Justice in Renaissance Philosophy

Abstract

The classical ideal of justice remained vibrant in the Middle Ages because it was embodied in the surviving texts of Roman law, the Corpus Iuris Civilis. From there, it entered canon law, where it gained strength from its association with the divine giver of justice. Justice in the classical tradition was an ideal of distributive justice, a socially fair allocation of things, rendering to each his due. It was an ideal ostensibly linked to outcomes, independent of process. Ideal and practice were never necessarily coincident, however, and it was along that fissure that humanist critiques of law and its practitioners, beginning with Petrarch (20 July 1304–19 July 1374), launched largely ethical arguments. Justice, itself an ethical construct, was being lost, said humanists, in procedural delays and cascades of citations and references, and in bad Latin, that seemingly served only to line the pockets of lawyers, judges, and notaries. By the sixteenth century, the ethical arguments had spilled over into epistemological attacks as well. The quasi-sacred quality of the classical legal texts was confronted by a more thoroughly historical construction of those texts, most frequently associated with the Italian jurist Andrea Alciato (8 May 1492–12 January 1550). This gave birth to such a different method of reading the texts of the Corpus that it came to be called the mos gallicus, in contrast to the older mos italicus, associated in many minds with the fourteenth-century jurist Bartolus of Sassoferrato (1313–1357). Against the assertion that no professional jurist could operate in any other fashion (nemo iurista nisi bartolista), lay the argument that justice lays in appropriate laws that served a people in their peculiar historical context. The legislator (most prominently a king, such as that of France), rather than the academically educated interpreter, was looked to as the font of justice. Justice could thus be reconceived, as it was by figures, such as Jean Bodin (1530–June 1596) and John Locke (29 August 1632–28 October 1704), in terms of a particular state and its ruler and its people, and natural law became unhinged from the realm of objective patterns of behavior and bound to subjective rights instead.