Jan Dietrich

The Marriage of Freedom and Justice, 3000-300 BCE

The Marriage of Freedom and Justice, 3000-300 BCE provides a new history of ideas concerning freedom and justice by comparing undervalued sources from ancient Near Eastern cultures with well-known ancient Greek sources, from early civilizations to pre-Hellenistic times. The book has two main theses. First, freedom is a value outside the Western world. Autonomous legal responsibility, self-mastery and free choice, inwardness, and originality are all ideas found before classical antiquity. Furthermore, in some ancient Near Eastern cultures, including ancient Israel, one finds early democratic institutions and democratic rules of procedure, including the law of impartiality. Second, freedom and justice did not come into deep conflict with each other. Instead, they married, from very early on, and their marriage kept developing over time, especially in the form of liberation and equity. Sporadic individual and collective debt releases, the exodus myth, the laws about the regular release of debt slaves, Solon's reform, and the establishment of the law of impartiality connect the ideas of freedom and justice from early times onwards. Liberation, as an eminent idea in cultural memory, drives equity to unfold as situational justice and subsistence ethics for the needy. In this book, we find the beginning of the idea of prioritarianism that weds freedom with justice and grants priority to the worst off.This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.