This chapter transports us to Hellenistic Rome, and to the issuance of a legal privilege from the Senate of Rome to the polis of Delphi. The chapter shows how empirical formality and substantive rationality in law came together to enable ancient legal documents to work as instruments of legal power. In seeing how Rome deployed instruments of legal power - legal privileges that performatively created and memoralized patronage relationships with subordinated peoples - to forge an empire, we see how instruments of legal power were used to create governing communities and zones of exclusivity in Mediterranean antiquity. We also see how zones of exclusivity granted to city-states like Delphi are analogous to the zones of exclusivity granted to modern corporations like Facebook, in the form of intellectual property.

This concluding chapter seeks to reiterate themes and lines of argument, while laying a foundation for discussion and judgment about the place of intellectual property in our political communities today. To summarize: the modern nation-state system, powered partly by intellectual property law, is fundamentally an order of obligation, an organization of vast social networks, in which legal instruments with ancient roots performatively link people and organizations together with their national polities into a joint project of economic expansion. The social formation story that I have told in tracing the development of this system is one in which Roman law and Biblical law were drawn together under the authority of bishops and kings to support a very modern, and very strange, adaptation of Abrahamic faith traditions, an adaptation in which faith is placed in legality, and hope is placed innovation. A characteristic set of anxieties accompanies this modern faith tradition, anxieties that our nation will fall behind in the race for innovation, and will lose its fragile position of dominance in a global order of power.

This chapter provides an introduction to the book, sketching the fundamental approach to sociological theory and narrative methodology that I deploy. I offer an intuitive summary for the Weberian theory of property that underlies my basic understanding about how intellectual property emerged and how it functions sociologically. I discuss the audience and disciplinary context for the book, and summarize five bodies of scholarly literature that are relevant to the arguments underlying the narrative offered in the book. The chapter concludes with a narrative summary and map, which is offered to help orient the reader.

This chapter traces the deveopment of Christianity within the late Roman empire, opening with an imperial decree that institutionalized Christianity as the official law of the empire. We examine the close counterparts to intellectual property that existed in the Roman law of late antiquity. With Christianization, however, we also see how semantic formalities and substantive rationalities in Roman law were culturally transformed. Empirical formalities from Roman law persisted, but these were sacramentalized in accordance with Christian understandings. The emphasis on God's creation within Christianity was combined with Hellenistic Roman traditions celebrating wondrous discoveries. Instruments of legal power from the Roman empire were carried forward, but the transformations that took place with Christianization would mean that these instruments of legal power could be deployed in newly intentional ways. In this chapter, we witness the rise of a distinctive order of obligation, one involving faith in legality. This is an order of obligation that combines a deep confidence in the ordering powers of law with tendencies toward acquisitiveness in matters of property and wealth.

This chapter traces foundations for the organizing framework of the modern nation-state to post-Conquest England. Feudalism was essential, as institutionalized in the royal prerogative, administrative kingship, and covenantal social bonds. I focus on the historical factors that made England distinctive, in this period, both in the intensity of its feudal structures and in the strength of royal, prerogative powers. I argue that a unique combination of Anglo-Saxon legal legacies with the Norman Conquest's imposition of powerful rulership facilitated the coalescence of a regime involving new levels of social power. Roman law, canon law, and English common law each played vital roles in this coalescence, with new levels of economic growth fueled by new types of legal privileges. Development of new technologies, for example the windmill, was one result.

This chapter focuses on the international extension of modern intellectual property, highlighting America's place in a regime of intellectual property that today is global. We trace the foundations for this global regime in international treaty frameworks, focusing on the legal parallels between treaties and contracts, as instruments of legal power. We briefly sketch the twentieth century developments of intellectual property law in the U.S., highlighting the juristic "solicitude" that is shown to intellectual property in U.S. lawmaking and international diplomacy. In the wake of World War II, the U.S. has used its position of global economic power to solidify commitments to intellectual property in a legal framework for trade relations that constitutes a super-national organization, the World Trade Organization, one that has facilitated global convergence in intellectual property law. New dangers and challenges are facing us today, in this globalized legal order, with the rise of artificial intelligence, and with patent claims extending very deeply into the social dimensions of human life, through computer-implemented inventions.

In this chapter, I argue that the formation of intellectual property was enabled by a cultural transformation, involving the embrace of natural legality, a transformation that parallels, in significant respects, the Christianization of imperial Rome. In this cultural transformation, traditions of Roman law were rediscovered as a naturalistic foundation for sociability and national economic life. The commodification of human creativity and inventive discovery, through intellectual property rights, made sense, within the culture of natural legality, as a justified response to natural, but extraordinary, powers of human creativity, and became part of a broader strategy for national empowerment. The combination of Roman law with interpretations of Christian obligation that emphasized natural sociability and legality gave new form to a natural rights tradition, one that providing legitimating foundations for the recognition of intellectual property under principles of English common law. The chapter concludes with a focus on the U.S. constitutional convention of 1787, and the embrace of intellectual property as part of the constitutional framework for a powerful, national state.

This chapter introduces a basic theoretical conception of law as an obliging force, which binds us together in governing communities, thereby enabling property of various types to exist. The chapter also sketches a stylized historical narrative, drawn from Max Weber's developmental sociology of law, about how intellectual property emerged, as a new type of legal property. The stylized narrative envisions three basic "layers" to the modern institution of intellectual property, which roughly correspond to three different paradigms for the obliging force of law: empirical formality, semantic formality, and substantive rationality. The historical development and weaving together of these three "layers" in the obliging force of law thus becomes an overarching narrative (or meta-narrative) for the book.

This chapter focuses on the period of Roman history in which the empire emerged. The famous historical personalities of Caesar and Cicero are sketched to contrast two prevailing methods of acquiring social power in ancient Rome: charismatic leadership of soldiers, as exemplified by Caesar, and rhetorical persuasion in accordance with formalistic rules, as exemplified by Cicero. In one published speech by Cicero we see very close counterparts to intellectual property in ancient Rome: a situation in which a foreign-born poet has been granted Roman citizenship in order to reward his poetic services to the state, described metaphorically as property. We then see how this basic pattern of granting privileges in order to inventivize valued behaviors was systematically utilized by Roman emperors, as they sought to transform the institutional structures of the republic into an institutional structure over which they exercised more autocratic levels of control. Within the classical, imperial framework of Roman law, jurists recognized important forerunners to intellectual property. Many centuries later, these would become the foundation for modern intellectual property.

This chapter outlines a "feudal transformation" in medieval Europe, in which originality and creativity became activities to be protected and encouraged through grants of legal privileges. A Venetian statute that many have seen as Europe's first patent law is here placed in the context of legal and religious reforms overseen by Carolingian bishops and rulers. The trajectory of these reforms is traced through the development of medieval universities and legal education, which are linked, in turn, to an idealizing social vision of law as a morally binding force, drawing people together into communities through legal promises and oaths. With the birth of the European legal profession, Roman and Biblical legal traditions are synthesized into the legal foundation for medieval city-states, guilds, and universities, together with the prebend system that provides material support for clerics of various kinds. In the medieval city-state of Venice, these legal traditions become the basis for a transformation in legal privileges, emphasizing the value of novelty and creativity for legal communities and providing early precursors for later patent and copyright law.

In this chapter, I endeavor to weave together a complex series of European legal developments connected with the emergence of intellectual property. I begin by tracing the emergence of intellectual property in France, focusing on the context for this development in the revolutionary processes through which a new French nation was formed, and on the ambivalent implications of national codification for intellectual property in France. I then go back to the Reformation, pointing out the significance of Calvinist and Lutheran legal dcotrines for jurisprudential traditions carrying new conceptions of sovereignty and natural rights. Shifting to the legacies of these traditions for legal and administrative theories that developed in German-speaking lands, we see early foundations for a new jurisprudential narrative that becomes vital to the substantive rationale of intellectual property in our own time: progressivism. The upshot of these complex developments is a paradoxical linkage between bureaucratic impersonalism in the formal application of legal doctrines and an idealizing personalism in the agentive capacities of individual human beings: the idolizing of "genius."

This chapter establishes a basis for the book's meta-narrative in a present-day context, highlighting the importance of intellectual property - particularly patents - for the foundation of Facebook. The chapter emphasizes the weaving together of formality and substantive rationality in contemporary patents, which are theorized as instruments of legal power. By showing how patents were important in the founding of Facebook, the chapter emphasizes the role that instruments of legal power - like patents - can play in linking people together into social groups, classes, and networks. Michael Mann's IEMP model for social power helps us to understand the dynamics of exclusivity, as seen in contemporary intellectual property, particularly in patents.

In this chapter, we return to the American context in order to see how intellectual property develops from within a nationalizing state during the nineteenth century. We see the extent to which America's national legal foundations were, ironically, international and Roman. In writers of early U.S. legal treatises, we see an overt embrace of Roman law as a foundation for the commercial law of the new nation. We see the implications of this in the will theory of contracts and in franchising arrangements that lay the foundations for a telecommunications network, at first for telegraphs and later for telephones. Contracts become a new instrument of legal power, one that facilitates intentional strategy in the consolidation and deployment of unprecedented levels of social power, rooted in the zones of exclusivity enabled by intellectual property. In the Bell Telephone System, we see this consolidated social power at its apex. In the regulatory reactions to this level of social power, we see early foundations for the American administrative state.

This chapter traces a rising national consciousness in English law and legal institutions, focusing on the implications of this for the broader shift from medieval privileges to modern intellectual property. The shift is presented through a narrative highlighting the roots of Parliament in the legal principles and transcendent appeals established in the wake of thirteenth century baronial revolts. We see the impacts of this nationalizing legal revolution in the thought-world of the great monastic chroniclers at the Benedictine abbey of St. Albans. And we see the historical legacy of this nationalizing legal revolution in the rise of statutory supremacy and positive legality. These interrelated developments occurred through processes of semantic legal ordering, in which Parliament appropriated traditional rights of prerogative kingship and the church, establishing itself as the guardian of property owned by an increasingly-vocal class of subjects invested (materially and spiritually) in the Protestant Reformation. Two statutory foundations for modern intellectual property resulted from these complex developments: the Statute of Monopolies (1624) and the Statute of Anne (1710).