und soziale Stellung der römischen Juristen (Weimar, 1952), pp. 8, 10, 12, 14, 18Google Scholar. On the Roman jurists' general attitudes toward Greek philosophy, see Schulz, F., History of Roman Legal Science (Oxford, 1946), pp. 62, 69, 70Google Scholar, who states the result of his inquiries as follows: “Although a number of the leading lawyers drank deep of the well of Greek philosophy, a philosophy of law was not developed, and philosophy stopped at the frontiers of Roman law.”

6 Cf. Mitteis, L., Reichsrecht und Volksrecht in den östlichen Provinzen des römischen Kaiserreichs (Leipzig, 1891)Google Scholar.