/lit/ - Literature

>>23240711

Agreed, privacy itself is a relatively new invention. It's one of the curses of the industrial revolution. It used to be that extended families lived, loved, and worked as a part of the same household. Sex was ordered, but it wasn't something 2 parents went off into their own bedroom to do. Working class families used to sleep in the same room or even the same bed together. Children learned about sex not from books or bureaucrats but because they could see their younger siblings being conceived. It sounds appalling and abusive to us because we're used to the idea of sex as something shameful, something that hurts innocence rather than something that exists a part of the Axis Mundi, the Hearth. Likewise, nowadays we find it medieval and eccentric to not put away our elderly in medical facilities run by corporations and staffed by rootless cosmopolitans.

>>23209746

Picrel isn't quite as long as Albion's Seed but it goes into great detail about how the Papacy and other institutions worked to develop the notion of Law that people take for granted in the West. That is, the idea of the Rule of Law being something that transcends any government, institution, and politician. Mind you, Berman is speaking more of legal theory than practice; he's not fixated on any material analysis of how universally/consistently the Law is applied.

>>23209754

https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-seed/

This article is a decent summary of the thesis and highlights the most intriguing bits. Fischer did reasonably good work considering the depth and breadth of what he was attempting. Nonetheless, my biggest gripe is that he takes a lot of primary sources at face value when it comes to the Borderers. A lot of SSC readers have spread the meme that Borderers are barbarian germs which isn't a perspective taken seriously even by a lot of fringe racial scientists.

>>23188651

>Law and Revolution by Harold J Berman

I recently finished this book. I'm planning on reading Aldo Schiavone's The Invention of Law in the West when I'm able to get a copy. It's an extremely thoroughly presented and argued book. The thesis is that Western legal tradition is distinct in that it treats the Law as an authority unto itself independent of other sociopolitical institutions. Monarchs could be held accountable to laws and through this way power was leveraged against temporal governments to create the liberal societies we live in today where there's a heavy emphasis on the Rule of Law and law and order being sacred regardless of one's religious/social/ideological ingroups. It's not a thesis that needed so many pages but I personally found it fascinating.

Add Schiavone, Formation of Law in the West and pic related

>>21652671
Schiavone, The Invention of Law in the West

Also pic related

Schiavone, The Invention of Law in the West

Also pic related

>>19728800
What about Bodin

Schiavone's Invention of Law in the West is cool.

Also learn about the actual rediscovery of the Pandects/Digest in 1070 and how they practically founded Europe's first university just to study it, leading to the rebirth of systematic Roman law in the West, something with massive ramifications down through a thousand years. From that day forward everybody from medieval to absolutist monarchs and republican despots and condottiere wannabe kings would stuff their courts with legal experts who could speak with the authority of rational, systematic law.

It's incredibly interesting to study the origins of Roman law through the pragmatic necessities of collating decisions (precedents!) of provincial officials and then, slowly, the emergence of rational commentary traditions and synopses, and with that the emergence of self-conscious "Law" in the abstract (as opposed to simply the sum total of concrete laws, leges), the foundation of legal consciousness in the West.

The main thing that's so hard to get your mind around is that Law is not this pre-existing thing, even "law codes" are not quite "LAW" in the way we mean it, and the way we mean it is a very specific legacy of Rome. Try to ask yourself questions like: Okay, then when did ROME go from "having lots of decrees and decisions" to "having legal consciousness abstractly?" Is there a gradual emergence of legal consciousness? Is law a platonic essence that revealed itself through the Romans or is it invented and contingent?

What's really interesting about Bologna and Roman law is that right around the same time, ecclesiastical law was undergoing a parallel revolution through Gratian's Decretum. Studying the parallel development of Roman and canon law is fascinating because it's two entirely different legal jurisdictions that somehow coexist and overlap, both claiming "catholicity" (legal universality) in principle.

Finally, pic related is a cool book but I haven't really read it. Thanks to the /lit/bro who recommended it.

Good luck OP, I hope if you go Big Firm you don't get your soul crushed.