Rudolf Gneist and the Prussian Rechtsstaat: 1862-78

Abstract

The Prussian jurist Rudolf Gneist (1816-1895) is remembered today as a champion of liberal administrative reforms enacted during the 1870s. In his own time he was a popular law professor, an eminent scholar, parliamentarian, and high-court judge. In his scholarship he expressed many of the aspirations of middle class liberals in nineteenth-century Prussia and Germany, while his politics underscore the set-backs and compromises which liberals endured or accepted in the decades after 1848 as, by installments, history proved that they were not on the winning side. During the 1848 Revolution German constitutional liberals had learned to fear the masses and looked to the monarchs and their armies to uphold shared values: property, law, and order. Thereafter the liberals had few political options, as the Prussian constitutional conflict (1862-66) showed. In that conflict Gneist was, right from the beginning, an outspoken opponent of Bismarck. He helped to define the strategy of the liberals, who couched their political opposition in narrow, purely legal terms. After Bismarck's decisive victcry in 1866, Gneist sided with the national liberals and emerged in the 1870s as a dedicated supporter of Bismarck's illiberal Kulturkampf and anti-socialist legislation. Gneist was not, as this synopsis might suggest, merely a failed idealist turned opportunist. His scholarship and politics reflect some of the deep anti-democratic instincts of Prussian middle-class liberals that made it more easy for them to be allies of the traditional authoritarian landed elites, than champions of the masses uprooted through industrialization. His doctrinaire view of politics as a ceaseless struggle between state and society allowed him to conclude that political rights should be extended to the wealthy and educated, but not to the politically immature lower classes. After 1866 Gneist's unrelenting campaign for a Prussian Rechtsstaat--a system of juridical review of public administration--and for the modernization of Prussian local government, helped furnish Prussia's liberals with positive reform goals. Because these demands did not challenge Bismarck's authoritarian system, or entail the risk of reviving the radical forces of 1848. they were largely fulfilled--though not for all subjects at all times, as Catholics and social democrats discovered during the 1870s. An examination of Gneist's political theory and politics shows how Prussia's constitutional liberals came to accept their modest allotment of political power in Bismarck's pseudo-parliamentary monarchical system.