Siegmund Feilbogen: Review of Ludwig Felix’s Entwicklungsgeschichte des Eigenthums, Parts II–III (1895)

Siegmund Feilbogen’s review assesses Ludwig Felix’s account of custom and religion in the historical development of property. Its central judgment balances appreciation of Felix’s cultural breadth against a demand for legal precision: the volumes supply valuable historical materials, but a history of property requires systematic treatment of property rights.

Feilbogen first outlines the books’ organization. Part II traces moral development through advancing intelligence, the growth of benevolence toward subordinated and vulnerable groups, and the expansion and refinement of needs, including a sympathetic treatment of healthy luxury. Part III considers sacred protection of property and religious demands for possessions, the Church’s economic role, religion’s protective and obstructive effects, and ecclesiastical expenditure, wealth, and secularization. Its concluding synthesis presents religion’s influence on property as broadly beneficial. Feilbogen emphasizes Felix’s ambition to encompass religious feeling from earliest times to the present.

The review then shifts from exposition to methodological assessment. Felix’s strength lies in arranging abundant historical evidence for a broad educated readership:

Jeder von den vorliegenden Bänden ist ein Lesebuch im Sinne Roscher's, ein übersichtlich geordnetes Repertorium, in welchem der Verfasser die Früchte einer ungewöhnlich umfassenden Lectüre mit Nachweis der Quellen, ohne besonders strenge Kritik, Definition und Systematik, den Gebildeten aller Stände zur Verfügung gestellt hat.

English translation: Each of the present volumes is a reader in Roscher's sense, a clearly arranged repertory in which the author has placed the fruits of an unusually extensive reading, with references to the sources but without especially rigorous criticism, definition, and systematic arrangement, at the disposal of educated persons of every station.

The comparison with Roscher joins praise to reservation. Feilbogen admires Felix’s humane ethical judgment, historical openness, and fairness, while observing that the accumulation of facts sometimes outruns their connection to property. Comprehensiveness does not itself produce conceptual rigor.

His decisive distinction separates cultural and economic contributions from the construction of a legal history:

Vom wirtschaftlichen und culturgeschichtlichen Gesichtspunkte aus werden immer nur Beiträge, Bausteine zu einer Eigenthumsgeschichte möglich sein; das Gebäude selbst auszuführen, ist Sache des geschulten Juristen und Rechtshistorikers, der die gesamte Entwicklung des Eigenthumsrechtes nach Inhalt, Schranken, Schutzmitteln, Objecten und Subjecten zu überblicken gewohnt ist.

English translation: From the economic and cultural-historical point of view only contributions, building blocks toward a history of property, will ever be possible; to erect the edifice itself is the business of the trained jurist and legal historian, who is accustomed to survey the entire development of the law of property according to its content, its limits, its means of protection, its objects and its subjects.

Yet this division of labor does not make cultural history dispensable. Feilbogen immediately warns that abstract legal training can obscure the living forces and purposes through which law develops within culture. Felix’s ethnographic materials therefore offer a necessary corrective and supplement to formally juridical accounts.

The review’s significance lies in this reciprocal criticism: cultural history needs legal articulation, while legal history needs an account of social purposes and historical life. Feilbogen accordingly withholds a final verdict until Felix’s projected concluding volume on law and the state, which he regards as substantively the most important part of the undertaking.