Like many scholars, Louis Dumont ( Essays on Individualism ) traces the development of modern conceptions of social order, individualism, and politics to Ockham: Ockham denied that general terms have any reality: “Ockham goes so far in his polemics against the Pope as to deny that there is really anything like the ‘Franciscan Order’: there are only Franciscan monks scattered through Europe.” As a result, he insists that there is “no natural law deduced from an ideal order of things” and thus “nothing beyond the actual law posited either by God or by man with God’s permission, i.e. positive law .” God’s absolute power cannot be limited by anything but itself, and “this reference to the power of God will reflect upon human institutions.”

Law in particular is conceived not as “an expression of the order descried in nature by the human mind” but becomes instead “in its entirety the expression of the ‘power’ or ‘will’ of the legislator.” Once, “right had been conceived as a just relationship between social beings” but in Ockham right is “the social recognition of the power ( potestas ) of the individual.” Ockham thus becomes “the founding father of the ‘subjective theory’ of right” that is the basis of “the modern theory of law.”

Dumont adds in a footnote that the setting for the development of this theory of law: The debate between Pope and the Franciscans over the Franciscan vows of poverty.

“Saint Francis of Assisi had wedded his order to poverty, but it became very rich and the Popes finally decided to compel the order to accept the ownership of the estates which they actually enjoyed.” Ockham wanted to remain with Francis’s original vision and so fought the Papal requirement, in the process developing “his new definitions of law and right.”

Ironically, Ockham’s intention was “to restrict the judicial sphere, but he thereby made it independent and, his individualism and positivism playing their part, more absolute and compulsive than it had ever been. As opposed to the mere faculty of using a thing, a right to it is characterized by its sanction, i.e. the possibility of vindicating it before a court of law. ‘A right is power recognised by positive law’: thus says the advocate of property heralding the era of private property.”

This, rather than Roman law, is the origin of the modern notion of property: “It is more likely that it has been read into Roman Law by its modern interpreters.”