Eduard Goose

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Eduard Gans (lithograph, 1839)

Eduard Gans (born March 22, 1797 - according to the tombstone placed by his mother, according to other sources on March 23 - in Berlin ; †  May 5, 1839 ibid.) Was a German lawyer , legal philosopher and historian .

Life

Eduard Gans was the son of the banker Abraham Isaak Gans and his wife Zippora Marcus. His father belonged to the liberal, assimilated Judaism and was one of the financial advisors to State Chancellor Karl August Prince von Hardenberg . His nephew was the later chemist and industrialist Leo Ludwig Gans .

After Gans had completed his school days at the Berlin French Gymnasium - hence his excellent knowledge of French - he began to study law, philosophy and history in Berlin from 1816 . The following year he switched to the University of Göttingen with the same subjects . In 1819 Gans successfully completed his studies ( summa cum laude ) with a doctorate on the Roman Code of Obligations in Heidelberg . There he was a student of Anton Friedrich Justus Thibaut , among others , but not of Georg Friedrich Hegel , who had already left for Berlin and whose ideas he later incorporated into history and law.

Together with other Orthodox Hegelians , he founded the yearbooks for scientific criticism . As early as 1819, Gans, together with like-minded friends, including Leopold Zunz and Moses Moser , founded the Association for Culture and Science of the Jews , of which he was president from 1821 to 1824 . The young reformers were primarily concerned with getting young Jewish people out of their spiritual isolation and integrating them into the world of European thought ; in the spring of 1825, however, the association dissolved. In 1820 Gans, Moser and Zunz joined the Society of Friends .

Despite the Prussian Edict of Emancipation of 1812, Jews were still denied the civil service career: an exemption for particularly capable academics was revoked in 1822 by a royal cabinet order on the occasion of Gans' application for a university professorship and went into Prussian legal history as so-called Lex Gans a. Even an attempt by Hardenberg to mediate did nothing in this case. After Gans was baptized in 1825, he was appointed associate professor in 1826 and then full professor of law at the University of Berlin in 1828 , without having previously been a private lecturer . In 1832 he was promoted to dean of the law faculty .

Gans was extremely positive about the liberal ideas of the Vormärz . He received student torchlight procession and organized a signature campaign for the Göttingen Seven who were relieved of their positions . As a historian, he saw the French Revolution as the decisive turning point in European history and in 1830 welcomed the July Revolution as a necessary development in the spirit of the liberal bourgeoisie . He was not a Republican , however, and he rejected the radical dialectics of the Young Hegelian club system as well as the efforts of the Restoration .

His ideal was the Prussian state as a constitutional monarchy under the leadership of an enlightened, strong sovereign ; He mistrusted democracy and the republic . He was one of the first to have the political vision of a united Europe in which German , French, Latin , Greek and Jewish heritage should flow together. Nationalist , he was not, and the romantic medieval -Schwärmerei his time remained alien to him - his political views went to the future and to the west .

As a lecturer, Gans, in contrast to other professors, knew how to package his theories in a way that was effective for the public and to let abstract facts come to life in concrete daily events. His lectures were extremely popular - sometimes up to a thousand students and interested laypeople streamed into the lecture halls, so the Prussian authorities canceled the events; From 1836, the young Karl Marx was among the audience . The fact that this is said to have been influenced by Gans and even planned a doctoral thesis at Gans is colportage .

Eduard Gans also worked as a journalist : as a Berlin correspondent for the Allgemeine Zeitung in Augsburg and as a political travel journalist. He maintained a lively social interaction and was friends with Heinrich Heine and Karl August Varnhagen von Ense , among others .

Grave of Eduard Gans in the Dorotheenstädtischer Friedhof in Berlin

Gans' greatest academic adversary at the law school in Berlin was Friedrich Carl von Savigny . In contrast to the conservative Savigny, who only wanted to consider and interpret the origin and development of man- made laws as natural phenomena , since he saw them as "eternal" and divine, the Hegelian goose demanded a consideration of legal facts, above all that of possession, from the spirit of philosophical speculation and historical classification. He accused the legal historians around Savigny of a lack of intellectual sharpness and a lack of historical knowledge. The academic war between the mighty Savigny and the popular goose, which was sometimes bitter and led with harsh verbal attacks, was to last until the latter's early death in 1839: while still on his deathbed, he is said to have written a pamphlet against his old enemy.

In 1839, at the age of only 42, Eduard Gans died of complications from a stroke .

Eduard Gans is now considered to be one of the founders of comparative law in Germany. His unfinished main work The Law of Inheritance in World History (four volumes published 1824–1835) was partially translated into French in 1845 , where his work received the greatest attention except in Germany. English and Italian translations are also available in excerpts.

Eduard Gans has also made a name for himself as the editor of Hegel's works: in 1833, volume eight ( Basics of the Philosophy of Law ) and in 1837 Volume nine ( lectures on the philosophy of history ) appeared under his leadership.

The Hegelian goose - spiritually a child of the Vormärz and yet a mind of its own - was long forgotten by the philosophy of law, since it was only viewed as an epigonal link between Hegel and Marx. Today scientific research is gradually beginning to rediscover him - as a liberal pragmatist with a very early view of a Europe united in peace .

Fonts (selection)

  • Half-yearly report in the Association for Culture and Science of the Jews (April 28, 1822) given by E. Gans . M. Hahn, Hamburg 1822 digitized .
  • The law of inheritance in world historical development. A Treatise on the History of Universal Law .
    • Volume 1 : The Roman law of inheritance in its position on pre- and post-Roman, Mauersche Buchhandlung, Berlin 1824
    • Volume 2 : The Roman law of inheritance in its position on pre- and post-Roman, Mauersche Buchhandlung, Berlin 1825
    • Volume 3 : The right of inheritance in the Middle Ages, JB Cotta'schen Buchhandlung, Stuttgart and Tübingen, 1829
    • Volume 4 : The right of inheritance in the Middle Ages, part two, JB Cotta'schen Buchhandlung, Stuttgart and Tübingen, 1835
  • System of Roman civil law in outline . Ferdinand Dümmler, Berlin 1827 digitized .
  • Contributions to the revision of the Prussian legislation . Duncker and Humblot, Berlin 1832 digitized .
  • Lectures on the history of the last fifty years .
  • Review of people and conditions . Veit and Comp., Berlin 1836 digitized .
  • About the basis of ownership. A duplicate . Veit and Comp., Berlin 1839 digitized .
  • Philosophical writings . Edited and introduced by Horst Schröder, Auvermann, Glashütten / Taunus 1971.
  • Natural law and the history of universal law. Lectures according to GWF Hegel . Edited and introduced by Johann Braun , Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2005.
  • Letters and documents . Edited and introduced by Johann Braun , Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2011, ISBN 978-3-16-150779-3 .

literature

  • Directory of the professor ord. of the University of Berlin Dr. Gans, the superintendent Mr. Küster, the Dr. medicinae Mr. Reuss and several other book collections left behind, which are to be auctioned on December 2nd and the following days in Berlin . Berlin 1839.
  • Warren Breckman: Eduard Gans and the Crisis of Hegelianism . In: Journal of the History of Ideas. 62/3 (July 2001), pp. 543-564.
  • Corrado Bertani: Eduard Gans (1797–1839) e la cultura del suo tempo. Scienza del diritto, storiografia, pensiero politico in un intellettuale hegeliano . Guida, Naples 2004, ISBN 88-7188-787-5 .
  • Corrado Bertani: "The right of inheritance in world historical development (1824-35)" by Eduard Gans. The first testimony to Hegel's influence on private law historiography. In: Rechtsgeschichte , 11, 2007, pp. 110-138.
  • Reinhard Blänkner: Eduard Gans (1797–1839). Political professor between the Restoration and Vormärz . Leipziger Universitäts-Verlag, Leipzig 2002, ISBN 3-934565-33-6 .
  • Johann Braun: Judaism, jurisprudence and philosophy. Pictures from the life of the lawyer Eduard Gans (1797–1839) . Nomos, Baden-Baden 1997, ISBN 3-7890-4818-6 .
  • Angela von Gans, Monika Groening: The family Gans 1350-1963 . Verlag Regionalkultur, Heidelberg 2006, ISBN 3-89735-486-1 .
  • Michael H. Hoffheimer: Eduard Gans and the Hegelian philosophy of law . Kluwer, Dordrecht 1995, ISBN 0-7923-3270-9 .
  • Hermann Lübbe :  Goose, Eduard. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 6, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1964, ISBN 3-428-00187-7 , p. 63 ( digitized version ).
  • Emil Julius Hugo Steffenhagen:  Goose, Eduard . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 8, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1878, p. 361 f.
  • Norbert Waszek (ed.): Eduard Gans (1797–1839). Hegelians - Jews - Europeans. Texts and documents . Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1991, ISBN 3-631-43883-4 .
  • Norbert Waszek: L'émergence d'une théorie de l'opposition dans l'école hégélienne. In: Revue française d'histoire des idées politiques. 25.1, 2007, ISBN 978-2-7084-0797-8 , pp. 89-107.
  • Norbert Waszek: Eduard Gans on Poverty and on the Constitutional Debate. In: Douglas Moggach (Ed.): The New Hegelians, Politics and Philosophy in the Hegelian School . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2006, ISBN 0-521-85497-0 , pp. 24-49.
  • Reinhard Mocek: Eduard Gans: Thinker between Hegel and Marx . In: Berlin monthly magazine ( Luisenstädtischer Bildungsverein ) . Issue 3, 1998, ISSN  0944-5560 , p. 47–53 ( luise-berlin.de - detailed appreciation).
  • Norbert Waszek: Was Eduard Gans (1797–1839) the first Left or Young Hegelian? In: Michael Quante, Amir Mohseni (ed.): Die Linke Hegelianer. Studies on the relationship between religion and politics in the pre-March period . Paderborn, Fink, 2015, ISBN 978-3-7705-5495-9 , pp. 29–51.

Web links

Commons : Eduard Gans  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Basic lines of the philosophy of law, or natural law and political science in outline.
  2. ^ Lectures on the Philosophy of History .
personal data
SURNAME Goose, Eduard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer, legal philosopher and historian
DATE OF BIRTH March 22, 1797 or March 23, 1797
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH May 5, 1839
Place of death Berlin