Howard Richards, Professor of Peace and Global Studies

    With a few exceptions (such as Michel Foucault who dates notre modernité as starting after the French Revolution) scholars think of our modern world-system as taking shape approximately in the years 1400 – 1800.   I will briefly list nineteen points concerning its then emerging basic cultural structures:
1.      In the territories Rome had governed, its law survived the fall of its Empire, not only in the Byzantine East but also in the medieval West, not only on the continent but also in Britain.
2.      Most of Europe officially received Roman law and fashioned from it a modern jurisprudence that was part and parcel of the modern economy under construction during the same time period.
3.      The principal institutions of Europe were formed under monarchies.   Democracy came later.
4.      The monarchs of Europe ruled by and under law. Roman legal principles were a normative framework limiting the powers of the state.
5.      Later, when the sovereign people replaced the sovereign monarch, the new sovereign was also a constitutional ruler, who accepted the principles of private law, notably those of property and contract, as juridical and moral givens.
6.      The early modern philosophers articulated ethics and politics as normative frameworks parallel and complementary to law.
7.      Immanuel Kant, for example, in his Grundlagen zur Metaphysik der Sitten (1785) illustrates his ethical theory with only one example of a strict duty to others, the duty not to incur a debt without intending to pay it (cf. pacta sunt servanda).   Late in the book he remarks that he could just as well have chosen as his illustration the duty to respect the property of others (cf. suum cuique) or the duty to respect other people’s freedom (cf. honeste vivare).
8.      (Kant explicitly makes the principles of Ulpian eternal and universal (Kant 1797, pp. 314-5))
9.      Other early modern European thinkers (Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Rousseau) explicitly made contract (cf. pacta sunt servanda) the basis of political obligation, imagining that society had been created by an original social contract.
10.   Large populations came to depend on markets to obtain food. Selling something to get money became a necessity of life.
11.    The historical conditions of the possibility of unemployment were established, i.e. a wage earning class composed of people who needed to sell their labor power and sometimes did not find employers willing and able to buy it.
12. The shaping of the European system, then on its way to becoming the world-system, was part and parcel of the conquest by Europe of the rest of the world.
13.   The conquered peoples were compelled to accept European legal reasoning, sometimes by fraud, as when native Americans who had no comprehension of Roman Law concepts of contract “sold” Manhattan Island to the Dutch for a few trinkets ….
14.   … more often by force, as when in South Africa tribal peoples were forced to sell their labor for wages in the mines in order to pay a money tax that had been levied on them.
15.   (My friend Catherine Hoppers who teaches at the University of Pretoria once said to me, “Europeans never remember that Africa was incorporated into the global economy by violence. Africans never forget.”)
16.   One of the bitter lessons the defeated peoples of the world learned from their European conquerors was that tribal or community ownership of land was legally impossible.
17.   Perhaps the most bitter lesson was that each juridical subject is in principle alone. The bitter point of contract conceived as the general form of social relationships is that where there is no contract there is no obligation of mutual aid.   Older forms of social relationship, the normal ones for the human species, depend on reciprocity and gift-giving. (Gouldner 1960, Malinowski 1922, Mauss 1925, Vaughan 2006, www.gift-economy.com )
18.   (This bitter point is expressed in the Argentine national epic Martin Fierro when the main character exclaims, “What kind of world is this where everybody demands to be addressed as señor, and nobody takes care of you?”)
19.     I will not try to add up every plus and subtract every minus of modernity.   At this point trying to decide rationally whether modernity is on the whole good or bad is a low priority task compared to high priority tasks like the ones aptly described by Mahatma Gandhi with this striking image: “…with the rest of the world India finds itself in the deadly coil of the mercantile cobra… It will take all the resources of all her best Brahmins to unwind that coil.” (Gandhi 1924, p. 316)

Early Modern Times