Individuality and the System of Law

Abstract

Law is a ‘part of culture, a cultural object, or a cultural force’.¹ As a part of culture, law partakes of those concepts that are characteristic of the prevailing way of thinking of that culture and that overarch divergent domains of social life. In their endeavours to understand their circumstances and adjust themselves to them, people conceive the world through categories and assumptions that are themselves a result of the historical factors that shape their lives. Political ideologies, economic orientations and legal systems bear, hence, the influence of some greater underlying conceptions of the relationship between man and his surrounding universe. In this respect, in law, as in for example politics, one can observe how the basic abstract philosophical concepts of a system of thought are interpreted and put into action at the level of social institutions. Hence, a study of the legal system of a society can reveal the nature of the principal premises of the prevailing way of thinking of that society. In other words, through an inquiry into the legal codes of a society and by considering how certain people conceive the extent of their rights and how they categorize and group their mutual interactions with other people, one can arrive at the central concepts of the way of thinking of the people in question.