[Reader-list] The Public of the Private

[udayan kumar]

The Public of the Private                          

In this posting I would like to share with you some of
my reservations on the notion of ‘public sphere’.

A precise collection of laws drawn up around 450 BC by
Roman jurisprudents seems to reflect the dormant
potential; it carried throughout millennia, of being
able to become very much instrumental to the need of a
mercantile society in facilitating a reasonably
protected commercial activity.
Centuries later in 1362 a money lender in Europe
enters into a contract abiding by the formula
prescribed in the same Roman source; which reads:     
                                         
             
                “In the presence of not less than five
roman citizens of full age, and also a sixth person
having the same qualifications, known as libripens, to
hold a bronze scale, the party who is talking by the
mancipation, holding a bronze ingot says: ‘I declare
this slave is mine ex jure Quiritum, and he be
purchased to me with this bronze ingot and scale’. He
then strikes the scale with the ingot and gives it as
a symbolic price to him from whom he is receiving by
the mancipation”. (I have not consulted the original
material; however, in order to draw upon a different
inference I have relied on the reference to the
material in Michel E. Tiger’s Law and the Rise of
Capitalism p.26)                                      
                                    
                   
Against the background of this reference several
questions can be asked.

Who are the ‘five Roman citizens of full age’? Are
they the ‘witness’ of the contract?
 Do those witnesses represent the ‘public’? Can we
then think of a situation where the ‘witnesses’ turn
out to be spectators?

The background of these questions parallels my take on
the topic I am working on in which the duel role of
witness/spectator transmutation is discussed at length
in one of the sections.                               
                                                 
Udayakumar.M                                          
                                            




		
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