Johannes Althusius

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Johannes Althusius, copper engraving 1650

Johannes Althusius (also: Althaus , Alphusius ; * 1563 in Diedenshausen ; † August 12, 1638 in Emden ) was a German legal scholar , Calvinist state theorist and from 1604 city councilor and city politician in Emden.

Life and career

Johannes Althusius came from a farming family in the county of Sayn-Wittgenstein . The father, Hans Althaus, was probably the count's wool buyer and mill owner in Diedenshausen near the royal seat of Berleburg. Althusius attended the Philippinum grammar school in Marburg from 1577 and was enrolled at the Cologne artist faculty in 1581 . He then studied law in Basel , where he was a guest in the house of the theologian Johann Jacob Grynäus and frequented the humanist group of Basilius Amerbach .

A study visit to Geneva , during which Althusius may also have met the French jurist and monarchomachie François Hotman and the pandectist Dionysius Gothofredus in 1585/86, is regarded as obvious, but has not been proven. After obtaining his doctorate in law in Basel in 1586, Althusius received his first treatise De arte Jurisprudentiae Romanae methodice digestae libri II (Basel 1586), in which he professed the method of empirical realism as developed by the French logician Petrus Ramus , in the same year as the first legal scholar to the 1584 of Count Johann VI. the Calvinist-Reformed Nassau High School founded by the elder of Nassau-Dillenburg in Herborn , which was shaped by federal theology .

At the high school in Herborn, which was named after the Nassau sovereign Count Johann VI. 'Johannea' was called, Althusius was, in addition to his legal professorship, which he obtained in 1588, as a count's counselor and legal advisor to his sovereign of Nassau, Count Johann VI. the elder , a brother of Prince William of Orange . In 1592 Althusius accepted a call to the newly founded Calvinist high school in Burg-Steinfurt , the Arnoldinum grammar school . In 1596 he returned to the Nassau High School, which had been moved from Herborn to Siegen in 1594 . In 1599/1600 Althusius was the rector of the Nassau High School in Siegen, some of which had already been moved back to Herborn by this time. In 1602, Althusius was rector of the Nassau High School, which had meanwhile been relocated entirely back to Herborn. In 1603 his main work, the Politica Methodice Digesta, appeared .

One year later, in 1604, Althusius became the town councilor of the port and trading town of Emden, known as the “Geneva of the North” because of its Calvinist-Reformed character. He stayed that way into old age, turned down several appointments as a legal scholar at Dutch universities and lived in his adopted home Emden until his death.

After his return from Burg-Steinfurt to the Nassau High School, which was moved to Siegen, Althusius married the widow Margarethe Keßler, née Neurath (1574–1624), daughter of the Siegen rentmaster Friedrich Neurath, with whom he had six children.

Scientific work

With a Calvinist-influenced understanding of state and natural law, Althusius developed the first normative and systematic state theory of the estates monarchy in the early modern period . The influence of federal and federal theology on his political and legal thinking, which was previously regarded as formative and which was taught by important theologians at the Nassau High School in particular, is relativized in the more recent reception of Althusius's political theory and the fundamental and constitutive influence on his work has been called into question by a decisive Calvinist-Reformed orientation. Althusius was still subject to a theocentric orientation. This was in the tradition of the traditional scholastic legal metaphysics and was conveyed to him by Pierre de la Ramée . His demand, which posterity traced as the central point, to put popular sovereignty against the princely state, he justified from the depth of the moral theological models of justification.

With his main work, the Politica Methodice Digesta , Althusius is considered the most important political theorist of Calvinism and is considered the greatest federalism theorist of the 16th and 17th centuries. In terms of the history of ideas , Althusius with his corporate state model is attributed to the early development of the theory of federalism, which makes his tiered concept of the state structure recognizable as an early modern contribution to the development of the principle of subsidiarity .

In his Politica Methodice Digesta , first published in 1603 , whose third edition from 1614, including his political practice in Emden, is considered to be the most important, Althusius developed a consocial, community-oriented theory of the state and society within his corporate-corporate state theory, in which he developed a theory from below Upwardly structured, gradual communalization ( consociatio ) from the family through the estates and provinces to the state . Within this order, the individuals who have to obey God's commandments are linked to one another in the sovereignty of the state people in the sense of an organic national body. In the decades that followed, this draft state became the basis for the state theory of dual sovereignty developed specifically in Germany, particularly by Johannes Limnäus .

The Calvinist Althusius' understanding of sovereignty is seen in the history of political theory as an alternative to the state theory of the monarchical-absolutist French sovereignty theorist Jean Bodin , who regarded the prince as the sole and exclusive holder of state power. In contrast, Althusius assigned the sovereignty rights to the kingdom ( regnum ), community ( respublica ) or people ( populus ). In Althusius, the understanding of popular sovereignty is not yet linked to the individual rights of individual citizens , as they are only later expressed in rational natural law and in the contractualist theory of contracts . His idea of ​​the right of resistance against tyrannical rulers, based on the monarchy, is limited to the representatives of the estates and the officials of the monarchical-estates system of rule.

In the history of political ideas, Althusius is mainly perceived as a transitional theorist who wrote the most mature and systematic state theory of the early modern corporate state , but has not yet made the breakthrough to the modern constitutional state and the modern understanding of democracy with his state model . The historical impact of Althusius's doctrine of constitutional law, which was initially even more widespread in university literature, remained in the time of the emerging absolutism in the 17th century mainly limited to the Calvinist environment - especially in Germany and the Netherlands as well as Western European countries up to Scotland.

In connection with his influence, his work Dicaelogicae Libri Tres , published in 1617, is worth mentioning for the classical doctrine of natural law of the Old Kingdom , which was on the threshold of the epochal (time-shifted) works of Grotius '( De iure belli ac pacis 1625) and Hobbes' ( Leviathan 1651) appeared, based on the mathematical and scientific knowledge and methods of Galileo and Descartes . Franz Wieacker describes Althusius in the context of legal history as a pioneer and founder of the law of reason born out of natural law , emphasizing his services for the "oldest ideology of freedom of German constitutional theory", but also draws attention to the fact that Althusius is still the critical approach for his "idealistic view of ideas “Was missing and was unable to overcome the late Renaissance .

Afterlife and remembrance

The Johannes-Althusius-Gesellschaft, founded in Münster in 1959 , researches the doctrine of natural law and the constitutional history of the 16th to 18th centuries, researches legal and political teachings as well as the legal and constitutional history of the early modern period based on the life and work of Althusius as an epoch of pan-European legal and political thought that continues to have an effect up to the present day.

In his birthplace Diedenshausen, a district of Bad Berleburg , Althusius was set up a memorial in the home town of the village. The city of Bad Berleburg named their grammar school after Johannes Althusius in 1962. In Emden, too, the grammar school, the forerunner of which as a Latin school dates back to the 15th century, was renamed Johannes-Althusius-Gymnasium in 1972.

Selected literature

Major works
  • Iuris romanis libri duo. Ad leges Methodi Rameae conformati . Basilea, 1586 (digitized)
  • De civilis Conversationis Libri Duo: Methodicé digesti et exemplis sacris et profanis passim illustrati . Hanoviae (Hanau), 1601.
  • Politica Methodice digesta et exemplis sacris et profanis illustrata: Cui in fine adjuncta est Oratio panegyrica de utilitate, necessitate et antiquitate scholarum . Herbonae Nassoviorum, 1603 (digitized version )
  • Dicaelogicae Libri Tres: Totum et universum Jus, quo utimur Methodicé complectentes . Herbonae Nassoviorum, 1617.
Editions and partial translations (English and German) of Politica
  • Politica Methodice Digesta of Johannes Althusius (Althaus). Reprinted from the Third Edition of 1614 - Augmented by the Preface to the First Edition of 1603 and by 21 hitherto unpublished Letters of the Author, with an Introduction by Carl Joachim Friedrich, Harvard University Press, Cambridge 1932.
  • Johannes Althusius: Basic concepts of politics. In: Erik Wolf (Ed.): Politica methodice digesta 1603. Frankfurt am Main 1948.
  • The Politics of Johannes Althusius . An abridged translation of the Third Edition of Politica Methodice Digesta, Translated, with an Introduction by Frederick S. Carney. Preface by Carl J. Friedrich, Boston 1964. (London, 1965)
  • Politica Johannes Althusius. An Abridged Translation of Politics Methodically Set Forth and Illustrated with Sacred and Profane Examples. Edited And Translation, with An Introduction by Frederick S. Carney. Foreword By Daniel J Elazar, Indianapolis, 1995.
  • Johannes Althusius politics . German Partial translation of the Politica of Johannes Althusius by Heinrich Janssen, edited, revised and introduced by Dieter Wyduckel. (Introduction with Althusius biography and recent literature review). Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-428-11159-1 .
Secondary literature
  • Otto von Gierke : Johannes Althusius and the development of the natural law state theory , Berlin 1880 (unchanged 7th edition Aalen, 1981)
  • Carl Joachim Friedrich: Johannes Althusius. Politica Methodice Digesta of Johannes Althusius (Althaus) with an Introduction and an sketch of the life and environment and of the literary background of Althusius, Harvard, Cambridge / Mass. 1932 (see above)
  • Erik Wolf: Johannes Althusius. In: ders .: Great legal thinkers in German intellectual history . Tübingen 1939. (4th edition. 1963, pp. 177–219)
  • Heinz Antholz: The political effectiveness of Johannes Althusius in Emden . Dissertation. University of Cologne, Aurich 1955.
  • Ernst Reibstein : Johannes Althusius as a continuation of the school of Salamanca. Studies on the history of ideas of the constitutional state and on the old Protestant doctrine of natural law. (= Freiburg legal and political science treatises. Volume 5). Karlsruhe: CF Müller 1955
  • Peter Jochen Winters: The politics of Johannes Althusius and its contemporary sources . Dissertation University of Freiburg, Freiburg / Br. 1963.
  • Hans Ulrich Scupin , Ulrich Scheuner (ed.): Althusius bibliography. edited by Dieter Wyduckel . 2 vols., Berlin 1973
  • Carl Joachim Friedrich : Johannes Althusius and his work in the context of the development of the theory of politics. Duncker and Humblot, Berlin 1975
  • Michael Behnen: Image of rulers and rulership technique in the 'Politica' of Johannes Althusius. In: Journal for Historical Research. 11: 417-472 (1984).
  • Hasso Hofmann : Representation in the political theory of the early modern period - On the question of the principle of representation in the 'Politica' of Johannes Althusius. In: Hasso Hofmann: Law - Politics - Constitution. Studies in the history of political philosophy. Frankfurt 1986, pp. 1-30.
  • Daniel J. Elazar (Ed.): Federalism as Grand Design. Political Philosophers and the Federal Principle. Publius Book, Boston 1987.
  • Karl-Wilhelm Dahm , Werner Krawietz , Dieter Wyduckel (Hrsg.): Political theory of Johannes Althusius. Berlin 1988.
  • Thomas O. Hüglin: Societal federalism. The political theory of Johannes Althusius. Berlin / New York, 1991
  • Horst Dreitzel: Althusius 1614. On the development and foundations of his 'Politica', in ders .: Absolutism and the corporate constitution in Germany. A contribution to the continuity and discontinuity of political theory in the early modern period. Pp. 17–32, Mainz 1992:
  • Peter Nitschke: Johannes Althusius - or: the concept of the political as a theocratic reflex. In other words: reasons of state versus utopia? Pp. 153-177. Stuttgart / Weimar, 1995
  • Giuseppe Duso, Werner Krawietz, Dieter Wyduckel (eds.): Consensus and consociation in the political theory of early federalism. Berlin, 1997
  • Thomas O. Hüglin: Early Modern Concepts for a Late Modern World . Althusius on Community and Federalism. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Waterloo / Ontario 1999
  • Daniel J. Elazar and John Kincaid: The Covenant Connection. From Federal Theology to Modern Federalism. Lexington Books, Boston / Oxford, 2000
  • Peter Blickle , Thomas O. Hüglin, Dieter Wyduckel (eds.): Subsidiarity as a legal and political principle of order in church, state and society. Berlin 2002
  • Emilio Bonfatti, Giuseppe Duso, Merio Scattola (eds.): Political terms and historical environment in the Politica Methodice Digesta of Johannes Althusius. Wiesbaden 2002.
  • Horst Dreitzel: Althusius in the history of federalism. In: Emilio Bonfatti, Giuseppe Duso, Merio Scattola (eds.): Political terms and historical environment in the Politica Methodice Digesta of Johannes Althusius. Wiesbaden, 2002. pp. 50-112.
  • Frederick S. Carney, Heinz Schilling , Dieter Wyduckel (Eds.): Jurisprudence, Political Theory and Political Theology . Symposium on the 400th anniversary of the Politica of Johannes Althusius 1603–2003. Berlin 2004.
  • Henning Ottmann : Johannes Althusius or Reformed Politics in German. Overview display. In: Henning Ottmann (ed.): History of political thinking, Die Neuzeit. From Machiavelli to the great revolutions. Volume 3/1, Stuttgart / Weimar 2006, p. 93 ff.
  • Peter Nitschke: The "Reich" in the political theory of Johannes Althusius. In: Peter Nitschke, Mark Feuerle (Ed.): Imperium et Comitatus. Frankfurt 2009, pp. 31–52.
  • Corrado Malandrino, Dieter Wyduckel (Hrsg.): Political-legal lexicon of the 'Politica' of Johannes Althusius. The art of the holy-inviolable, just, fair and happy symbiotic community. with an introduction and critical discussion of the 'Politica'. Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-428-12975-1 .
  • Philip A. Knöll: State and communication in the politics of Johannes Althusius . Studies on Political Science in the Early Modern Era. Dissertation. Duncker & Humblot, Berlin, 2011, ISBN 978-3-428-13539-4 .
  • Heinrich de Wall (Hrsg.): Reformed state theory in the early modern times . Conference of the Johannes Althusius Society in Erlangen 2010. Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-428-54238-3 .

Individual evidence

  1. Dieter Wyduckel in the introduction to Johannes Althusius Politik (excerpts of the Politica in the translation by Heinrich Janssen, edited, revised and introduced by D. Wyduckel, Berlin 2003), "Leben und Wirken des Althusius", p. VIIIf. Contrary to earlier assumptions, which indicate the year Althusius was born as 1557, according to more recent research, starting with Carl Joachim Friedrich's Introduction, Politica of Johannes Althusius , Cambridge / Mass. 1932, p. XXIIIf. ("The Life and Environment of Johannes Althusius"), and other authors (cf. also Heinz Holzhauer Johannes Althusius. In: 400 Years High School Steinfurt. Steinfurt 1991, p. 146f.), Based on the year 1563 as the year of birth the inscription of an oil portrait with the dates "Anno 1563" and "Anno 1623", which was probably made on the occasion of the 60th birthday of Althusius and is now in the Johannes-a-Lasco library (formerly the Great Church) in Emden.
  2. There is no precise proof of this, as well as information about when he started studying in Basel. Compare Dieter Wyduckel: Johannes Althusius. In: Hans-Gert Roloff (Hrsg.): The German literature. Biographical and bibliographical lexicon. Row 2: Die Deutsche Literatur between 1450 and 1620. Bern et al. 1991, p. 345f .; Franz Wieacker scheduled Althusius' arrival in Geneva in 1587, which could rule out getting to know him earlier. In: Private law history of the modern age with special consideration of the German development . P. 286.
  3. ^ Franz Wieacker : History of private law in the modern era with special consideration of German developments . 2nd Edition. Göttingen 1967, DNB 458643742 (1996, ISBN 3-525-18108-6 ). P. 270.
  4. Peter Jochen Winters : The "Politics" of Johannes Althusius and its contemporary sources , (also dissertation) 1963.
  5. Cf. u. a. Dieter Wyduckel: Johannes Althusius politics. Translated by Heinrich Janssen, Berlin 2003, here pp. XVIII – XX ("Basic structures of the political theory of Althusius", "2. Politics as consocial community building"): "Central category" with which Althusius describes the complex interrelationships of life relationships in the community , "Is what he deliberately calls consociatio , a form of community building that represents the structural backbone of the whole and encompasses all forms of order from the smallest, simple through the larger composite to the most comprehensive and largest of the entire community".
  6. See Horst Denzer: Late Aristotelianism, Natural Law and Imperial Reform: Political Ideas in Germany 1600–1750. In: Iring Fetscher , Herfried Münkler (Hrsg.): Piper's manual of political ideas. Volume 3: Modern Times: From the Denominational Wars to the Enlightenment. Munich 1985, pp. 233-273, here: pp. 267ff .; and: Rudolf Hoke : Johannes Limnaeus. In: Michael Stolleis (Ed.): State thinkers in the early modern times . Frankfurt am Main 1995, pp. 100-117, here: pp. 104ff.
  7. ^ Johannes Althusius: Politica Methodice Digesta (preface). Quoted in: Rudolf Hoke, Ilse Reiter (Hrsg.): Collection of sources on Austrian and German legal history. Böhlau, Vienna 1993, margin number 1113, p. 223 in the Google book search.
  8. Klaus von Beyme : Political Theories in the Age of Ideologies. Wiesbaden 2002, p. 965f: Waves of reception and currents of influence of political thought in Europe.
  9. Uwe Wesel : History of the law: From the early forms to the present. CH Beck, Munich 2001, ISBN 978-3-406-54716-4 . No. 249 (pp. 374 and 380).
  10. ^ Franz Wieacker: History of private law in the modern era with special consideration of German developments . 2nd Edition. Göttingen 1967, DNB 458643742 (1996, ISBN 3-525-18108-6 ). P. 286 f.
  11. a b Pierre Bayle, Johann Christoph Gottsched, Erich Beyreuther: Historical and Critical Dictionary, AB , Volume 1. Olms, Hildesheim 1997, ISBN 3487047918 , p. 169.

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