Siegmund Feilbogen, Une introduction sociologique aux sciences du droit, par Eugen Ehrlich (1914)

Published in June 1914, Feilbogen’s review of Eugen Ehrlich’s Grundlegung der Soziologie des Rechtes presents legal sociology through its challenge to legislative omnipotence. Opening with the German book’s dedication to the French professor Girard, Feilbogen anticipates a receptive French readership, especially among the liberal economists of his journal. He distinguishes Ehrlich’s scientific inquiry into the foundations of law from practical policy debate, while emphasizing its implications for limiting state intervention.

M. Ehrlich ne cesse pas de combattre les illusions interventionnistes et de dénoncer, comme superstition, la foi illimitée dans la toute-puissance de l'Idole-Etat.

English translation: M. Ehrlich never ceases to combat interventionist illusions and to denounce, as superstition, the unlimited faith in the omnipotence of the State-Idol.

Feilbogen grounds this affinity with economic liberalism in Ehrlich’s observations of the discrepancy between imperial legislation and local practice in an Austrian border region. Unintended legislative effects and unenforced provisions undermine the assumption that promulgating laws can cure social evils. The review reports Ehrlich’s claim that at least a third of the Austrian Civil Code remains a dead letter, then gives the concrete example of peasants excluding the code’s provisions when negotiating leases.

Observer le droit, tel qu'il existe à l'état vivant, voilà le programme que M. Ehrlich propose à l'enseignement du droit aux facultés.

English translation: To observe the law as it exists in its living state: such is the programme that M. Ehrlich proposes for the teaching of law in the faculties.

This educational program supplements the study of national codes with comparative jurisprudence and observation of actual legal usages. Feilbogen praises Ehrlich’s familiarity with English common law and Slavic jurisprudence, but comparison serves a deeper conceptual reversal: law originates in rules actually observed by people living in society, not primarily in rules issued by legislators. The passage from statutory texts to social practices thus changes both the object and the method of legal inquiry.

Feilbogen closes by marking the limits of his own emphasis. He leaves fuller discussion of Ehrlich’s sociological analysis to specialist reviewers, yet explicitly locates the book’s originality beyond its anti-interventionist implications:

Mais nous tenons à souligner que la nouveauté scientifique du livre de M. Ehrlich consiste précisément dans l'analyse fine et approfondie des rapports entre l'évolution de la société et celle de son droit.

English translation: But we are anxious to emphasize that the scientific novelty of M. Ehrlich's book consists precisely in the fine and thorough analysis of the relations between the evolution of society and that of its law.

The review’s progression—from French reception, through liberal criticism of the state, to empirical and comparative legal study—makes Ehrlich’s work relevant to its economic readership without reducing its contribution to a political position. Its central insight is that understanding law requires examining how social relations sustain and transform the rules people actually follow.