Law and Revolution, II: The Impact of the Protestant Reformations on the Western Legal Tradition
| Date | 01 May 2006 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.2006.00593.x |
| Published date | 01 May 2006 |
REVIEWS
Harold J. Berman,Law and Revolution, II: The Impact of the Protestant
Reformations on the Western Legal Tradition,Harvard: Harvard University
Press, 2003, xii þ522 pp, hb d33.95.
This is a magisterial sequel to Berman’s justly famous and much cited Law and
Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (1983). Revolution, for Ber-
man, means a ‘fundamental change, a rapid change, a violent change, a lasting
change, in the political and social system of a society, involving a fundamental
change in the people themselves ^ in their attitudes, in their character, in their
belief system’ (p 3). This book is a study of the impact of Western Protestantism
in both its Lutheran and Calvinist forms upon the development of Western law
and Western Constitutionalism, and in Berman’s view this impact was revolu-
tionary in those terms. Its central target is Weber’s thesis inThe Protestant Ethic and
the Spirit of Capitalism, a work which ^ although its central thesis, if there is one,
remains enigmatic ^ is summarised judiciously here and with much more perspi-
cacity than in many deployments or misreadings of these famous essays.
Berman’s sweep is awesome, both in terms of timespan and disciplines.The
two main segments of the book deal with the impactof Lutheranism upondevel-
opments in state and law in 16
th
century ‘Germany’ and of Calvinism upon 17
th
century England. Scotland is more backgrounded, Ireland more marginal; Ber-
man is dealing with an historical periodi nwhich it is perhaps premature to speak
of ‘Britain’ never mind the‘UK’. The scholarly apparatus is remarkable ^ 125 pp of
endnotes, with much additional textual material.
I cannot comment in detail on the section on 16
th
century Germany, except to
make the obvious point that in such a patchwork of mini-states (if ‘states’ is what
they deserve to be called at this time) the interaction of governmental form, law,
constitutionalism and religious a⁄liation was unsurprisingly quite intense. It
might have been more informative to look at the trajectory of Holland, where
there was a similar con£ictual mess but at least the ¢rst seeds of a real impact on
the outside world, or on world history if one wishes. But that would have made
the contrast between Lutheranism and Calvinism unavailable. From the stand-
point of World History, however, in the period of the 16
th
and 17
th
centuries (and
especiallythe latter century)it is England and Hollandwhich are moreinteresting
and the German states more marginal. Of course, Germany was a source of
Luther and other theologians and thus of ideas which were pivotal in the English
Reformation (which, as he rightly emphasises, was an extended a¡air). But it is
not obvious that these remained very live sources of energy by the 17th century
when the Three Kingdoms experienced their own convulsions.
A second point is that for Berman there was an extended Revolution in Eng-
land between 164 0 and 1689 driven by Calvinism. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a
workpresumably so longi n the makingand so sweeping in its scope, little atten-
tion is paid tothe vast literature of recent years on how to understand this period.
Berman resides with the classics, many, like him, fairly broad brush, and there is
not much reference to work written after the mid-1990s. Despite the particular
rThe Modern LawReview Limited 2006
Published by BlackwellPublishing, 9600 Garsington Road,Oxford OX4 2DQ,UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
(2006) 69(3)MLR 480^48 8
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