The Birth of Nomos - (Encounters in Law & Philosophy) by Thanos Zartaloudis (Paperback)

About the Book

This is a highly original, interdisciplinary study of the archaic Greek word nomos and its family of words. Includes extracts from ancient sources, in both the original and English translation, to give us a new and complete understanding of nomos and its foundational place in the Western legal tradition.

Book Synopsis

This is a highly original, interdisciplinary study of the archaic Greek word nomos and its family of words. More recently used to mean simply 'law' or 'law-making', Thanos Zartaloudis draws out the richness of this fundamental term by exploring its many roots and uses over the centuries. The Birth of Nomos includes extracts from ancient sources, in both the original and English translation, including material from legal history, philosophy, philology, linguistics, ancient history, poetry, archaeology, ancient musicology and anthropology. Through a thorough analysis of these extracts, we gain a new and complete understanding of nomos and its foundational place in the Western legal tradition.

From the Back Cover

An interdisciplinary and highly original study of the early ancient Greek uses of the word nomos and its family of words In 'The Birth of Nomos', Thanos Zartaloudis assembles a complex genealogy of the ancient Greek word 'nomos', elucidating the complexity and the richness of the uses of a word that was to later become famously known as a key classical (and modern) term for 'law' and 'law-making'. Collecting and analysing for the first time in the field of legal studies a large number of primary ancient sources in the original and in translation, this volume opens an interdisciplinary pathway of scholarship into the 'foundations' of ancient legal history and invites a new and comprehensive understanding of the Western legal tradition. Thanos Zartaloudis is Reader in Legal Theory and History at Kent Law School, University of Kent and Lecturer in History and Theory Studies at the School of Architecture, Architectural Association.

Review Quotes

The Birth of Nomos is an exceptional piece of work, amounting to almost 400 pages of excellent, rigorous scholarship. Its sustained critical engagement with a wide literature, generating an 80-page-long bibliography, and providing 10 lengthy substantive chapters, is worthy of admiration for its exhaustive and painstaking scholarship.--Alan Norrie, University of Warwick

Generosity is not a word Zartaloudis explicitly deploys in this remarkable investigation - a veritable cosmonomy, to invoke the author's erudite terminology. And yet, what better way to describe what he does in The Birth of Nomos, as he genially apportions and distributes, scrupulously gives and grants, deftly dispensing and setting apart the multiple sources and resources that have nourished, or been fed by, the word nomos (differentially accented) and its 'family of words'? Throughout, Zartaloudis reads and roams, disposes, arranges and orders anew centuries of use, fields of practice and thought (poetry and prophecy, tragedy and philosophy, shepherding and mousikē, to name just a few), engrossing traditions of reading, of performance and conduct, as well as persistent issues and concepts of manifest currency -- and intense urgency. The outer edges of law (that most common translation of nomos from which Zartaloudis knowingly seeks to guard us, 'the danger', he says, 'is, as ever, to miss the point') are traversed and carefully circumvented, revealed for their still unchartered expanses, the multifarious forms of life and worlds they are and have been. A masterful and exemplary, truly creative and generous work.--Gil Anidjar, Columbia University

If you thought you know what nomos means, you are wrong. In a masterful and determined feat of scholarship, Thanos Zartaloudis' The Birth of Nomos follows the manifold origins of the term in multiple sites of practice, such as sheep-herding, feasting, allocating, and land-holding.--Nicholas Blomley, Simon Fraser University

Like no one else before, Thanos Zartaloudis has broken through the complexities of the concept of nomos with a tour de force. As incisive and imaginative as one wants intellectual work to be, The Birth of Nomos bursts even more with stunning philological prowess, poetic invention, and philosophical ingenuity - a real gem to behold and a treasure to mine over and over.--Stathis Gourgouris, Columbia University

Thanos Zartaloudis' The Birth of Nomos renovates entirely our understanding of a fundamental term in the history of Western culture. From this unprecedented book, it becomes clear that we will need to rethink all of the themes that our ethical and political tradition has gathered around the word 'Law'.--Giorgio Agamben

Thanos Zartaloudis's The Birth of Nomos is an unprecedented study of a category that for too long has been reduced to narrow and at times problematic interpretations. For Zartaloudis, nomos gives rise to multiple interpretations which in different ways deal with the question of how to make forms of life intelligible as a collective experience. In doing so Zartaloudis challenges the way nomos has been translated into rigid juridical formulas and gives back to this term its existential and poetic density. Beside its importance in the fields of Law and Ancient Studies, I would to say that The Birth of Nomos is also a crucial book also for all those committed to spatial practices such as architects, planners, artists, and activists as it can inspire more sensitive and nuanced ways to give form to our experience of the world.--Pier Vittorio Aureli, Architectural Association and Unit Master

The time has come for us as a community to consider our dependencies on our habituations, indeed to review the circumlocutory logic of our habitual recourse to habituation. It is not the content of the nomos per se that is at fault, but the structural interactions of nomos with its hated opponents: violence, anarchy, nature and anomie. Giorgio Agamben recently requested that we try to think nomos as in contact with its opposite, anomie, without any kind of oppositional relationality, as a precursor to thinking anomie as a thing for itself, not simply the zone of failure of the rule of law. If nomos is set loose from anomie, and anomie empowered to create a new, indifferential and nonrelational ontological and political landscape, then what of nomos, what of our habits of being, existence and power? What will nomos even resemble if its habitual modes of operativity and function are no longer tied to a history of aggression towards that upon which its very existence is negatively founded? To think anomie without nomos is one kind of task, and we have thinkers of indifference to take us into that strange territory. To think nomos without anomie however is another mode of behaviour entirely, and is perhaps the greater intellectual challenge. Who will lead us in this intimidating and deeply unsettling quest, a quest for that which we already possess? Thanos Zartaloudis is the only man for the job, which is why we should all read The Birth of Nomos, because in keeping with Benjamin's idea of Jetzzeit, the ancient history of nomos is, at the same time, our contemporary moment. And Zartaloudis the presiding genius of its essential archaeology. In order for the habitual dictates of power to die, they first have to be truly born, for power has just as much right to be set free from its narratives of oppression, as its victims have the right to walk down a street dressed in the habit of their non-habituation unmolested, unsegregated, and indifferent. Thanks to Zartaloudis, we are 485 steps closer to this radical potential.--William Watkin, Brunel University

Writing in the grand tradition of humanistic legal research, The Birth of Nomos proffers an extraordinarily sophisticated and extremely precise tracking of the European roots of the legal tradition. Contemporary legal theory defines nomos and norm as law and rule. In a meticulously erudite work of philological and philosophical investigation, The Birth of Nomos patiently and decisively evidences the paucity and inaccuracy of such designations. Zartaloudis in this scintillatingly original study traces the plural roots and multiple forms of nomos and in doing so redraws the boundaries of jurisprudence.--Peter Goodrich, Cardozo Law School

About the Author

Thanos Zartaloudis is a Reader in Legal Theory and History at Kent Law School, University of Kent, and Lecturer in History and Theory Studies at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London.