Enlightenment

The Enlightenment is the period Michael Berg studies through its legal codes and drafts, and it briefly offers him a compelling image of law as rational, humane, and beautiful. His eventual rejection of legal progress does not erase that attraction; instead, it helps him frame history as a motion that repeatedly returns to its starting point and sets off again.

Legal Order and Intellectual Attraction

Michael encounters Enlightenment legal thought while working as a legal historian. Its codes and drafts rest on the belief that a good order is intrinsic to the world and can therefore be brought into being. He finds happiness in following how provisions are made paragraph by paragraph from this premise, becoming laws that serve as solemn guardians of order and aspire, through beauty, to truth.

This attraction is more than an abstract interest in old documents. For a time, the Enlightenment’s confidence gives Michael a way to imagine law as a coherent human achievement: rational in its construction and capable of expressing a moral as well as an aesthetic ideal. The painstaking process of making legal provisions visible to him as crafted forms, rather than merely inherited rules, makes the study of this past gratifying.

The Abandoned Idea of Progress

For a long time, Michael believes that legal history moves toward greater beauty, truth, rationality, and humanity, even though its course includes terrible setbacks and retreats. The Enlightenment’s confidence in an order that can be made good lends support to this model of progress. Yet Michael eventually recognizes that the belief itself is a chimera. The history of law cannot be understood as a steady ascent toward a final, more humane condition.

His change in outlook does not mean he ceases to study law’s past. Rather, he replaces the image of linear improvement with one in which history has a purpose but ultimately reaches its own beginning. That return is not a secure restoration: once the starting point is reached, the movement has to begin again. The Enlightenment consequently remains both an intellectual achievement Michael can take pleasure in and an instance of the hope that his later historical understanding cannot sustain.

The Enlightenment Within Michael’s Historical Method

Michael’s reflections on the Enlightenment sit beside his account of studying law under the Third Reich, an area in which past and present meet within a single reality. He distinguishes that urgent historical responsibility from the gratification of exploring periods less directly connected to the present; his work on Enlightenment codes provides the clearest example of that different pleasure. The contrast prevents his interest in the period from becoming a claim that legal history is safely sealed off from present concerns.

Instead, the Enlightenment supplies one image against which Michael tests what historical study can promise. Its belief in good order makes law’s aspiration to beauty and truth intelligible, but it does not guarantee that history will advance toward those ideals. In Michael’s later analogy with the Odyssey, history moves purposefully and purposelessly, successfully and futilely. The Enlightenment’s ideal of order thus remains significant not as proof of progress, but as a point of departure within an unsettled cycle of legal history.