Legal History Commons^™

Angels And Infidels: Hierarchy And Historicism In Medieval Legal History, Guyora Binder

Buffalo Law Review

In Law and Revolution, author Harold Berman argued that our society’s commitment to law’s autonomy and to law’s efficacy for social change are persuasively synthesized in an idea of legal science originally developed by medieval canon lawyers to justify the centralization of authority under the Pope. According to Berman, this idea of progress through law became the model for the modern state and inspired progressive social change. This essay challenges these claims. It argues that medieval scholasticism had a static view of history and that Berman systematically misreads synchronic representations of hierarchy and dominion in scholastic thought as diachronic representations …