onditions: "All legitimate law rests upon enactment, and all enactment, in turn, rests upon rational agreement. This agreement is either, first, real, i.e., derived from an actual original contract of free individuals, which also regulates the form in which new law is to be enacted in the future; or, second, ideal, in the sense that only that law is legitimate whose content does not contradict the conception of a reasonable order enacted by free agreement (Weber, 1978, p. 99).
Weber locates the ideal type of freedom of action and agreement in the "freedom of contract," which "became one of the universal formal principles of natural law construction, either as assumed real historical basis of all rational consociations including the state, or, at least, as the regulative standard of evaluation" (Weber, 1978, p. 99).
Two strands of thought in regard to freedom of contract are evident in this analysis. One is the treatment of the development of capitalism in post-Renaissance Europe and North America as a structured means (or perhaps as a structure of means) aime
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