The Dawn of States-System as a Concept: Althusius, Pufendorf and Leibniz on the Holy Roman Empire (original) (raw)
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This essay places Eugen Ehrlich and Hans Kelsen afresh in their common context, the late Habsburg Empire. It reframes Ehrlich's legal sociology and Kelsen's pure theory of law as co-original and connected responses to the problem of legal universals under conditions of fractured sovereignty and imperial diversity. At first glance, Kelsen and Ehrlich seem antipodes, an impression apparently confirmed by their prickly exchange in the 1910s: while Kelsen made universality reside in the formal features and sequences of imputation that held the normative order together, Ehrlich claimed that every normative system which purported to be meta-social and meta-cultural merely camouflaged its local conditions of emergence. Once resituated in their Habsburg environment, these strategies can be read as articulations of a broader set of common proclivities. Ehrlich's and Kelsen's proficiency in the empire's techniques of plurality management enabled them to demystify the state and to dismantle the nation: both perceived the state as a juristic construction, hence they unmasked its alleged social, cultural, and ontological unity as a delusion. The same held true for the nation: Ehrlich challenged its supremacy by showing that social relationships-"associations"-cut across national divides, while Kelsen delegitimized the nation's status as a rights-bearing collective and blurred the distinction between citizens and alien residents, working toward the civic enfranchisement of the latter. This dovetailed with Ehrlich's and Kelsen's unmaking of the distinction between private and public law: the false belief in the latter's superiority over the former served to license arbitrary rule. Both jurists deterritorialized state sovereignty by highlighting the brittleness of spatial dominion and the artificiality of political boundaries: Ehrlich and Kelsen discovered a gamut of sovereign authorities with overlapping spatial areas of jurisdiction that coexisted within the Habsburg polity. This in turn permitted them to effectively transcend the distinction between domestic and international law: while, according to Ehrlich, the state fizzled out on the local level, Kelsen redescribed it from a global perspective, turning it into a mere subordinate organ of world law. Ehrlich's legal pluralism and Kelsen's pure theory were the two most successful juristic legacies of the Habsburg polity whose imprint they bore. Both creatively reworked Habsburg constitutional reality into templates of legal order that survived the empire's demise. Full text available at: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/modern-intellectual-history/article/imperial-diversity-fractured-sovereignty-and-legal-universals-hans-kelsen-and-eugen-ehrlich-in-their-habsburg-context/8CFF629C9336F01E583D38FCA8CF4A2C
General accounts of the political history of later medieval Europe have tended to stress the development of discrete, more-or-less coherent units. A typical approach in such accounts is to list the most prominent European kingdoms and principalities, and to characterise the most important trends in their development in terms of that which contributed (however gradually and incompletely) to their consolidation and constituted the vertical ‘lineaments of state power’. This way of thinking about politics has long posed a problem for the German-speaking spaces within the Holy Roman Empire. Given that a path towards increasingly centralised statehood under a monarch or prince is held up as the norm, it is not surprising that – in light of the weakness of the kings of the Romans and the fragmentation of the Imperial political map – German scholars have concluded that ‘das römisch-deutsche Reich den Weg zur modernen Staatlichkeit nicht gefunden [hat]’, and furthermore that ‘in den Territorien weitgehend verwirklicht wurde, was dem Reich als Ganzem versagt blieb, so daß es in Deutschland eher die Territorialherrschaften waren, die den Grundstock für die Ausbildung des modernen “Anstaltsstaates” gelegt haben’. The notion that the Empire’s late medieval political development was shaped by the creation of Territorien – Territorialstaaten, even –emerged in the early modern principalities within the Empire, and has overshadowed the historiography of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries ever since. There have been attempts to render this idea of crystallising authority within compartmentalised lordship-territories less anachronistically and less abstractly as socially-grounded Landesherrschaft and Landeshoheit, notably under the influence of Otto Brunner’s concept of autogenic lordship in tradition- and community-derived Länder. The word ‘state’ is thus now avoided, but the historiographical vision of the Empire remains that of a patchwork of evolving political units (Flächenherrschaften) characterised by growing governmental authority. As Ernst Schubert conceded in his recent overview of princely lordship in late medieval Germany, scholarship of the Empire remains in the grip of this model of territorial political power below the level of the crown even though scholars are questioning the meaning and value of the concepts (Territorium, Landesherrschaft, and so on) which underpin it. The Empire as a whole has not been fully abandoned in the search for a political narrative for later medieval Germany. Since Peter Moraw’s 1985 history of the 1250-1490 period the role of the monarchy and the estates have been viewed constructively through the influential paradigm sketched out in that book. According to Moraw’s model, there was a transition from an ‘open constitution’ (offene Verfassung), in which political entities existed side-by-side within the boundaries of an Empire towards which they had no major obligations, to a kind of ‘configured consolidation’ (gestaltete Verdichtung), which was the loose and dualistic but increasingly institutionalised form that the Empire took as a consequence of the interplay of the interests of great dynasties on the Imperial throne on the one hand and the combined efforts of the leading Reichsstände to defend and assert their personal and territorial agendas on the other. This framework is offered as a means of making sense of how ‘die Vielzahl der Machtträger im Reich’ and their ‘freie Kräftespiel’ fed into the shape and dynamic of the Imperial polity as a whole. These conceptualisations of the Empire and its constituent parts have gone a long way towards fashioning a convincing narrative of political developments in the German lands. However, in the south-west of the Empire there was a level of political activity which is very evident in surviving documentary sources, but which the existing models of the unitary Territorial- and Reichsverfassungen and the predominantly vertical links within them do not fully apprehend: the sub-monarchical level of lateral interaction between local elites . Verfassungsgeschichte is good at identifying relationships within a political unit, but not across or between multiple units, especially the kind of fragmentary and protean units which formed fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Oberdeutschland. The lateral interaction amongst such units is exemplified by the numerous alliances, leagues, and Landfrieden undertaken by and between a range of political actors along the length and breadth of the Upper Rhine, including princes, counts, margraves, prince-bishops, abbots, and free and Imperial cities. Other kinds of formal association in the area, such as coinage leagues and multilateral jurisdictional contracts, as well as informal networks spanning multiple polities (between creditors and debtors, relatives in extended noble dynasties, etc.), also point to the mutual entanglement of a variety of political actors and entities across ‘territorial’ boundaries. These essentially horizontal associations appear to have been so widespread and multitudinous that it seems appropriate to explain these activities in terms of an associative political culture in the concerned south-western regions. The aim of this paper will be to demonstrate the existence of this political culture in a particularly challenging period for the Imperial monarchy and for peace and order in the Empire – the reigns of Wenceslas, Rupert of the Palatinate, and Sigismund. It will attempt to do so by sketching out the uniquely intense series of criss-crossing alliances which dominated the political landscape of the Upper Rhine between the 1370s and the 1430s. These alliances, and the lateral relationships which underpinned them, shed some light on a bewilderingly complex series of conflicts – the ‘town wars’ of the 1380s, the feuds of Strasbourg in the 1390s, the anti-Austrian Reichskrieg of the 1410s, and the anti-badisch coalition of the 1420s – which can seem chaotic and inexplicable when viewed solely from the perspective of the individual political entities involved, or from that of a ‘zoomed out’ overview of Imperial history. The paper will seek to substantiate the case for associative political culture further by reference to some other specific examples of lateral interaction, such as knightly societies and trans-jurisdictional mediatory practices. It will also consider how the activities of more or less autonomous regional powers below the level of the crown intersected with the idea and reality of the Empire as a whole and its monarchs. The presence in many alliance treaties, not least royally-sanctioned Landfriedensverträge, of a rhetoric of concern for general peace and order and the honour of the Holy Roman Empire suggests a conscious link between associative activity and the overarching Imperial polity. More concretely, kings could and did attempt to harness associations to their own agendas, particularly those associations with close established customary ties to the crown’s remaining administrative structures, such as the league of ten Imperial cities in the Reichslandvogtei of Alsace (the so-called ‘Décapole alsacienne’). The half-brothers Wenceslas and Sigismund provide an instructive comparison, in that the former’s rigid opposition to most formal associations (notably Städtebünde) left him with far less influence than the latter was able to garner through a policy of careful support for key actors and their allies, although neither could fully direct associative dynamics in the south-western localities. The turbulence in south-west Germany which followed Charles IV’s experiment in hegimoniales Königtum cannot be fully understood without considering how associative activity fits into both regional and crown-level politics. The contention in this paper will thus be that we stand to gain by thinking about sources pertaining to later medieval Germany in a framework other than that of the Verfassungsgeschichte of either a territory or of the Empire as a whole. Instead, a consideration of political structures – discourses, networks, and behavioural patterns as well as formal ties and institutions – could yield new perspectives and resolve apparent difficulties in the Empire’s historical development. The specific case of the later medieval Upper Rhine suggests that some of the prevalent structures of this kind could be characterised as elements of an associative political culture on the basis of the extensive evidence of lateral interaction between poorly hierarchised neighbouring powers. Associative political culture in all its forms offers one possible alternative solution to Moraw’s ‘drängendes Problem’ of ‘die Suche nach dem Gemeinsamen in der deutschen Geschichte innerhalb ihrer ausgeprägten Vielfalt’. This paper will attempt to make it clear that lateral interactions between variegated powers are an important but neglected aspect of the political history of the Empire and perhaps of Europe more generally in the later middle ages.
Since the nineteenth century, the Holy Roman Empire has occupied a central but often negative place in accounts of German nationhood. 'In the beginning was the Reich', declared Heinrich August Winkler in his monumental German history, which took as its starting point the Empire's abolition in 1806. 1 It was with the Empire that, in Winkler's view fatally, 'that which distinguishes German history from the history of the great western-European nations has … its origin'. Winkler's judgement reflects a viewpoint which has been tenacious and highly influential: that at the heart of the problem of German nation-making lay the peculiar and deficient character of Germany's pre-modern 'state', the Empire itself. Whereas other European nations had developed within the framework of governments exercising sovereign power over firmly bounded populations, the Reich, after a promising start, had fallen prey to universalist fantasies, fragmentation, institutional atrophy, and the interference of foreign powers. At the Empire's final, allegedly unlamented demise, the German people constituted a mere Kulturnation, a scattered population of shared language and custom, but lacking the unifying steel of firm, centralising rule. That steel was destined to be supplied by Prussia. This chapter is concerned with the medieval period, comprising roughly the first two thirds of the Empire's thousand-year history. The Middle Ages have been central to modern narratives of the tortuous and anomalous course of German nation-making, since it was in those early centuries that the prize of nationhood was supposedly first glimpsed and then fatally lost. On this view, rooted in nineteenth-century conceptions of the sovereign nationstate, nation-making in the German lands ran backwards, from early promise, under vigorous 'German' kings, to imperial hubris, overreach, betrayal, and a long decline into sleepy provincialism and political impotence. In what follows, a different account of the relationship
History of European Ideas, 2014
The foundations of modern international thought were constructed out of diverse idioms and disciplines. In his impressive book, Foundations of Modern International Thought, David Armitage focuses on the normative idioms of natural law and political philosophy from the Anglophone world, from Hobbes and Locke to Burke and Bentham. I focus on parallel developments in the empirically-oriented disciplines of history and historiography to trace the emergence of histories of the states-system in the Italian-and German-speaking worlds, from Bruni and Sarpi to Pufendorf and Heeren. Taking seriously Armitage's remark that 'the pivotal moments in the formation of modern international thought were often points of retrospective reconstruction', I argue that the historical disciplines supplied another significant intellectual context in which the modern world could be imagined as 'a world of states'.
Český časopis historický, 2023
The emergence of nation states in Europe is associated in contemporary historiography with the French Revolution and the development of national movements in the 19th century. The author draws attention to an earlier phase of the formation of nation states, which was related to the power-political crisis of the Holy Roman Empire in the second half of the 15th century. The medieval Empire crossed the boundaries of three major language groups that were mutually unintelligible (Germanic, Romance and Slavic languages). At the time of the creation of the Estates’ monarchies at the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries, the question of linguistic identity became an important state-forming element.
The temptation of theologians and sovereigns to think and seek to understand the world from an eschatological perspective, and thus in a permanent tension between the temporal and the eternal, is certainly characteristic of medieval political thought. Moreover, scholarly interest in the old Church/State pairing or the monarchy/priesthood association in political history has lost none of its relevance over time. 1 Political Theology? Schmitt-Peterson The concept of political theology dates back to the twentieth century; 2 it refers to reflection on the relationship between the Church and the secular State within secularized modern states. It only makes sense when applied to a theologico-political problem posed within the framework of a revealed and instituted religion, taking its theology into account. 3 (Re)introduced during the inter-war period by the German philosopher and jurist Carl 1 Cf. Boureau, "Des politiques." 2 Political theology should not be confused with the theology/civil religion (theologia civilis) of Varro's tripartite classification of Romano-pagan theologia (116-27 BC). Cf. Milbank, "Politique." 3 Kervégan, "L'enjeu," 202. Schmitt, 4 the question of political theology was raised for the first time in the debate on the relationship between monotheism and politics that pitted this German intellectual against the theologian Erik Peterson, 5 who was also German. Leaving aside the political rather than theological or religious stakes of this quarrel, while remaining critical of his "descriptive" and "polemical" notion of political theology, 6 we retain from Carl Schmitt's work the idea of an isomorphism between the social structure of an era and its metaphysical image of the world. 7 His thesis of the transfer and secularization of Christian theological concepts into the legislative and legal sphere made a lasting impression. 8 The modern State was born of the Christian religion. His legal theory would proceed from the neutralization of faith and the secularization of theology developed and refined over the centuries. 9 On the contrary, in his Catholic theology thesis Erik Peterson rejected the Christian origin of political 4 A philosopher, theorist, and professor of law at the University of Berlin, Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) was a Catholic and German conservative, if not reactionary, who joined the Nazi party in 1933. In 1945, Karl Jaspers described him as "one of those professors who tried to take the intellectual lead of the National Socialist movement" (quoted in Kervégan, "Questions," 147). The political ideas he supported and subsequently developed as a result of this membership have done much to discredit his work (Kervégan, "L'enjeu"). For a recent overview of the debates on the desirability of reading C. Schmitt, read the important
The struggle for political hegemony in early modern Europe was not solely pursued by military means. The many layered antagonistic claims-often motivated by religious and political ambitions, within Europe and beyond its borders-led to a variety of theories which aimed to foster claims for political influence and hegemony. Universal monarchy and balance of power are the two main concepts which can be discerned as the principal strategies employed in the strife, if not for Empire, at least for hegemony. The study of religion and Empire is closely related to the claims to universal monarchy, as it was this concept which not only claimed legitimate dominion over the world, but in doing so, commanding the role of purveyor of order and peace. Catholicism was used to reinforce the claim to empire. However, during the process of state building in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, universal monarchy was increasingly challenged and eventually superseded by the alternative idea of a balance of power, as a means of organizing the emerging European state system.1 Indeed, among most political thinkers of the seventeenth century the idea of universal monarchy had lost its constructive political value and was mostly used polemically.2 Theories which attempted to found