The Axial Age did not solve the problem of the unbridled ego for all time.  Its achievement was to record the problem of the unbridled ego as a great human drama, and to show that it was possible to transcend the heritage of unconscious tradition and also mitigate the brutal world of ego and power.  The doctrine of might-is-right could be transcended by a higher power that stood above all power relations and could judge the actions of the powerful.  This higher power was law, growing out of the twin cultural foundations of reason and literacy. 

Law is a city phenomenon.  It is in the city that the individual ego, the force that challenged the face-to-face society, is once more contained.  The law of the city responds to the breakdown in kinship as a basis of the good society and the rise of the individual ego.  It marks the decline of the perpetual family and the rise of the purposeful individual.  Law waits upon the birth of reason, the idea that the universe operates by rule in regular, predictable ways, and not at the will and prompting of familiar spirits.

Since the Axial Age, countryside and city have conducted a spirited dialog between power and law, between continuity and change, and between tradition and reason, demonstrating the profound difference between hierarchy and power in the country and law in the city.  In the country, the law of status and power always prevailed.  In face-to-face society the power of land and the influence of landowners were supreme.  In the city the power of land and money was everywhere diluted by the need to support the complex urban economy and its thousands of individual business transactions that extended far beyond the ability of any power elite to supervise.  And the relationship between power and law fluctuated as the city grew or declined.

The Roman Empire sustained an unprecedented expansion of cities and saw a remarkable expansion and differentiation of the law.  During the Republic the Romans developed the Twelve Tables, a codification that attempted to ensure that judges should be bound by a written code and not be free to make law on their own.  Over the centuries of the Roman Law, the basis of social relations progressively moved from membership in the family group to the individual in the city-state governed by the rule of law. 

But when the cities in Europe declined after the fall of Rome, a hierarchical, family-based social structure grew up in its place, the feudal system, that conceived social existence as hierarchical and group-based; the powerless owing allegiance to their liege lord and the powerful reciprocating with protection for his loyal follower.  The agricultural society seemed to demand a hierarchical status society based on power, just as the city had seemed to demand a rule-based society based on law.  In the feudal agricultural world, family is everything, because it mediates the access to land through the vital process of land inheritance, the sole means to survival and prosperity.  In the city, the family decays as other means of mutual support develop, and as the importance of inheritance declines, since the city lives by money and the exchange of goods and services, not by the fruitfulness of the land. 

The rise of the city over the last one thousand years has encouraged a move away from the power relations and the life-or-death struggle over land to the growth of law and contract.  The first to flourish, the cities of northern Italy—Venice, Florence, and Genoa—were all commercial hubs, with Venice and Genoa establishing naval empires in the Mediterranean and Florence becoming a major center of woolen manufacture and banking.  The most successful of these three cities was Venice.  It was also the city that developed the most secure and even-handed body of law to regulate its political and economic life.

The Republic of Venice that flourished from the end of the first millennium until its capitulation to the army of Napoleon in 1797 was an aristocracy.  Political power was vested in a few hundred noble families, and the framework of political institutions was designed to maintain those families in power.  But the Venetian nobles were merchants.  They lived by buying low and selling high.  Faced with the turbulence of trading in the Mediterranean, they built a polity based on rules and regulations that encouraged and supported the commerce that had raised their families to eminence.  Legislative and executive powers were vested in a web of committees and councils.  The chief executive, the Doge, was elected by a complicated series of committees for a life term.  His powers were limited by custom and by a promissione, an extensive oath of office that he pledged upon election.  The nobles all belonged to the Great Council, equivalent to a New England town meeting.  In between Doge and Great Council were numerous committees and councils, including a Senate, a Council of Forty, and a Council of Ten. 

At the core of Venetian prosperity was a fleet of ships that plied the Mediterranean, bringing cargoes from Constantinople, Palestine, and Alexandria through Crete, Negroponte, and Corfu, and up the Adriatic Sea to Venice.  These ships sailed mostly in convoys on regularly scheduled seasonal voyages.  Venetian merchants at each port purchased goods in anticipation of the next visit of the fleet.  A state scribe sailed with each ship to keep track of all cargo.  Merchants and investors collaborated in short term partnerships, called colleganze, and spread the risk of individual voyages among several individuals.  Because the Mediterranean was contested by several powers, the merchant fleet of galleys doubled also as a navy, and most ships were built by the Venetian state at its Arsenal along the waterfront from the Doge’s palace and the piazza San Marco.  The government and its councils were heavily involved in the regulation of commerce, from bidding for ships, prioritization of cargo, pay and working conditions of seamen and oarsmen, responsibilities of officers, and scheduling of voyages.  The government also regulated the bylaws of the numerous guilds and fraternal organizations that flourished in Venice, attempting to strike a balance between the encouraging of fraternal solidarity and the limiting of economic exploitation.

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©2005 Christopher Chantrill