Felix Kaufmann: Review of Max Salomon’s Grundlegung zur Rechtsphilosophie (1926)

Felix Kaufmann’s short journal review assesses the second, revised edition of Max Salomon’s Grundlegung zur Rechtsphilosophie, published in 1925. Its central judgment concerns the book’s arrangement of problems rather than its particular doctrines: Kaufmann values the intellectual construction of its questions and the resulting pedagogical clarity. He treats the appearance of a new edition six years after the first as evidence that Salomon’s conscientious, penetrating formulation of problems has received deserved attention.

The review proceeds from this acknowledgment to an extended quotation from Salomon’s new preface. Salomon distinguishes revision from the comprehensive rewriting he would now prefer. Both the arrangement of material and its presentation would require fundamental changes, but insufficient leisure has prevented that undertaking:

Wollte ich mich nicht selbst zum Verstummen verurteilen, so mußte ich mich mit einer Ueberarbeitung begnügen.

English translation: If I did not wish to condemn myself to silence, I had to content myself with a revision.

The revised edition thus represents continued participation in philosophical discussion without a wholesale reconstruction of the book. Salomon maintains that his basic position remains unchanged, while acknowledging a greater need to deepen its philosophical foundations, especially through engagement with post-Kantian thought. As Kaufmann reports it, progress in legal philosophy depends less on elaborating individual doctrines than on deepening and securing their philosophical groundwork.

Kaufmann then notes that reviews of the first edition prompted most additions and alterations, particularly the predominantly polemical responses by Emge, Sauer, Sander, and Binder. He does not reconstruct these disputes or adjudicate their objections. His concluding assessment explicitly limits the scope of the notice while identifying the book’s principal merit:

Er möchte nur bemerken, daß ihm dessen Hauptwert in dem sehr glücklichen gedanklichen Aufbau der Probleme zu liegen scheint, wodurch es sich auch vom pädagogischen Gesichtspunkt vorteilhaft von manchen anderen neueren Erscheinungen auf dem Gebiete der Rechtsphilosophie abhebt.

English translation: He wishes only to remark that its principal value seems to him to lie in the very successful intellectual structuring of the problems, through which it also distinguishes itself favorably, from a pedagogical standpoint, from some other recent publications in the field of legal philosophy.

The review’s significance lies in this restrained distinction between doctrinal evaluation and philosophical problem-construction. Kaufmann offers no substantive endorsement of Salomon’s answers; his praise concerns how the work makes legal-philosophical questions intelligible and teachable.