| Chapter : | Introduction |
|
|
Introduction
The Enlightenment was essentially the conflation of “European” and “universal.” Reason was elevated to the pinnacle of human life and in some places even deified. What was good for Western Europe was thought to be good for everyone everywhere, and a Hegelian spirit of conquering progress invested this Euro-normativity with evangelical zeal. Napoleon, whom Hegel welcomed as the Promethean genius of the Enlightenment, spread this progress by means of a civil code, which was imposed by French forces or adopted by progressivist governments throughout Europe and in North, Central, and South America. It did not matter what laws had existed in a given place before the arrival of the Napoleonic Code. The Enlightenment was seen as nullifying prevenient custom and mores and reconfiguring the culture and mindsets of the people who had been living in pre-Enlightenment anticipation.
But not every Enlightenment thinker was so sure that Western Europe was the only valid social and jurisprudential model. Some philosophers in the eighteenth century (who we now see were the earliest anthropologists) recognized the problems inherent in filtering a given society through the lens of legal codes from very different times and places. In his l’Esprit des Lois (1748), for example, the Baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755) observed that each society should have the laws best suited to its particularities. This insight, based in part on Montesquieu’s reflections on non-Western traditions such as the Chinese and Persian, was to become the foundation for a new mode of inquiry into how societies and their laws—long separated by scholarly inquiry of a different sort—had interacted in the past, and how they should in the future. It is for