Deep History

I first came across Robin Bradley Kar when I was researching Principled Pluralism and Contract Remedies (abstract here). For what it's worth, I found Kar to provide the best secular justification for the expectation measure of damages for breach of contract. But that's a story for another day.

I had the pleasure of meeting the late Harold Berman when he spent a week at Regent Law School's Summer Institute in Christian Jurisprudence. While I disagreed with his conclusion that Puritan theology was the source of strict liability in contract (see my Puritan Revolution and the Law of Contracts, abstract here), Berman's detailed account of the origins of "the West" and particularly the Western legal tradition in his magisterial Law and Revolution has endured as the source of my (and many others') understanding of how the West came to center its culture around law.

Based on a wealth of historical research Berman concluded that "the West" came into being in the 11th century from a confluence of historical factors. During the century that followed the West both recognized and intentionally adopted the traditions of Rome, Greece, and Israel as its ancestors. These traditions emphasized law as an organizing social principle and successfully exported that social understanding to other cultures, included each other. But from where did those traditions come? That is the question that Kar attempts to answer in an extraordinary three-part series of articles (abstracts here, here, and here).

In short, Kar argues that

Certain early social phenomena that emerged in the Indus Valley (and then spread into the Eastern part of Iran and Bactria) gave rise to the complex types of cultural and legal traditions that have helped so many subsequent Indo-European groups transition to complex societies with the rule of law.

In other words, as my Indian friends should be pleased to read, the so-called Harappan Civilization (or, more precisely, its forbears) is the ur-source of Western civilization.

I would not have paid much heed to this argument but for Kar's fine work in jurisprudence and contemporary philosophy generally. And I am certainly not capable of evaluating the lengthy and complex argument for Kar's conclusion that the residents of the Eastern-Iran-Bactria-Indus-Valley region of 4500 BC are the linguistic, social, and political ancestors of "the West." I can only suggest that hereafter those who take seriously legal history, legal cultures, and the successes (and failures) of efforts to export the Western legal tradition must deal with Kar's work.