Akadémia Kiadó

    Codification is one of the most powerful techniques humanity has ever elaborated for reifying his standards of order. Codification is also a means of reducing the ius [right] to the lex [law]. Laws enacted mark an end to spontaneity prevailing in legal development, which transform the entire legal enterprise into a tool for programming human action with planning for the future as well. Codification as a factor and issue of rationality is both a function and a motive power of the overall politico-economic rationalisation. Although rationalisation has only been completed in modern Civil Law, under a variety of forms its germs may also be detected in primitive and early, as well as mediaeval law and Common Law. Utopias of rationality are particularly expressive of latent yet prevailing tendencies of legal development.       The factors of codification, legal, political, social and economic, are surveyed in ancient China, Mesopotamia, Greece and Rome, the Middle Ages and the absolutist states, as well as the time when classical codification was formed in France and widespread throughout nineteenth-century Europe. Common Law attempts at and substitutes to codification, twentieth-century Civil Law inertia, Afro-Asiatic experiences and the socialist policy for recodification are equally examined. As a theory of legal objectification, the monograph offers a highly theoretical framework for the explanation of the historical functions and types of codification. Quantitative and qualitative kinds of codification are differentiated according to whether the law's basic consolidation is achieved through the law's systemic re-building by its complete re-positivation.       The postface on 'Codification at the Turn of Millennia' analyses developments in events and theoretical reconstructions for the last quarter of a century since the first edition, especially the trend of decodification and the preparation for new European common codes.       Csaba Varga, scientific adviser at the Institute for Legal Studies of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and professor directing the Philosophy of Law Institute of the Catholic University of Hungary, authored The Place of Law in Lukács' World Concept (1981, 1998), Law and Philosophy (1994), Theory of Judicial Process The Judicial Establishment of Facts (1995), Transition to Rule of Law (1995), Paradigms of Legal Thinking (2000), in addition to Comparative Legal Cultures (1992), Marxian Legal Theory (1993) and European Legal Cultures (1995) he edited.