10 - Semantic Legal Ordering

Summary

In this chapter, I endeavor to weave together a complex series of European legal developments connected with the emergence of intellectual property. I begin by tracing the emergence of intellectual property in France, focusing on the context for this development in the revolutionary processes through which a new French nation was formed, and on the ambivalent implications of national codification for intellectual property in France. I then go back to the Reformation, pointing out the significance of Calvinist and Lutheran legal dcotrines for jurisprudential traditions carrying new conceptions of sovereignty and natural rights. Shifting to the legacies of these traditions for legal and administrative theories that developed in German-speaking lands, we see early foundations for a new jurisprudential narrative that becomes vital to the substantive rationale of intellectual property in our own time: progressivism. The upshot of these complex developments is a paradoxical linkage between bureaucratic impersonalism in the formal application of legal doctrines and an idealizing personalism in the agentive capacities of individual human beings: the idolizing of "genius."