Mecklenburg, Saxony-Weimar). Thus began a series of consolidations that would reach completion only under the premiership of Otto von Bismarck . But along with these political unifications came legal reforms as well, as different economies, social classes, tax structures and the like had to be reconciled and merged. In some cases, German legal reformers looked to the Napoleonic Code as a model. Now, the point of the French codifiers was to exclude from the legal process what they saw as the arbitrary use of power by the elites of the Ancien Régime . Instead they proposed to establish a system by which the judges operated as sort of rational computers, applying a complete, stable, and seamless system of rules. For some German philosophers of law, this was just what Germany needed. In fact, Anton Thibaut , a German professor of law at Heidelberg University , publicly proclaimed the need for such a code of law in Germany . But with the fall of Napoleon in 1815 and the rise of German nationalism and anti-French sentiment, reaction against his social and legal reforms set in. It thus turned out that Thibaut ’s essay“On the Necessity for a General Civil Code for Germany ” rather than leading to the adoption of a Napoleonic-type code provoked the exact opposite reaction, and is generally credited with sparking the emergence of a romantic notion of law that came to be called the historical school, to which I shall return in a moment.
The logic of its argument was roughly as follows. One alternative to the Napoleonic code was, of course, to go back to the laws of the pre-Napoleonic period. While calls to do so may have attracted some sympathy from the conservative-minded established estates, this was clearly not a workable solution. First of all, the political landscape had changed dramatically, as we just noted. Second, as the pace of change in Europe quickened and belief in modern science and progress spread, European thinkers came more and more to see the classical period not as one to which a fallen humanity had to return, but one that modern people should overcome, transcend, and move beyond. Certainly the experience of both the