Explore how the law grows from struggle and how the fight to defend rights shapes society.
This book argues that ethics, not aesthetics, guides the idea of law, and that struggle is its enduring engine. It links personal feelings of legal right to the social roles people inhabit, from peasants and merchants to states, showing why different groups demand different protections and punishments.
- Learn how the feeling of legal right varies by class and calling, and what that means for justice.
- See how labor, property, and inheritance underpin the modern sense of ownership.
- Understand critiques of traditional jurisprudence, including how self-defense and remedies for injury have been treated in law.
- Discover how state power and social conditions influence how laws are written and enforced.
Ideal for readers of legal philosophy, social theory, and history who want to understand law as a living response to human struggle.