German Philosophy of Criminal Law from the Age of Late Absolutism to the End of the Napoleonic Era: A Systematic and Reception-Historic Analysis

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The last decades of the 18th and the early 19th century mark the historical peak of philosophical discussions in German criminal law. The criminal law of the Jus commune (gemeines Recht) was seen as heavily outdated. The hope for a new and more contemporary concept of criminal law was invested in philosophy, which quickly advanced to the position of leading discipline in the field of criminal law thinking. This development led to unprecedented rich discussions in which legally interested philosophers such as Kant, Fichte, Schopenhauer and Humboldt took their share, as well as philosophically ambitioned legal scholars such as Feuerbach, Grolman and Welcker. The debate produced an abundance of theories and arguments which have not been surpassed ever since. A reception of this discussion today is difficult, though, due to the lack of a comprehensive presentation of the thoughts, theories and arguments of the discussants. The goal of the present project is to fill this gap. One focus of the project will be to analyze how the reflections directly related to criminal law fit into the overall philosophical systems of the mentioned authors. The other focus will be to show how these thoughts were influenced by contemporary criminal law discourse and how they, in turn, influenced the following discussion on criminal law. The investigations of my project lead up to the closing question: to what extent are the conceptions of that time still of interest in the context of our present political and philosophical style of thinking, and, further, can they even serve as a role model for the present age?