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Liberalism, Property, and the Foundations of the Greek State (C.1830–1870)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 August 2019
Abstract
How does a new state, born by way of revolution, produce its social and political institutions? This article explores this question by looking at the case of Greece after independence from the Ottomans (1830). It focuses on the Greek civil jurists and provides a history of a liberal political program that was manifested in Roman-law jurisprudence. As elsewhere in Europe, so too for jurists in Greece, Roman law was both a consistent method for lawmaking and a powerful political ideology, one that linked private property to personal liberty, and to equality of conditions. As in several other colonial and postimperial settings, it developed as a language of statehood and a “territorial” program that associated sovereignty with the reorganization of space within the state. As in a very few other cases, there it became a means of practical statecraft, which the jurists turned against other political programs, including that of the monarchy.
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Footnotes
Research for this article was conducted as part of the Border Crossings: People and Ideas on the Move, and the Formation of Political Institutions in the Greek World during the 19th Century research project, funded by the Research Center for the Humanities (RCH) for the year 2019, with the support of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. I would like to thank the editors and the anonymous readers of Modern Intellectual History for their constructive and insightful comments and suggestions.
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