Karl Friedrich Vollgraff

Karl Friedrich Vollgraff, also Carl Friedrich Vollgraff (born November 4, 1794 in Schmalkalden , † March 5, 1863 in Marburg ) was a German lawyer and early social scientist.

Life

His father was a lyceum teacher, his father-in-law the mathematician Karl Reinhard Müller .

Vollgraff studied from 1816 to 1819 in Marburg and Göttingen . Before that he was in the Westphalian civil service, then a lawyer and procurator in Marburg, and became a lawyer and constitutional lawyer . In 1820 Vollgraff became a lecturer in Marburg and in 1824 a professor for political science, in 1832 for constitutional law and economics .

At first he devoted himself to the study of the German nobility and its decline in the mediatization and thought about the reasons for this - he found the same phenomenon in the Roman patriciate . Nevertheless, he was in favor of a class instead of a representative constitution . This is where his very backward-looking attitude to life comes into play. Vollgraff soon caused a sensation and mostly rejection - the book about the deceptions was publicly burned on the Marburg market square soon after it was published in 1832! - through works in which he attests to the modern European peoples an aversion and inability to live in great states. The revolutions of 1830 and especially 1848 worried him.- All of this has to do with his view of human culture as a whole, which he saw ideally culminating in ancient times : in the arts and sciences with the Greeks and in statecraft with the Romans . The Germanic and Slavic peoples since the Middle Ages would only have offered a “weak reflection” of this. He saw "culture" as something that different peoples at different times took part in in different ways.

He was also averse to the developing technology of the West , the planet was ruthlessly plundered and cleared out, the Europeans had evidently entered their "age phase" and would soon be at an end along with the rest of humanity. What is humanity "A single colossal field of ruins"! Their peoples have either (1) long since perished, (2) enslaved, (3) robbed of their own language and culture, or (4) a mixed (i.e. no longer stratified ) mulatto society. He can thus be regarded as a forerunner of environmentalists , but also as an early biologist . He leads the right ( ius ) back to “the right to be done”, and this is different for every people, depending on the natural conditions of life; there is not even a natural law, but for each people its own. If one praised Oswald Spengler (the " cultural pessimist ") for his intellectual independence (incorruptibility), Vollgraff (sixty years earlier) is even more admirable in this regard.

Quote from 1854 (II: 781) Goethe [was and is] the representative of German conservative passivity. He hated the French Revolution, but only instinctively felt its perniciousness or the dangers which its doctrinal constitutions were bound to pose for the whole of Europe, without knowing anything to counter them [so that he] let them go.

In 1854 (II: 947) he wrote after a long list of all known peoples and division into levels of culture (evidently adapted to a Lorenz Oken system based on the ancient theory of temperament ): Inner decay, moral dying [of peoples of a cultural level such as ours is hiding through something that the ignorant and superficial consider a sign of increasing prosperity, namely through an ever increasing selfish or private luxury with the aid of a high technical industrial culture.

Hans-Joachim Schoeps rediscovered this late culture idiosyncratic in 1953 as a "forerunner of Spengler"; Another lawyer as a cultural morphologist and “pessimist” is Hartmut Piper.- Vollgraff dealt for the first time with things that are now part of sociology, but in his time and for a long time afterwards, jurisprudence. There are also references to ethnology and national psychology , as well as to anthropology and ethology ( sociobiology ).

Vollgraff was a member of the Freemason Lodge Marc Aurel zum Flammenden Stern in Marburg.

Publications

• 1823: Is there still a high German nobility in the sense and terms that were associated with it doctrinally until the dissolution of the German Empire? . Darmstadt.
• 1824: The German noblemen . To water.
• 1828: Characteristics of the Germanic-Slavic or modern peoples of Europe . To water.
• from 1828: The systems of practical politics in the West . 4 volumes. Heidelberg .-- Unfinished.
• 1832: The Deceptions of the Representative System . Marburg.
• 1848: Of the renewal, expanded and suppressed above and below its measure, in all branches of food and commerce in bourgeois life . Darmstadt.
• 1851–1855: First attempt to justify general ethnology from anthropology as well as state and legal philosophy through the ethnology or nationality of peoples . 3 volumes. Marburg.
  • 1851: Anthropognosy or to the knowledge of man in general .
  • 1854: First attempt to establish general ethnology [1]
  • 1855: Polignosie und Polilogie (or: Genetic and comparative legal and state philosophy on an anthropognostic, ethnological and historical basis) .

literature

• Johann August Ritter von Eisenhart :  Vollgraff, Karl Friedrich . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 40, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1896, p. 248 f.
• Pierer's Universal Lexicon Volume 16, 4th edition, Pierer, Altenburg 1864.