The Time of Law

The Time of Law:Eighteenth-Century Speculations Peter de Bolla (bio) In the great shift from the theocentric to the skeptical ordering of knowledge that is Enlightenment, one way of knowing stands out as preeminent, as the exemplar for the entire mathesis of modernity. There is a moment, a precise point at which this shift becomes visible, stabilizing the slow-moving plate tectonics of epistemological contest in a discursive daguerreotype whose silvered surface still bears witness to this monumental change. Without this moment modernity, as such, is unthinkable; science, in its broadest sense, groundless, floating free from the certainty that knowledge is knowable. No systematic study of economy and society, language and literature, indeed no human sciences, sciences of the earth—in short nothing that we have inherited as the lexicon of human understanding—would be possible. That moment is June 5, 1756, the day Charles Viner died, and the way of knowing that enables the entire architectonics of modernity is what we have come to recognize as the law. Dramatic, as openings go. Let's voice some objections in order to get them out of the way. The law, of course, predates the mid-eighteenth century, so what can this claim mean? Furthermore, when talking about the law one needs to make clear what one is referring to. The law comprehends different codes and customs, has an internal ordering that must be adverted to if not respected. The civil law is to be differentiated from the common law, and both differ from canon law. English law is distinct from Scottish, and both differ from French law. Law, in the sense of legislation, concerns the drafting and passing of statutes, and this is distinct from case law, which pertains in the most frequently imagined scenario of the law: the trial in common law. In the proliferation of legal instruments and areas of jurisdiction that characterize modern legal practice, criminal law is distinct from international, commercial from family, and so on. Even if we clear up these cavils, what use is there in making such a bold claim: that there might be a moment at which the shift from a pre-modern world, with all its epistemologies grounded in the theological certainties of belief, to the modern world, can be seen, made visible? Obviously the drama of this point of departure is intended [End Page 52] as a heuristic device, a way of sharpening focus, getting a close-up on a massively complex series of articulations in the ordering of knowledge. Or is it? The date I have mentioned, June 5, 1756, marks the day Charles Viner died, and with him, the embodiment of the old certainty of knowledge as a finite category, of knowledge as a knowable quantum. It is said that Samuel Johnson was the last person to have read every book in print; whether this is true or not I do not know. Charles Viner, however, was certainly the last person to know, in their entirety, the laws of England. He spent his whole working life in passionate pursuit of this one aim: a complete abridgement of the laws of England. This alphabetical digest of every law, published and printed by Viner himself, runs to 24 volumes of so-called black letter, the gothic script of the law books. It is, in almost every respect, a glorious monument to an old order of knowledge: a white elephant of learning and classification, an indigestible digest of a now discarded way of knowing, the remnants of pre-modernity's epistemology. It remains an invaluable work of reference, a dictionary that opens up the history of pre-modernity, but it remains unread if not unreadable. The reasons for this illegibility strike hard to the center of the following presentation. When Viner died, the possibility of deciphering the figures in the woven fabric of his knowing, of what constituted the reach of knowledge for Viner and those contemporaries who shared the same epistemic aspirations, died with him. Appearance to the contrary, this is not an essay on Charles Viner, perhaps a shadowy figure in the generally accepted "history" of the English enlightenment. My topic is more philosophical: what is it to know

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