German roots of the theory of pluralism

Michael Dreyer

Constitutional Political Economy, 1993, vol. 4, issue 1, 7-39

Abstract: The theory of pluralism has been developed mainly in our century, but its theoretical and practical roots go back far into the last century. Pluralism has flourished in the Anglo-Saxon world, but even though there is no tradition of pluralism in German history, some German thinkers developed ideas which came remarkably close to later English and American pluralists. They opposed political authoritarianism, the Hegelian concept of the ‘state as such’, and the notion of Roman law as the legal guideline. Georg Beseler and Otto Gierke tried to show a German common law tradition instead. Later Hugo Preuss came to bold democratic interpretations of this theory which put him at odds not only with other legal scholars, but with the Prussian state as well. The article deals with this development, as well as with the reception of Gierke's works by the English pluralists. Copyright George Mason University 1993

Date: 1993
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/BF02393281 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:copoec:v:4:y:1993:i:1:p:7-39

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/10602/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/BF02393281

Access Statistics for this article

Constitutional Political Economy is currently edited by Roger Congleton and Stefan Voigt

More articles in Constitutional Political Economy from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().