Justice has remained the keyword which runs through various different and at times diametrically opposite thoughts in Western Political Thought. Western Political thought has remained a search for a perfect state, enshrined within it the conception of Justice. Such a conception of Justice and State appears in Western Political Thought and Jurisprudence from the times of Ancient Greek Philosophy to the modernist philosophy of Ideologies and Social Contract to the post-structuralist philosophy of socially-constructed linguistic structures.
Jurisprudence remains a search for the structure to both define the boundaries of the close set of such an idealist society and to define the relationship between the members in the society. Jurisprudence as a search for closely worded and codified legal instruments, has been a requirement of modernity where the word took precedence over the metaphysics of un-said and felt. In pre-modern, ancient Greek thought, Jurisprudence was a discipline allied with and at the same pedestal as any other discipline of Humanities including Ethics, Epistemology, a concern with Literature etc. Jurisprudence could not be understood differently from the Philosophy of Ontology, the larger purpose of Universe and an appreciation of the philosophical assumptions of the system.
Modern Philosophy tried to create a distinction among the various socio-political and economic facets of thought. Jurisprudence was separated from the domain of the social and elevated to the task of constructing the social for the members of the political-community. The creation of the social space with a desire for survival translated into the tasks for Jurisprudence in the tumultuous times of modernity: codified laws which worked for the sovereignty of the State with the protection of the status-quo of social-political and economic paradigm, while imagining development in a linear manner.
Ancient Greek thought on the other hand is a concern with Aesthetics. Political Aesthetics is the basic concern of Ancient Greek Political thought. The notion of the “Good” and the “Beautiful” laid the tasks for the Jurisprudential thought. Good and Beautiful were to be searched in the Social, where the individual was still not recognized as a atomistic whole (was was done by modernity).
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