General Doctrines and Private Law - Hardcover

by Friedrich Julius Stahl (Author), Ruben Alvarado (Translator)

The hardback edition includes the three books comprising Vol. II, Part I of The Philosophy of Law.

Philosophical Foundations

Philosophical Foundations offers an introduction to the philosophy of law, but it also furnishes the foundations for a Christian philosophy. It provides us with the metaphysical and ethical tools to slash our way through the wilderness of ideologies and power-craving opinions which threaten to overwhelm civilization. The most basic datum such a framework can provide is very simply the either/or of a personal God from Whom all things originated or an ultimate reality that is impersonal. That is the starting point for inquiry. And it cannot be the case that the decision for an impersonal ultimate reality is a requirement for science. Functional atheism can be no requirement for participation either in academia or in public life and policymaking.

Is science truly science that ignores the most basic fact of existence - the existence of God? It cannot be so.

Principles of Law

The Christian difference to the legal order is not to be found in any religious test or requirement of conformity, but in the Christian character of legal institutions. Stahl accomplishes this by making institutions rather than actions the cornerstone of law. Law is a general rule, not a specific command; and institutions, not persons, are its primary object. Persons operate within the framework established by law, but that law is an external, objective framework, not an internal, subjective one. The right of the person and the rights of persons are established and defended precisely by this objectively Christian order. Therefore, what is Christian about this legal order is the principles, the law-ideas, upon which it is based, not the level of faith of those living within it.

Private Law

Private law forms the cornerstone of individual freedom. Even so, it is derived from the law of God, which establishes the principles of which it is the further outworking. It establishes the institutions and authorities within which individual freedom can function.

The law forms part of the ethical world. The two poles around which the ethical world revolves are the fear of God and full humanity. Both of these need to be given their due in a properly-regulated legal order. The problem with modernist law is that "it only seeks man while being detached from what stands above man. Of the two parts through which the law is fulfilled - you shall love the Lord your God above all things, and your neighbor as yourself - it has arbitrarily picked out the second while ignoring the first, it has demolished the first of the two tables of the law while proposing to establish only the second" ( . 21).

Therefore the rights of man receive full explanation only within the context of higher, God-given legal principles. As such, human rights do not serve as the source of law but as a secondary principle subservient to a higher law. That higher law establishes, besides the free action of the individual, family and property as the bases of private law.