The Moral Menace of Roman Law and the Making of Commerce: Some Dutch Evidence

Did Roman law represent a kind of moral menace in premodern Europe, encouraging commercialism, greed, and exploitativeness, and fostering a lifeless rationalism ? In one version or another, this idea has been accepted by Europeans for centuries. Petrarch was already warning his readers in the Middle Ages that the practice of Roman law was a nursery of corrupt and mercenary values;\u27 and in the early-modem period many Europeans took the same view. Even in modem times, some of our greatest legal historians have put their authority behind the idea that Roman law was somehow morally menacing. The most famous scholarly version of the idea came from Heinrich Brunner, who, around the turn of the century, described the spread of Roman law through medieval and early-modem Europe as the spread of destructive infections. But Brunner was not the only major scholar to mount this sort of claim. Max Weber, to choose the most important example, also ascribed destructive impact to the spread of rationalistic Roman law, though his tone was of course more sober than Brunner\u27s; and the same idea left its mark on the writings of Karl Marx and Ferdinand Thnnies, among others.\u27 The idea has had a life in modem politics too. Through Marx, Engels, and Proudhon, it established itself in the general lexicon of socialist thought on the rise of capitalist society. Not least, it made its way into the ideological underworld of the German far right wing: Point 19 of the Nazi party program denounced Roman law as a vector of the materialistic world-order and demanded its elimination