Julius Landesberger, Über die geschichtliche Entwicklung des Rechtsstaates (1889)

This printed dissertation speech, delivered at the University of Vienna on Landesberger’s promotion sub auspiciis Imperatoris, is a compact historical-theoretical account of the Rechtsstaat. Its scope is not doctrinal exposition but genealogy: Landesberger asks how the legal state emerged from changing relations among state, individual, nation, and society.

The speech begins from a methodological claim: public law cannot be understood abstractly, because the state is both lawgiver and legally bound will. Crises therefore reshape not only institutions but also legal theory. The Rechtsstaat must be studied historically, as a problem whose meaning changes with the social and political form of the state.

Landesberger first locates the classical German formulation in Kant. Kant’s Rechtsstaat is defined by the state’s exclusive vocation to posit and protect law:

Feste Gestaltung und eingehende Ausführung gewann dieser Gedanke in Deutschland erst durch Immanuel Kant, welcher den Rechtsstaat als das teleologische Princip der Staatslehre dahin formulierte, daß dem Staate einzig und allein die Aufgabe gestellt sei, das Recht zu setzen und zu schirmen.

English translation: This idea gained firm shape and thorough elaboration in Germany only through Immanuel Kant, who formulated the Rechtsstaat as the teleological principle of the theory of the state in the following way: that the sole task of the state is to establish and to safeguard the law.

This Kantian construction is important because it grounds state authority in freedom rather than welfare-paternalism. Law is the condition under which equal freedom can coexist:

Die Maxime des Handelns, die mit der Freiheit Aller verträglich ist, ist die Rechtsordnung.

English translation: The maxim of action that is compatible with the freedom of all is the legal order.

Yet Landesberger’s main thesis is that history “steps beyond” this abstract, individualistic Rechtsstaat. The French Revolution, the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire, and the rise of German national consciousness expose the insufficiency of a state conceived merely as a juridical protector. Through Fichte and the wars of liberation, Landesberger sees a shift from natural-law abstraction to the national Kulturstaat: the state becomes the organized will of a historically formed people.

An die Stelle des naturrechtlichen Staates mit seinen drei Gewalten und einseitiger enger Zweckbestimmung tritt ein einheitlicher Staatswille, dessen Aeußerungen das gesammte Dasein und die Entwicklung des Volkslebens umfassen sollen.

English translation: In place of the natural-law state with its three powers and one-sided narrow purpose there emerges a unified state will, whose expressions are to encompass the whole existence and development of the life of the people.

The central conceptual move of the speech is then to introduce “society” as the second factor of modern constitutional life. Society is not identical with the people as a mere population, but with the people in its dynamic structure of classes, interests, and cultural energies:

Das Volk in dieser seiner Gliederung, welche durch die Gleichheit und den Gegensatz der Interessen ein lebendiges Wechselspiel von Kräften entfesselt, — die dynamische Erscheinungsform des Volkes ist es, was wir mit dem uns so vertrauten Begriffe „Gesellschaft“ bezeichnen.

English translation: The people in this articulation of theirs, which, through the equality and the opposition of interests, unleashes a living interplay of forces — this dynamic form of appearance of the people is what we designate by the concept, so familiar to us, of "society".

From this premise Landesberger rewrites constitutional liberalism. Fundamental rights are not simply private entitlements of isolated individuals; they are the juridical form through which society gains free space against state monopoly and against domination by any one class. The modern Rechtsstaat is therefore founded on “civil society” as a legally secured sphere of cultural, religious, intellectual, and economic action:

Dieser Gedankenkreis, der Begriff der staatsbürgerlichen Gesellschaft, ist in Wahrheit das Fundament des modernen Rechtsstaates, und er ist es, dem die Verfassungen Ausdruck geben in dem Sätze: „Alle Staatsbürger sind gleich vor dem Gesetze“, — sowie in den übrigen sogenannten Freiheits- oder Menschenrechten.

English translation: This body of thought, the concept of civil society, is in truth the foundation of the modern Rechtsstaat, and it is this to which constitutions give expression in the proposition: "All citizens are equal before the law", as well as in the other so-called freedom-rights or human rights.

This also explains Landesberger’s view of parliament. Representation does not mirror individuals numerically; it mediates the organized forces and prevailing ideas of society into legislation. Likewise, self-government is valued not as anti-statism but as the disciplined participation of social bodies in public tasks, always under state law and supervision.

The conclusion fuses liberal legality with ethical statism. In the Rechtsstaat, law binds administration, legislation, and sovereign power itself; the state becomes more than coercive organization because it recognizes its own legal form as a limit on future action. Hence Landesberger’s culminating formula:

Der Rechtsstaat ist nicht die politische und culturelle allein, er ist auch die ethische Organisation eines Volkes!

English translation: The Rechtsstaat is not merely the political and cultural, it is also the ethical organisation of a people!

The speech’s relevance lies in this synthesis. Landesberger rejects both absolutist welfare rule and a minimal Kantian law-protection state. His Rechtsstaat is constitutional, social, administrative, and ethical: it secures freedom by separating state power from society’s sphere, but also unites both in legislation, self-government, and common cultural tasks. Its Austrian closing appeal to Justitia regnorum fundamentum and Viribus unitis frames constitutional legality as the moral condition for holding a plural society together.