Mountaineer wrote: ↑Sat Jan 16, 2021 1:59 pm
McNally sounds like a very Woke dude, or perhaps he has a very Woke editor. Does everyone have to mention oppressive to gain street cred?
I am 16% through the book....what is your assessment of the following passage from the book? Any characterization of the book from reading it?
Vinny
Law, Money, the Body … and War
Another way that money emanates from the body stems from the body’s role as the foundational site of justice. Life and liberty are fundamentally corporeal, involving conditions of human survival and the exercise of bodily powers in the world around us. This is why the very language of justice in the polis is steeped in the idea of a proper distribution of the goods of life. In ancient legal codes more generally, the body is omnipresent, with crimes against the body dominating the law, and with transgressors subject to corporal punishment and confinement. Justice and injustice were written on the body. Indeed, bodily mutilation may have been the most common of archaic punishments.20 It is equally noteworthy, however, that antique codes also provided for a significant interchangeability of money with the body.
One study of seventeen ancient law collections—including the Babylonian Laws of Eshnunna (ca. 1770 BCE) and Code of Hammurabi (ca. 1750 BCE), as well as the Roman Twelve Tables (450 BCE)—shows the substitution of monetary penalties for corporal punishment to have been widespread, and based on the social rank of the victim. In the Laws of Eshnunna, for instance, if a man causes the death of another man’s wife or child, the penalty is capital punishment. If he causes the death of an enslaved woman, however, his own life is not imperiled; instead, he must turn over two enslaved women as compensation. Under the same codes, if a dog or an ox, whose owner has been previously warned, causes the death of a man, the owner shall be fined forty shekels of silver. If the dog or ox kills an enslaved person, the fine is reduced by nearly two-thirds, to fifteen shekels. In the Code of Hammurabi, written two decades later, a lender who beats to death a debtor’s male child must turn over his own son to be killed in return. In the event that he kills someone enslaved by a debtor, he must pay the borrower twenty shekels and forgive the loan.21 In the last case, we observe money’s substitution for bodily injury according to the social valuation of the life involved. Where enslaved people were concerned, of course, money and life were always interchangeable. But this monetary principle infiltrated the domain of law and justice in complex ways.22 We see this especially in the custom of wergild, widespread in ancient Germanic law, in which monetary payments substituted for corporal punishment or death for legal offenses.
This practice of monetary substitution was widespread throughout the ancient world, beyond the examples cited above. Broadly similar arrangements can be observed in the Hittite codes of Central Anatolia (today’s Turkey), from about 1400 BCE; the laws set forth in Exodus of the Old Testament; the Law Code of Gortyn (Crete, ca. 480–450 BCE); and the Twelve Tables of Rome, which were almost contemporary with the Code of Gortyn.23 We also find clear references to such practices in Homer, where Ajax recounts men having accepted payment, rather than direct retribution, for the murder of their brothers and sons (Iliad, 9.632–36). These norms for measuring the value of bodies and lives originated at least as much in the domain of law as that of the market.
