Carlos Petit 140 Comparative Lawdoes offer the modern jurist an ideal and rare opportunity for historical analysis. This body of specialized legal research, which gave rise to its own intellectual field during a specific period and which strove to draw up proposals for the organization of a newscientific discipline, still awaits the development of a work programme sensitive to that moment of intense renewal in the theory of law sources and which, although in different ways and with different manifestations, dates back, for both Europe and North America, to the early decades of this century. Two main lines of reflection are thus offered to the reader of the old literature of Comparative Law. In the first place, if we accept that lawis none other than the disciplinary knowledge of jurists,-- the example nowchosen is particularly open to analysis: Comparative Law has no point of reference (the State, its codes or its judges) other than the affirmations of the jurists themselves; it exists only in classrooms and in law firms; it is updated by means of institutes and congresses; its ontology is significantly resolved by methodology. The study of the work of specialists in Comparative Lawplaces us really - if I may borrow an expression from Pietro Costa - “verso una nuova storia della cultura giuridica”, but in this affirmation the accent must fall on the cultural noun of reference more than on historiographic novelty. It is a legal culture which was forged in Europe by means of codes and which entered a phase of relativization when these codes underwent their first crisis: the historiographical Gény was an historical Gény, in the same way that the legal absolutismof the acute today observer-'* dealt with the legal absolutismof the old days tormented jurist.-5 Second, there is the question of another chapter of the history of modern legal source theory, which the palpable crisis of the State as the form of political organization has transformed, at least for the most informed, into a perfectly viable work project.-^ When the category ‘State’ is openly exposed as the paradigmof premodern institutional history-^ and the impressive apparatus of the former is reduced to the printed page;^^ when proposals to break with the Cfr. Pietro Costa, “Saperi, discipline, disciplinamento; verso una ‘nuova’ storia della cultura giuridica?”, in Annali della Facolta di Giurisprudenza (Macerata), n. s., 1989/ii, 993-1027. -■* Paolo Grossi, Ahsolutismojuridicoy derecho privado en el siglo XIX, Bellaterra (Barcelona), Universidad Autoonoma de Barcelona, 1991. Cfr. Hans Reichel, Gesetz und Richterspruch. Zur Orientieriing iiher Rechtsquelleyi- und Rechtsartu'endungslehre der Gegenieart, Zurich, Art. Institut Orcll Fiissli, 1915, pp. 5 v ss.: “Der Gesetzesabsolutismus”. Antonio M. Hespanha, La gracia del Derecho. Economia de la cultura en la edad modema, Madrid, Gentro de Estudios Constitucionales, 1993. Cfr. Antonio M. Hespanha (ed.), Podcr c instituiqocs na Europa do Antigo Regime. Colectdnca de te.xtos, Lisboa, Funda(;ao Calouste Gulbenkian, 1984, 7-89. Pietro Costa, Lo Stato immaginario, Metafore e paradigmi nella cultura giuridica fra Otto c Novecento, Milano, Giuffre (=Bihlioteca per la storia del pensicro giuridico moderno, 21). 1986.
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