Legal History in the Age of the Second Modernity - Große Rechtsdenker der deutschen Geistesgeschichte by Erik Wolf

• Applicant: Jörg Schöpper
• Subject Area: Principles of Law and Jurisprudence
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 574451081

The project‘s aims are threefold: First, it aims at bridging a gap in the studies on Erik Wolf, whose contribution to legal history has so far largely been left aside. Furthermore, it is supposed to shed new light on the questions of continuities and turning points in German legal scholarship before 1933 and after 1945. The analyzed narration seems particularly suited, since it builds on groundwork in the 1920s and had its fourth edition published in 1963. Lastly, it will test the power of introducing a formal vocabulary to the study of legal history’s analysis, which had been developed by American scholars of history and literature. The first part presents the structures of the narration “Große Rechtsdenker der deutschen Geistesgeschichte”. The analysis compares the story to the other influential texts that operated under the paradigm of the history of mind. Hayden White’s concept of tropologic structures has not been tested before for the subject of German legal history and proves beneficial to articulate meaningful comparisons. It offers a vocabulary that allows to identify and compare formal aspects of legal histories by distinguishing between the structure of the fable (the historical field), a formal explanation for historical change, the emplotment and a socio-political structure (developing further White’s adaption of ideological criticism). Taken together, these structures form the narration’s historic style. The second part offers interpretations along the concept of a second, reflexive modernity. Developed by Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens in the realm of sociology and adapted to legal theory by Marietta Auer, the concept allows for a historic reconstruction of the first part’s findings. The text’s political, literary-historical, educational, sociological, philosophical, and jurisprudential implications are being discussed to determine its intellectual origins. It can thus be read as the product of an author torn between assimilation to and resistance against National Socialism, but in a more informative reading it figures as a legal historian’s history of powers (“Kräftegeschichte”) with a keen educational purpose and strong links to the circle of star poet Stefan George. From a different perspective it appears as an adaptation of sociology’s influential narrative of the tragedy of culture or as the consistent form of legal theory that has fully become aware of its historic preconditions. Finally, the main elements of the narrative’s socio-political structure – dialectics, practical philosophy’s precedence over epistemology, gemeinschaft – are traced in jurisprudence’s dialogues of the early 20th century. Profoundly open for interpretation, these topoi were uncommonly adaptive and compatible even beyond societal and political turning points. Against this backdrop, Erik Wolf’s own particular concept of these notions is being outlined.

• DFG Programme: Publication Grants