A invenção do Direito pelo Ocidente: uma investigação face à experiência normativa da China

Abstract

In face of the modern difficulty in defining and identifying Law, a reflective rescue over its constitutive elements is proposed, from an intellectual effort that is unusual in legal circles. By means of the contrast with the Chinese civilization, which, in its long cultural history, has developed until recently completely apart from Western influence, one seeks to shed light over the elements that formed law in the West, given its unique rational and ethical experience. The originality of the legal phenomenon is postulated as a peculiar cultural product of the Western civilization, what is intended to be shown by putting it in perspective with the normative experience of this civilizational otherness constituted by China. Facing China and its cultural peculiarities, it is evidenced how the prevailing rational categories in a civilization condition the way it orders social life. It is revealed, on one hand, how law is dependent on certain rational assumptions that only appeared in Western intellectual tradition and, on the other hand, how China, conveyor of other rational perspectives, produced a normative experience that has nothing in common with Western Law.