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Imperial Diversity, Fractured Sovereignty, and Legal Universals: Hans Kelsen and Eugen Ehrlich in their Habsburg Context

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 February 2021

Franz Leander Fillafer
Franz Leander Fillafer*
Affiliation:
IKT, Austrian Academy of Sciences
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

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.

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Modern Intellectual History , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , June 2022 , pp. 421 - 443
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Copyright © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 See Vogl, Stefan, “Eugen Ehrlich's Linking of Sociology and Jurisprudence and the Reception of His Work in Japan,” in Hertogh, Marc, ed., Living Law: Reconsidering Eugen Ehrlich (Oxford, 2009) 95–123Google Scholar; Teubner, Günther, “Globale Bukowina: Zur Emergenz eines transnationalen Rechtspluralismus,” Rechtshistorisches Journal 15 (1996), 255–90Google Scholar; Hertogh, Marc, “A ‘European’ Conception of Legal Consciousness: Rediscovering Eugen Ehrlich,” Journal of Law and Society 31/4 (2004), 457–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rottenleutner, Hubert, “Das lebende Recht bei Eugen Ehrlich und Ernst Hirsch,” Zeitschrift für Rechtssoziologie 33 (2016), 191–206CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A series published under the auspices of the Hans Kelsen Institute is devoted to the global appeal of the pure theory, Der Einfluß der Reinen Rechtslehre auf die Rechtstheorie in verschiedenen Ländern, 3 vols. (Vienna, 1978–2010).

2 Illuminating studies on the global fortunes of Central European climate research, psychoanalysis, ethnography, neoliberal economics and logical empiricism have sought to transcend the appetizingly allusive, yet frequently insubstantial, arguments about the Habsburg Empire as a nutshell-like miniature of the global order. See Weiler, Bernd, “Über das Identische im Vielfältigen und die Monotonie des Uniformen: Einige Überlegungen zur österreichischen Ethnologie und deren Ursprung im Vielkvölkerstaat der Monarchie,” in Boisits, Barbara and Rinofner-Kreidl, Sonja, eds., Einheit und Vielfalt: Organologische Denkmodelle in der Moderne (Vienna, 2000), 273–301Google Scholar; Coen, Deborah, Climate in Motion: Science, Empire, and the Problem of Scale (Chicago, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Slobodian, Quinn, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Rise of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA, 2019)Google Scholar; Hartnack, Christiane, Psychoanalysis in Colonial India (Oxford, 2001)Google Scholar; Reisch, George A., How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science: To the Icy Slopes of Logic (Cambridge, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 On the former debate and its Austrian ramifications see Feichtinger, Johannes, Wissenschaft als reflexives Projekt: Von Bolzano über Freud zu Kelsen. Österreichische Wissenschaftsgeschichte, 1848–1938 (Bielefeld, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. When public lawyer Georg Jellinek visited Budapest in 1905 he was amazed that the public sphere bristled with talk of public law which was the subject of chitchat in railway compartments, streets and coffee houses by the Danube alike. Georg Jellinek, “Ungarisches Staatsrecht: Eine politische Reisebetrachtung,” Neue Freie Presse, 11 June 1905, c.i. Joachim Bahlcke, “Hungaria eliberata? Zum Zusammenstoß von altständischer Libertät und monarchischer Autorität in Ungarn an der Wende vom 17. zum 18. Jahrhundert,” in Petr Maťa and Thomas Winkelbauer, eds., Die Habsburgermonarchie 1620–1740: Leistungen und Grenzen des Absolutismusparadigmas (Stuttgart, 2006), 301–16, at 305. The nooks and crannies of these controversies can only be grasped in their conceptual and practical ramifications through an exhaustive study of the contemporary material which, has yet to be digested into a synthetic, analytically informed study. Convenient starting points are Bidermann, Hermann Ignaz, “Die rechtliche Natur der österreichisch-ungarischen Monarchie,” Juristische Blätter 6 (1877), 219–32Google Scholar (“state of states”); Georg Jellinek, Die Lehre von den Staatenverbindungen (Vienna, 1882), 227; Wlassics, Gyula, “Alkotmányjogunk védelme Tezner és Turba ellen,” Budapesti Szemle 150/424–6 (1912), 346–66Google Scholar; Fur, Louis Le and Posener, Paul, Bundesstaat und Staatenbund (Breslau, 1902), 301–2Google Scholar.

4 See Coen, Deborah R., “Climate and Circulation in Imperial Austria,” Journal of Modern History 82 (2010), 839–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 873; Franz L. Fillafer and Johannes Feichtinger, “How to Write the History of Knowledge from a Central European Perspective,” at https://historyofknowledge.net/2019/10/09/global-history-of-knowledge-making-from-central-european-perspective/#more-12923.

5 For practices of world making see Duncan Bell, “Making and Taking Worlds,” in Andrew Sartori and Sam Moyn, eds., Global Intellectual History (New York, 2013), 254–79.

6 See Milan Hlavačka, Zlatý věk české samosprávy 1862–1913 (Prague, 2006); Cohen, Gary C., “Nationalist Politics and the Dynamics of State and Civil Society in the Habsburg Monarchy,” Central European History 40 (2007), 241–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pieter M. Judson, The Habsburg Empire: A New History (Cambridge, MA, 2016).

7 Eliav Lieblich, “Assimilation through Law: Hans Kelsen and the Jewish Experience,” in James Loeffler and Moria Paz, eds., The Law of Strangers: Critical Perspectives on Jewish Lawyering and International Legal Thought (Cambridge, 2019), 74, to my mind unconvincingly argues for a link between the dilemmas of Kelsen's status as an assimilated Jew and his monist absorption of normative materials into an overarching world-legal system. Lieblich seeks to draw a parallel between the emancipated Jew's self-renunciation and the disintegration of the rights-bearing individual who in Kelsen's theory signifies a mere point of imputation, a bundle of obligations and entitlements.

8 Thomas Olechowski, Hans Kelsen: Biographie eines Rechtswissenschaftlers (Tübingen, 2020), 27–43; Anna Lea Staudacher, “Zwischen Emanzipation und Assimilation: Jüdische Juristen im Wien des Fin de Siècle,” in Rudolf Walter, Werner Ogris, and Thomas Olechowski, eds., Hans Kelsen: Leben—Werk—Wirksamkeit (Vienna, 2009), 41–53, at 47.

9 Hans Kelsen, “Naturalisation und Heimatberechtigung nach österreichischem Rechte” (1907), in Hans Kelsen Werke, vol. 1 (hereafter HKW 1), Veröffentlichte Schriften und Selbstzeugnisse, 1905–1910, ed. Matthias Jestaedt (Tübingen, 2007) 545–60, at 560. Here Kelsen disproved the claim that awarding Austrian citizenship was contingent on a candidate's certificate of residency awarded by a municipality.

10 Olechowski, Hans Kelsen, 119. When Kelsen and his fiancée decided to get married they became Protestants beforehand, enabling them to seek divorce in the future in case the marriage failed to shape up the way they expected—which it did. When Margarethe Kelsen died in 1973 her husband Hans survived her only by a couple of weeks.

11 Roger Cotterell, “Ehrlich at the Edge of Empire: Centres and Peripheries in Legal Studies,” in Herthog, Living Law, 75–94, at 81. In 1909 Ehrlich described assimilation to German culture as inevitable also for those Jews who lived among Slavs in eastern Central Europe, whereas in 1916 he noted that the proneness to assimilate vanished due to rampant anti-Semitism. Eugen Ehrlich, Die Aufgaben der Sozialpolitik im österreichischen Osten (Juden- und Bauernfrage), 4th edn (Munich 1916), 6–7.

12 Rehbinder, Begründung, 10–11.

13 On Anton Menger, the brother of Carl, founding figure of the Austrian school of marginal-utility economics, see the obituary by Eugen Ehrlich, Adolf Menger (Stuttgart, 1906).

14 An excellent recent bibliographical guide to Ehrlich's abundant output is Sergiy Nezhurbida, Maria Diachuk and Manfred Rehbinder, Eugen Ehrlich: Bibliographic Index, ed. Slávka Tomaščíková (Wilmington and Malaga, 2018).

15 Rudolf Jhering, Scherz und Ernst in der Jurisprudenz: Eine Weihnachtsgabe, 3rd edn (Leipzig, 1885; first published 1884), 7; Okko Behrends, “Rudolf von Jhering: Der Rechtsdenker der offenen Gesellschaft. Ein Wort zur Bedeutung seiner Rechtstheorie und zu den geschichtlichen Gründen ihrer Mißdeutung,” in Behrends, ed., Rudolf von Jhering: Beiträge und Zeugnisse aus Anlaß der einhundertsten Wiederkehr seines Todestages am 17.9.1992 (Göttingen, 1992), 8–10; Herbert Hofmeister, “Jhering in Wien,” in ibid., 38–47.

16 On Paul Laband see Michael Stolleis's seminal Public Law in Germany, 1800–1914 (New York, 2001), 323–8. For Laband's critics see Stefan Korioth's perceptive “Erschütterungen des staatsrechtlichen Positivismus im ausgehenden Kaiserreich: Anmerkungen zu frühen Arbeiten von Carl Schmitt, Rudolf Smend und Erich Kaufmann,” Archiv des öffentlichen Rechts 117 (1992), 212–38. On Ehrlich's critique see Manfred Rehbinder, Die Begründung der Rechtssoziologie durch Eugen Ehrlich (Berlin, 1967), 13; Hans Kelsen, “The Pure Theory of Law, ‘Labandism’, and Neo-Kantianism: A letter to Renato Treves,” in Stanley L. Paulson and Bonnie L. Paulson, eds., Normativity and Norms: Critical Perspectives on Kelsenian Themes (Oxford, 1998), 169–75, at 170–71.

17 Mehring, Reinhard, “Staatsrechtslehre, Rechtslehre, Verfassungslehre: Carl Schmitts Auseinandersetzung mit Hans Kelsen,” Archiv für Rechts- Staatsphilosophie 80 (1994), 191–202Google Scholar, at 199.

18 See Christoph Schönberger, “Ein Liberaler zwischen Staatswille und Volkswille: Georg Jellinek und die Krise des staatsrechtlichen Positivismus um die Jahrhundertwende,” in Stanley L. Paulson and Martin Schulte, eds., Georg Jellinek: Beiträge zu Leben und Werk (Tübingen, 2000), 3–32. Schönberger stresses that Jellinek's Habsburg experience sharpened his sociological acumen and made him skeptical of Laband's stodgy dogmatism. Ibid., 17. Thomas Olechowski, “Georg Jellinek und Hans Kelsen: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Staatsrechtslehre an der Universität Wien um 1900,” in Elisabeth Röhrlich, ed., Migration und Innovation um 1900: Perspektiven auf das Wien der Jahrhundertwende (Vienna, 2016), 375–98.

19 Georg Jellinek, Allgemeine Staatslehre, 3rd edn, Unter Verwertung des handschriftlichen Nachlasses durchgesehen und ergänzt von Dr. Walter Jellinek (Berlin, 1914), 394–434.

20 In his Main Problems of 1911, Kelsen, who had studied abroad at Heidelberg to attend Jellinek's seminaries in 1907 and 1908–9, considered himself lucky to have been among his students. Kelsen expressed the hope that his book would contribute to the blessed memory of the great Jellinek, Hauptprobleme, 63.

21 Hans Kelsen, “Über Grenzen zwischen juristischer und soziologischer Methode” (1911), in Hans Kelsen Werke, vol. 3, Veröffentlichte Schriften 1911–1917, ed. Matthias Jestaedt (Tübingen, 2007) (hereafter HKW 3), 23–75, at 51; compare Kelsen, “Sociologická a právnická idea státní,” Sborník vědprávních a státních 14 (1913–14), 69–101. On Kelsen's membership in the Viennese Sociological Association, which devoted itself to the promotion of sociology as a university discipline and as a subject of popular education see Olechowski, Kelsen, 164.

22 Kelsen, Hans, “The Conception of the State and Social Psychology” (1921), International Journal of Psycho-analysis 5 (1934), 1–38Google Scholar, at 36. Cf. Johannes Feichtinger, “Intellectual Affinities: Ernst Mach, Sigmund Freud, Hans Kelsen and the Austrian Anti-essentialist Approach to Science and Scholarship,” in Ian Bryan, Peter Langford, and John McGarry, eds, The Foundation of the Juridico-Political: Concept Formation in Hans Kelsen and Max Weber (New York, 2016), 117–39.

23 Hans Kelsen, “Autobiographie” (1947), in HKW 1: 29–132, at 59–60; Kelsen, “Reichsgesetz und Landesgesetz nach österreichischer Verfassung” (1914), in HKW 3: 360–425, at 398. Compare the reflections Hans Kelsen devoted to the interaction and reconciliation of diverse interests in the wide territorial sphere of an empire in Kelsen, Die Staatslehre des Dante Alighieri (Vienna, 1905), 6, 8, 15, 16, 35, 135. Cf. Manfred Baldus, “Hapsburgian Multiethnicity and the ‘Unity of the State’: On the Structural Setting of Kelsen's Legal Thought,” in Dan Diner and Michael Stolleis, eds., Hans Kelsen and Carl Schmitt: A Juxtaposition (Gerlingen, 1999), 13–25.

24 Ehrlich, Fundamental Principles, 470.

25 See Irina Stahl, “Balthazar Bogišić et Bogdan Petriceiu Hașdeu, deux scientifiques à la recherche des coutumes juridiques dans le sud-est de l'Europe,” in Luka Breneselović, ed., Spomenica Valtazara Bogišića: O stogodišnjici njegove smrti 24. apr. 2008. godine, 2 vols. (Belgrade, 2011), 1: 187–205; Sima Avramović, “Srpski građanski zakonik (1844) i pravni transplanti: kopija austrijskog uzora ili više od toga?”, in Milena Polojac, Zoran S. Mirković, and Marko Đurđević, eds., Srpski građanski zakonik: 170 godina (Belgrade, 2014), 13–45; Stanislav Dnistrjans′kyj, Das Gewohnheitsrecht und die sozialen Verbände (Czernowitz, 1905); Lebow, Katherine, Mazurek, Małgorzata and Wawrzyniak, Joanna, “Making Modern Social Science: The Global Imagination in East Central and Southeastern Europe after Versailles,” Contemporary European History 28 (2019), 137–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 Eugen Ehrlich, “Das lebende Recht der Völker der Bukowina” (1912), in Ehrlich, Recht und Leben: Gesammelte Schriften zur Rechtstatsachenforschung und Freirechtslehre, ed. Manfred Rehbinder (Berlin, 1967), 43–60, 43.

27 See the festive two-volume flagship publication the Viennese Juristic Association released on the occasion of the jubilee, Festschrift zur Jahrhundertfeier des Allgemeinen Bürgerlichen Gesetzbuches, 1. Juni 1911, 2 vols. (Vienna, 1911), in particular Franz Klein, “Die Lebenskraft des Allgemeinen Bürgerlichen Gesetzbuches,” in ibid., 1: 3–32.

28 Eugen Ehrlich, Fundamental Principles of the Sociology of Law, tr. Walter L. Moll (New York, 1962; first published 1913), 192.

29 Ibid., 38, Cotterell, “Ehrlich at the Edge,” 87; Eugen Ehrlich, “Die freie Rechtsfindung,” Das Recht: Volkstümliche Zeitschrift für österreichisches Rechtsleben 4/5 (1906), 35–41.

30 Eugen Ehrlich, “Judicial Freedom of Decision: Principles and Objects” (1903), in Ernest Bruncken and Layton Bartol Register, eds., The Science of Legal Method: Selected Essays by Various Authors (New York, 1921), 48–84, 83.

31 Kelsen, Hauptprobleme, 191–300; Kelsen, “Über Grenzen,” 27–9, 31–3, 36–47.

32 Eugen Ehrlich, Die stillschweigende Willenserklärung (Berlin, 1893); Ehrlich, Fundamental Principles, 105–6.

33 Monica Eppinger, “Governing in the Vernacular: Eugen Ehrlich and Late Habsburg Ethnography,” in Hertogh, Living Law, 21–47, at 34; Eugen Ehrlich, “Professor Ehrlich's Seminary of Living Law,” presented by William H. Page, Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the Association of American Law Schools (Chicago, 1914), 46–75, at 58–9.

34 Cotterell, “Ehrlich at the Edge”, 88; Kelsen, Hauptprobleme, 872. For Kelsen's return into three-dimensional space with the “hierarchical structure of the legal order” (Stufenbau der Rechtsordnung) pioneered by his student Adolf J. Merkl see Thomas Olechowski, “Legal Hierarchies in the Work of Hans Kelsen and Adolf Julius Merkl,” in Ulrich Müßig, ed., Reconsidering Constitutional Formation II: Decisive Constitutional Normativity. From Old Liberties to New Precedence (Berlin, 2018), 353–62.

35 Ehrlich, Eugen, “Die Börsenschiedsgerichte,” Neue Revue 6 (1895), 262–9, 305–10Google Scholar; Ehrlich, “Über Lücken im Rechte” (1888), in Ehrlich, Recht und Leben, 80–169; Stefan Vogl, Soziale Gesetzgebungspolitik, freie Rechtsfindung und soziologische Rechtswissenschaft bei Eugen Ehrlich (Baden-Baden, 2003), 83–91.

36 Hans Kelsen, “Eine Grundlegung der Rechtssoziologie” (1914–15), in HKW 3: 317–58. Cf. Klaus Lüderssen, “Hans Kelsen und Eugen Ehrlich,” in Stanley Paulson and Michael Stolleis, eds., Hans Kelsen: Staatsrechtslehrer und Rechtstheoretiker des 20. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen, 2005), 264–75.

37 Such specific “overtones of feeling” included “sentiment(s) of revolt,” “indignation,” “disgust” and “disapproval.” Ehrlich, Fundamental Principles, 165; Kelsen “Grundlegung”, 329.

38 Quoted from Kelsen, “Eine Grundlegung”, 357.

39 Ibid., 347–8.

40 Ibid.

41 Ibid., 354, original emphasis.

42 Helmut W. Smith, “Prussia at the Margins, or the World Nationalism Has Lost,” in Neil Gregor, Nils Roemer, and Mark Roseman, eds., German History from the Margins (Bloomington, 2006), 69–83, at 79.

43 Kelsen, “Eine Grundlegung,” 348.

44 See Hans Kelsen, Vom Wesen und Wert der Demokratie, 2nd edn (Tübingen, 1929).

45 See Tezner, Friedrich, “Die landesfürstliche Verwaltungsrechtspflege in Österreich vom Ausgang des 15. bis zum Ausgang des 18. Jahrhunderts,” Zeitschrift für das Privat- und öffentliche Recht der Gegenwart 25 (1898), 1–89Google Scholar, at 75–80; Holzgethan, Georg, “Über Collisionen bei der den Kammer-Prokuraturen obliegenden Pflicht zur gerichtlichen Vertretung der unterthänigen Gemeinden und einzelnen Gutsunterthanen,” Zeitschrift für österreichische Rechtsgelehrsamkeit und politische Gesetzeskunde 1 (1844) 129–41Google Scholar; István Kállay, Úriszéki bíráskodás a XVIII–XIX. században (Budapest, 1985); Anton von Schmerling, “Allerunterthängister Vortrag des treugehorsamsten Justizministers Dr. Anton von Schmerling betreffend die Organisirung der Gerichte in den Kronländern Galizien und Lodomerien mit Krakau, Auschwitz und Zator und in der Bukowina,” in Az ausztriai birodalmat illető közönséges birodalmi törvény- és kormánylap/Allgemeines Reichs- Gesetz- und Regierungsblatt für das Kaiserthum Oesterreich, Jahrgang 1850, IV. Theil, Stk. CXXVII–CLXV (Vienna, 1850), 2103–2115.

46 Until 1848, the Bukovinian peasants had remained sujets mixtes, deriving their corvée regulations from the so-called chrysow (charter) enacted by the Moldovan prince Grigore III Chica in 1766 whose further validity was stipulated by the treaty between the Ottoman Empire and the Viennese authorities when the Bukovina became a Habsburg possession after the peace of Küçük Kaynarca in 1775. See Verhandlungen des österreichischen Reichstages nach der stenographischen Aufnahme, vol. 1 (Vienna, 1849), 466. For confessional, marital and family laws see Bruno Primetshofer, Rechtsgeschichte der gemischten Ehen in Österreich und Ungarn (1781–1841): Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Beziehungen zwischen Kirche und Staat (Vienna, 1967); and for the loopholes the intra-imperial diversity of marriage laws opened up for potential bridal couples see Christian Neschwara, “Eherecht und ‘Scheinmigration’ im 19. Jahrhundert: Siebenbürgische und ungarische, coburgische und deutsche Ehen,” Beiträge zur Rechtsgeschichte Österreichs 1 (2012), 101–17. Cf. Otto Freydenegg und Monzello, “Zur Geschichte des österreichischen Fideikommißrechtes,” in Berthold Sutter, ed., Reformen des Rechts: Festschrift zur 200-Jahr-Feier der Rechtswissenschaftlichen Fakultät der Universität Graz (Graz, 1979), 777–808; Ignaz von Zingerle and Josef Egger, eds., Die tirolischen Weisthümer. IV. Theil: Burggrafenamt und Etschland. 1. Hälfte (Vienna, 1888), 164; Antonín Haas, “Omezení odúmrti a vdovská třetina v starém českém právu městském,” Právněhistorické studie 17 (1973), 199–218. On Bohemia's contested status in the German Confederacy and the problems of personal mobility, loan-brokerage and property turnover this entailed up to the 1866 peace of Prague, see Bohumil Baxa, “Jednání o připojení zemí koruny české k německému Bundu,” Časopis Musea Království českého 80 (1906), 322–66, 497–510.

47 Compare the penetrating analysis of Otto Hintze, “The Preconditions of Representative Government in the Context of World History” (1931), in The Historical Essays of Otto Hintze, ed. Felix Gilbert (New York, 1975), 302–53.

48 Natasha Wheatley, ‘Law, Time, and Sovereignty in Central Europe: Imperial Constitutions, Historical Rights, and the Afterlives of Empire’ (PhD thesis, Columbia University, 2016), 68.

49 See Heindl, Waltraud, “Die Einführung des ABGB in Ungarn: Eine ideologische Auseinandersetzung in Österreich,” Levéltári közlemények 66 (1995), 137–45Google Scholar; Helmut Slapnicka, “Österreichische Rechtsgeschichte als Geschichte multinationaler Lösungsversuche,” in Ursula Floßmann, ed., Rechtsgeschichte und Rechtsdogmatik: Festschrift Hermann Eichler (Vienna, 1977), 527–47.

50 Franz L. Fillafer, Aufklärung habsburgisch: Staatsbildung, Wissenskultur und Geschichtspolitik in Zentraleuropa, 1750–1850 (Göttingen, 2020), 345–47; Mónica García-Salmones Rovira's superb study traces Austrian jurists’ penchant for what she calls a de-teleologizing of private law and a concomitant teleologizing of public law: the former was portrayed as a neutral matrix for the pursuit of the “interests of the individual,” whereas the latter appeared as a pliable tool in the hands of the norm addressees. See Mónica García-Salmones Rovira, The Project of Positivism in International Law (Oxford, 2013), 277.

51 Waltraud Heindl, “Bildung und Recht: Naturrecht und Ausbildung der staatsbürgerlichen Gesellschaft in der Habsburgermonarchie,” in Thomas Angerer, Birgitta Bader-Zaar and Margarete Grandner, eds., Geschichte und Recht: Festschrift für Gerald Stourzh zum 70. Geburtstag (Vienna, 1999), 183–206.

52 Franz L. Fillafer, “Leo Thun und die Aufklärung: Wissenschaftsideal, Berufungspolitik und Deutungskämpfe,” in Brigitte Mazohl and Christof Aichner, eds., Die Thun-Hohenstein'schen Universitätsreformen: Konzeption—Umsetzung—Nachwirkungen (Vienna, 2017), 55–75. The deep epistemic aftereffects of this reorientation deserve an exhaustive study. Compare e.g. Jiří Hoetzel's remarks about Jiří Pražák, his predecessor as professor of public law at the Prague Czech University founded in 1882, whom Hoetzel called a “Puritan positivist”; another former student of Pražák's, František Vavřínek, says that Pražák regarded belief in the existence of a “general state law” as a leftover of long-debunked natural jurisprudence, Památník Spolku českých právníků Všehrd (1868–1918) (Prague, 1918), 122 and 228.

53 See Franz L. Fillafer and Johannes Feichtinger, “Habsburg Positivism: The Politics of Positive Knowledge in Imperial and Post-imperial Austria, 1804–1938,” in Johannes Feichtinger, Franz L. Fillafer and Jan Surman, eds., The Worlds of Positivism: A Global Intellectual History, 1770–1930 (New York, 2018), 192–238; Kelsen, “Reichsgesetz und Landesgesetz”, 398.

54 Bohuš Rieger, O Rakousko-uherském vyrovnání roku 1867 s přehledem vývoje do roku 1899: dle přednášky v České společnosti národohospodářské dne 29 října 1902 (Prague, 1903); Ľudovít Holotík, ed., Der österreichisch-ungarische Ausgleich 1867 (Bratislava, 1971); Gerald Stourzh, “Die österreichische Dezemberverfassung von 1867,” in Stourzh, Wege der Grundrechtsdemokratie: Studien zur Begriffs- und Institutionengeschichte des liberalen Verfassungsstaates (Vienna, 1989), 239–58. On public-law teaching see Helmut Slapnicka, “Die Lehre des öffentlichen Rechts an der Prager Karl-Ferdinands-Universität bis zu ihrer Teilung 1882,” Bohemia 14 (1973), 222–42; Robert Walter, “Die Lehre des öffentlichen Rechts an der Grazer Karl-Franzens-Universität zu Graz von 1827–1938,” Juristische Blätter 88 (1966), 546–53.

55 Hugo Preuß, “Zur Methode juristischer Begriffskonstruktion,” Schmollers Jahrbuch 24 (1900), 359–72, at 359. Preuß discusses Austria's “inextricable and unedifying [unentwirrbare und unerqickliche] problems,” from which its scholars presumably fled into the “rarefied, ethereal realm of the idea.”

56 František Weyr, “Zum Problem eines einheitlichen Rechtssystems,” Archiv für öffentliches Recht 23 (1908), 529–80, 544.

57 Ibid., 534. “We have grown used to ascribing to the sober, written laws the same effects once ascribed to heaven knows what unwritten natural or divine comandments.” Ibid. 535.

58 See Gernot D. Hasiba, “Edmund Bernatzik (1854–1919): Begründer der Theorie des österreichischen Verwaltungsrechts,” in Helfried Valentinitsch and Markus Steppan, eds., Festschrift für Gernot Kocher zum 60. Geburtstag (Graz, 2002), 93–109; Edmund Bernatzik, “Die Rechtssprechung in Verwaltungssachen,” in Bernatzik, Rechtssprechung und materielle Rechtskraft: Verwaltungsrechtliche Studien (Vienna, 1886), 2: “Be it noted for the sake of clarity that the individual legal norms never belong to one sphere or the other; the legal norm in itself is neither of private- nor of public-legal nature.”

59 Tanja Domej, “František Weyr und Hans Kelsen: Eine biographische Skizze,” in Robert Walter, Clemens Jablober and Klaus Zeleny, eds., Hans Kelsens stete Aktualität (Vienna, 2003), 45–56, 47; Ota Weinberger and Vladimír Kubeš, eds., Brněnská škola právní teorie (normativní teorie) (Prague, 2003); Miloš Večeřa, “František Weyr a brněnská normativní škola,” Právník 158 (2019), 107–18.

60 Weyr, “Zum Problem eines einheitlichen Rechtssystems,” 552–3.

61 Ibid., 558.

62 Hans Kelsen, Staatsform und Weltanschauung (Tübingen, 1933), 23.

63 Weyr, “Zum Problem eines einheitlichen Rechtssystems,” 563 n. 16. In the same vein Kelsen argued that “the state is us.” See Hans Kelsen, Staatsform und Weltanschauung (Tübingen, 1933), 23.

64 Weyr, “Zum Problem eines einheitlichen Rechtssystems,” 577.

65 See Hans Kelsen, “God and the State” (1922), in Kelsen, Essays in Legal and Moral Philosophy, sel. and intr. by Ota Weinberger (Dordrecht, 1973), 61–82, at 76–7; Kelsen, “Rechtsstaat und Staatsrecht” (1913), in HKW 3: 148–55; Kelsen, Hauptprobleme, 57, 872, where Kelsen anticipates the criticism that he overstretched a specific private-law-inflected logic to encompass public law: “This accusation can be confidently accepted, as long as one gains approval for the necessity of unitary juristic basic concepts for the entire territory of the law.”

66 See also Adolf Merkl, “Die monarchische Befangenheit der deutschen Staatsrechtslehre,” Schweizerische Juristenzeitung 16 (1919–20), 378–83.

67 See above. It is beyond the remit of this essay to investigate the richly layered discussion about the principles of personality and territoriality in the late Habsburg Empire. The concept Ehrlich used was a buzzword of this debate, the Austromarxist principle of personal autonomy formulated by Karl Renner and enshrined during the Social Democrats’ party convention at Brno/Brünn in 1899—the attempt to calm the roiled waters by granting the nations cultural autonomy, while eviscerating the historical crownlands of the Empire and dissolving their frontiers. See Hans Mommsen, Die Sozialdemokratie und die Nationalitätenfrage im habsburgischen Vielvölkerstaat: Das Ringen um die supranationale Integration der zisleithanischen Arbeiterbewegung (1867–1907) (Vienna, 1963), 336–7.

68 Natasha Wheatley, “Making Nations into Legal Persons between Imperial and International Law: Scenes from a Central European History of Group Rights,” Duke Journal of Comparative & International Law 28 (2018), 481–94. Edmund Bernatzik tartly noted that the state's multiple “subordinate organs” were described as persons, while the state was ostensibly a person too: “By comparison the attempt to understand the dogma of Trinity would be a trifle.” Edmund Bernatzik, “Kritische Studien über den Begriff der juristischen Person,” Archiv des öffentlichen Rechts 5 (1890), 169–318, 210.

69 Jeremy King, “Group Rights in Liberal Austria: The Dilemma of Equality in Proportional Representation,” in Lukáš Fasora, Jiří Hanuš and Jiří Malíř, eds., Moravské vyrovnání z roku 1905: Možnosti a limity národnostního smíru ve střední Evropě (Brno, 2006), 27–42.

70 Hans Kelsen, Pure Theory of Law, 2nd edn (Berkeley, 1967; first published 1960), 287–8.

71 Weyr, “Zum Problem eines einheitlichen Rechtssystems,” 551 n. 8.

72 Rovira, Positivism, 189–97. On Strisower see Ihor Zeman, “Die völkerrechtliche Tätigkeit von Leo Strisower und sein Einfluß auf Hans Kelsen, Alfred Verdroß und Hersch Lauterpacht,” Zeitschrift für öffentliches Recht 73 (2018), 373–96.

73 Ernst Radnitzky, “Die rechtliche Natur des Staatsgebietes,” Archiv für öffentliches Recht 20 (1906), 313–55. See also Felix Stoerk, Option und Plebiszit bei Eroberungen und Gebietscessionen (Leipzig, 1879), 67. Since the eighteenth century, Habsburg jurists had concocted a wealth of intra-imperial stopgap solutions to bridge the different property regimes between the Austro-Bohemian lands and Hungary, thereby smoothing the collateralizing and borrowing and the redemption of bills of exchange between the halves of the monarchy. See Sándor Gyömrei, “A kereskedelmi tőke kialakulása és szerepe Pest-Budán 1849-ig,” Tanulmányok Budapest múltjából 12 (1957), 197–278, at 224–5; György Kerekes, A kassai kereskedők életéből harmadfélszázad 1687–1913 (Budapest, 1913), 198; Hans Kelsen, “Der Buchforderungseskont und die inakzeptable deckungsberechtigte Tratte” (1913), in HKW 3: 94–103.

74 Radnitzky, “Die rechtliche Natur des Staatsgebietes,” 348–9.

75 Ibid., 349.

76 On enfranchisement compare Kelsen's sheaf of writings devoted to the essence and value of democracy in the 1920s, where he gave a novel twist to Radnitzky's scheme: Kelsen switched from guarantees of nondiscrimination to the extension of rights bearing, arguing that in radical democracies the blurring of the distinction between citizen and resident may lead to the enfranchisement of the respective polity's alien inhabitants. Kelsen, Vom Wesen und Wert, 17–18; Hans Kelsen, General Theory of Law and the State (Cambridge, MA, 1949), 241. The current European Union still deplorably falls short of this promise, failing to enfranchise its citizens at their respective place of residency. See Fillafer, “Das Imperium als Rechtsstaat.” On spatial dominion see Radnitzky, “Die rechtliche Natur des Staatsgebietes,” 353: “The procedure within the state that corresponds to the foundation and dissolution of states is the erection and abolition of agencies and authorities [Ämter und Behörden] with local competence. Nowhere is this fact more tangible than in a polyglot state … where the striving for national autonomy creates a corresponding design of the institutional system. If Bohemia and Tyrol should ever be split up into German and Czech or, respectively, Italian administrative areas, these processes that unfold within a state would stand in perfect analogy to the secession of Belgium from the Netherlands.” Cf. Wilhelm Brauneder, “Die Habsburgermonarchie als zusammengesetzter Staat,” in Hans-Jürgen Becker, ed., Zusammengesetzte Staatlichkeit in der europäischen Verfassungsseschichte (Berlin, 1996), 197–223.

77 The classic statement of the theory of self-obligation is Jellinek, Georg, Die Lehre von den Staatenverbindungen (Vienna, 1882), 34Google Scholar. Its most prominent critics include Hans Kelsen and his students. Hans Kelsen, Das Problem der Souveränität und die Theorie des Völkerrechts, 2nd edn (Aalen, 1960; first published 1928), 182–7. Hersch Lauterpacht, The Function of Law in the International Community (New York, 1973; first published 1933), 409–12; Verdroß, Alfred, Die Verfassung der Völkerrechtsgemeinschaft (Vienna, 1926), 12–20Google Scholar. In 1914, Kelsen noted that it was a fundamentally flawed assumption to believe that the laws of the empire and the laws of its lands were norms of the same state simply because they were sanctioned by the same monarch and countersigned by the same ministers. Instead, jurists would first need to demonstrate that these signatories really acted as organs of one state rather than as common organs of several states when doing so. Kelsen, “Reichsgesetz und Landesgesetz”, 399. The post-1867 hurly-burly of claims about constitutional agents’ relevant volitional substrates will satisfy any connoisseur of the monophysitic theologies of antiquity. see e.g. Tezner, Friedrich, Der österreichische Kaisertitel, das ungarische Staatsrecht und die ungarische Publicistik (Vienna, 1899)Google Scholar; Ferenc Deák, Adalék a magyar közjoghoz (Észrevételek Lustkandl Venczel munkájára Das ungarisch-österreichische Staatsrecht a magyar közjog történelmének szempontjából) (Pest, 1865). The monarch's will in budgetary controversies between the two constituent parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire unleashed a long debate over the unification of two constitutional volitional tendencies in the physical person of the monarch.

78 Radnitzky, “Die rechtliche Natur des Staatsgebietes,” 355; Rovira, Positivism, 196.

79 For Kelsen's claim that the state was identical with its legal order see above. The rich historical background of Kelsen's elaboration of the “basic norm” can be best discerned in Kelsen, “Reichsgesetz und Landesgesetz”, 385–6, 410–11: the preference jurists gave to the December Constitution of 1867 was an essentially arbitrary choice of an endpoint of imputation; this strategy aimed at thwarting the constitutional powers of the crownlands’ diets enshrined in the prior constitution, the February patent of 1861.

80 While the latter was designed to make war between peoples superfluous, the former ensured domestic political peace. See Kelsen's remarks Hans Kelsen, Wesen und Entwicklung der Staatsgerichtsbarkeit: Überprüfung von Verwaltungsakten durch die ordentlichen Gerichte (Berlin, 1929), 81–4. Jellinek's call for a constitutional court was motivated precisely by the crestfallen realization that there were no reliable rules about what laws were subject to the qualified constitutional majority (§15 StGG of the imperial constitution of 1867) in parliament; with this initiative Jellinek also responded to the turf battles between national pressure groups who used the constitution as a blind pawn and accused each other of its violation. See the fine chapter by Alfred J. Noll, “Georg Jellinek's Forderung nach einem Verfassungsgerichtshof für Österreich,” in Paulson and Schulte, Georg Jellinek, 261–76.

81 Kelsen, Das Problem der Souveränität, 152; Kelsen, Hans, “Les rapports de système entre le droit interne et le droit international public,” Recueil des cours de l'Académie de droit international 14 (1926), 227–331Google Scholar. Kelsen himself claimed that the primacy of international law over state law was an unintended by-product of the methodological rigor of his pure theory. Kelsen, Reine Rechtslehre (Vienna, 1934), 129–32, 134–6; Langford, Peter and Bryan, Ian, “Hans Kelsen's Concept of Normative Imputation,” Ratio Iuris 26 (2013), 85–110CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

82 Paul Miller and Claire Morelon, eds., Embers of Empire: Continuity and Rupture in the Habsburg Successor States (New York, 2019); Olechowski, Kelsen, 630, for a brief discussion of Kelsen's proposals to federalize Czechoslovakia made in 1936 and 1938, as professor at Prague.

83 Kelsen's critics from Weimar and postwar German jurisprudence polemically conflated his allegedly philstine, vapid “formalism” with the Labandian positivism Kelsen excoriated. See Carl Schmitt, Politische Theologie: Vier Kapitel zur Lehre von der Souveränität (Berlin, 1934), 54; Oliver Lepsius, “Hans Kelsen und die Pfadabhängigkeit in der deutschen Staatsrechtslehre,” in Matthias Jestaedt, ed., Hans Kelsen und due deutsche Staatsrechtslehre (Tübingen, 2013), 241–66, and Christoph Schönberger's comment in ibid., at 62. For Schmitt's misidentification of Kelsenian “positivism” with the project Kelsen sought to scupper, namely the nomothetic naturalism of nineteenth-century jurisprudence, see Mehring, “Staatsrechtslehre,” 200.

84 Redlich, Joseph, Das österreichische Staats- und Reichsproblem: Geschichtliche Darstellung der inneren Politik der habsburgischen Monarchie von 1848 bis zum Untergang des Reiches, vol. 1, Der dynastische Reichsgedanke und die Entfaltung des Problems bis zur Verkündigung der Reichsverfassung von 1861 (Leipzig, 1920), xiii–xivGoogle Scholar. Redlich's indispensable diaries are a superb guide to intellectuals’ active grappling with the “problem” unraveled by his classic book. See Redlich, Schicksalsjahre Österreichs: Die Erinnerungen und Tagebücher Joseph Redlichs, ed. Fritz Fellner and Doris Corradini, 3 vols. (Vienna, 2011).

85 Case, Holly, “The Quiet Revolution: Consuls and the International System in the Nineteenth Century,” in Snyder, Timothy and Younger, Katherine, eds., The Balkans as Europe, 1821–1914 (Rochester, 2018), 110–38Google Scholar; Wheatley, Natasha, “Central Europe as Ground Zero of the New International Order,” Slavic Review 78 (2019), 900–11CrossRefGoogle Scholar.