Josef Redlich and the Glorious Revolution of Liberalism

Abstract

Josef Redlich is a representative of the new generation of Austrian liberals that came of age around 1900. Through his legal-historical publications, diaries, and the surviving voluminous correspondence, he offers a glimpse into the highly changeable times of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries in Europe and expresses his frustration with political developments. Redlich, who was a university professor of Constitutional and Administrative Law, was the first to see the lack of the Rule of Law as the reason for the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the first place, and he named two different conceptions of the state in Western Europe and Central Europe. He thus came into confrontation with the state doctrine of the Prussian university professor Rudolf von Gneist, which was taught in all German-speaking law schools. The difference between the authoritarian state in Central Europe and the British people’s state is still apparent today.