On February the 24th, 1920 Adolf Hitler laid out the 25 point plan of the NSDAP. Of these points, around half were things Hitler hated. The unjust Treaty of Versailles, the dirty Jews, foreigners, and traitors, democratic selection of leaders, usury, and… Roman law? Near the end of the list, after his chief hatreds, Hitler throws out the following:

Why did Hitler hate Roman Law? If this was not already a little baffling, it is made more so by the fact Hitler was generally positive about Ancient Rome. In Mein Kampf, he suggests “Roman history, along general lines, is and will remain the best teacher, not only for our own time but also for the future...” Yet when it comes to Roman law, Hitler, and the Nazis were rabidly antagonistic. Nazi Jurist Helmut Nicolai, in The Legal Doctrine of Racial Laws (Die rassengesetzliche Rechtslehre) suggested Europe had been infected by a "Roman-Byzantine-Eastern” disease, which had dissolved “every connexion between law and race, between law and morality, between law and life.”

To understand this hatred, we need to look at Hitler’s world-philosophy. Something Hitler stressed repeatedly in Mein Kampf was that the NSDAP was not an ordinary political party, nor was National Socialism a political policy. It was a ‘Weltanschauung’, best translated as ‘world consciousness.’ National Socialism was a civilizational project within the currents of the World Spirit, one measured in terms of millennia rather than decades. Yet a ‘Weltanschauung’ is not enough on its own: it needs a party to attain its political ends and a blueprint for the new system: a ‘Weltordnung’, or ‘World Order’, and a ‘Rechtsanschauung’, or ‘Legal Order.’

Of these, the ‘legal order’ was far more important than you and I would expect. Although often obscured, a country’s Laws have always been popularly regarded as the mirror to its soul. A legal order could reflect the piety of a Christian kingdom, the elegance of an Italian court, the civilisation of an Empire, or the volksgeist, or ‘peoplespirit’ of a nation. For this reason, totalising ideologies like National Socialism and Communism paid particular attention to the legal system of liberal capitalism. Any program which left that edifice intact would be a half-measure, a compromise, a pathetic tweak around the edges.

Roman law has one feature in particular which has enraged ideologues and enamoured legal scholars throughout history: its abstract elegance. Feudal law lacks abstraction: it is, in the words of Max Weber, an ‘irrational’ system. Persons are defined by their status, commodities by their role in the social hierarchy, and value by an intangible web of feudal relationships. Take the following example: you have lent money to a nobleman and he’s blown it all on gambling. Now you want it, or whatever he owns, returned to you. In a feudal system it is highly unlikely this sort of debt will be enforced: he will be protected, perhaps because of his ‘youth’ (which in England only ceased at 25), or because his land is tied up in a medieval trust called the ‘use.’

In contrast, Roman law is extraordinarily abstract. Person A makes the contract of ‘mutuum’ (loan) with Person B. If Person B does not repay the loan, Person A can sue him for the principal plus interest. Person A is a patrician and B a plebeian? The texts suggest this is irrelevant. If Person A has never met Person B, or there is an intermediary Person C, or there are thousands of loans? Irrelevant. To some extent this is an illusion of reception: like the white bleached statues, Roman law has come down to us in formal texts alone. This gives it an ethereal, amoral quality which has seduced many great scholars. Those who first discovered the rules – formal, and densely interconnected – regarded it as ratio scripta, or written reason. Leibniz, famed mathematician, considered it a system of logic even more perfect than the axioms of arithmetic.

Roman law’s amoral quality, so useful for enabling high volume commodity trading at long distances, also makes it revolting. Pope Honorius III regarded it as a godless and amoral system, whilst French revolutionaries believed it legitimised the power of Kings. These criticisms reached their highest pitch in the 20th century. A school of German legal science rejected Roman law as a foreign transplant contrary to the volksgeist. Heinrich Brunner famously described Roman law as an infection which had swept across Europe destroying its indigenous legal systems. All that was noble, just, and honest about our law was replaced with an alien, austere, amoral legal order.

Hitler’s hatred of Roman Law grew from these roots. Above and beyond Brunner, he believed Roman Law’s formalism abstracted away the natural competition between races and peoples. In a Romanised Legal Order all humans, rich or poor, gay or straight, Jew or gentile, are Abstract Individuals with Absolute Property Rights. Very convenient, Hitler hints, for the Jewish moneylenders wishing to blend in with the crowd and abuse the gentile without social repercussion. In Mein Kampf, he proposed Jews relied on commodification of property – such as the land, of time, and labour – for their power. And it was all thanks to the amoral, race-less Romanised law that the Jew could destroy the people with their own courts. To combat the Jew, we need a return to the old system – the pre-capitalist system: a system where the law was simple, where it matched the morality of the volk, and the volk was pure:

As Lawrence Preuss suggests, the concept of race in National socialism plays a similar role as economic materialism. Both determine the ultimate shape of the law; both regard Roman law, technical and juristic, as the source of social division; and both look elsewhere for halcyon period of cooperation, whether back in time, or forward to Utopia. Before/after Roman Law, we will not sue each other as selfish individuals, we will collaborate in perfect harmony:

The Jew lacks this instinctual sense of right and wrong. He must rely on ‘statutes, dogma, and the letter of the law.’ He thrives on complexity and ‘Talmudic’ reasoning. His worldview is one of reason (verstand) rather than spirit (seele); egoism (ichbotent) rather than society (wirbotent); suspicion rather than cooperation. According to the National Socialist legal theorists, ‘Jewish blood’ somehow entered the Roman state its law, corrupted the glorious Roman Empire, and then through reception, destroyed the native law of Europe.

It is a simple formula. The Jews killed feudalism by killing feudal law. Now the National Socialists will destroy liberal capitalism by killing capitalistic law. That is the basic logic behind Point 19 of Hitler’s NSDAP Programme. And his enemies agree. Liberal capitalists have always recognised law as the guarantor of their sacred values. Martha Nussbaum and John Rawls, liberal prophets of the ‘90s, were ultimately juristic moral theorists. In their most succinct form: “the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests.” Law is still the mirror of our soul, even if we ignore it: a liberal society has liberal law, a globalist one international law, and a theocratic one religious law. You can read the soul of an ideology in its legal order.

Accordingly, if you feel the air is changing, that there is ‘something in the water’, look to what people say about law. A political program which continues our current private law system is not, and can never be, an alternative Weltanschauung. It is those programs which seek the demolition of the 19th century legal order which propose something radically new. Some parts of the world system are more sensitive than others. Some are more densely networked. As the winds of change blow, look to ripples on the water out at sea. Look for that buried Point 19.