The chapter explores what it calls the ‘Romanist’ or ‘contractual’ liberal current that was to dominate nineteenth-century Greek jurisprudence from the mid-1840s onwards. After exploring the intellectual sources (the historical school of jurisprudence, the French Doctrinaires, as well as the Idéologues) upon which the civil jurists (the ‘Romanists’ as the chapter calls them) drew, and their massive impact on legal thought and civil law, it discusses what the jurists tried to achieve and why they turned to Romanist jurisprudence. As the chapter shows, property reforms had central importance in this current and were strongly related to the transition from a pluralistic legal order (which centuries of Ottoman rule had imposed) to that of a modern and ‘civilised’ state. The chapter also shows that the emphasis on property makes sense only if the issue of the ‘national lands’ (i.e. former Turkish property that had been transformed into Greek state domain) is taken into consideration. It then discusses how, for reasons both economic and cultural/political, the Romanists subscribed to a subversive legislative agenda, conceptualised in the theory of the Rechtsstaat that had significant differences with that envisioned by the monarchical authorities.

Chapter 4 demonstrates that the recommendations that favoured state intervention were coupled with a different way of thinking about political power: its nature, its sources and its organisation. The intellectual éminence grise behind this was Nikolaos Saripolos, who, after coming to Greece and being elected to the Law School in 1846, was to become the country’s leading constitutional and international law scholar. Being mindful of the revolutionary tradition and fusing together several different intellectual currents (Rousseau, Doctrinaires, the monarchiens, Benjamin Constant), Saripolos changed the terms of constitutional thinking by drawing on the revolutionary idioms of natural rights and national sovereignty. This was a liberal, governmental discourse that spoke in terms of sovereignty as self-rule and of the state as a moral person with rights in the international arena. As the chapter demonstrates, for Saripolos – as well as for the economist Ioannis Soutsos – the state in the form it then took had become an obstacle to the formation of the nation and was undermining social cohesion.