Law is a specific form of social regulation distinct from religion, ethics, and even politics, and endowed with a strong and autonomous rationality. Its invention, a crucial aspect of Western history, took place in ancient Rome.

Aldo Schiavone reconstructs this development with clear-eyed passion, following its course over the centuries. A vast historical overview and a tight interpretative essay on the fundamental features of the Western legal machine and the discourse built around it: formalism, claimed neutrality, relations with political power. Environments, characters, conceptual frameworks, ideologies that have marked our history and are analyzed here in a continuous counterpoint between ancient and modern, between Roman thought and European tradition.

«It indisputably marks a new and welcome opening in its field.» T. Corey Brennan, The Times Literary Supplement