Karl Salomo Zachariae Von Lingenthal - Works and Studies

Works and Studies

The German universities then enjoyed, in regard to legal questions of international importance, a moral jurisdiction dating from the Middle Ages, and Zachariae was often consulted as to questions arising in Germany, France and England.

Elaborate "opinions," some of them forming veritable treatises - e.g. on Sir Augustus d'Este's claim to the dukedom of Sussex, Baron de Bode's claim as an English subject to a share in the French indemnity, the dispute as to the debts due to the elector of Hesse-Kassel (or Hesse-Cassel), confiscated by Napoleon, and the constitutional position of the Mecklenburg landowners - were composed by Zachariae.

Large fees which he received for these opinions and the great popularity of his lectures made him rich, and he was able to buy several estates; from one of which, Lingenthal, he took his title when, in 1842, he was ennobled by the grand-duke. He died on 27 March 1843. He had married in 1811, but his wife died four years later, leaving him a son, Karl Eduard.

Zachariae's writings are many and multifarious. They deal with almost every branch of jurisprudence; they are philosophical, historical and practical, and relate to Roman, Canon, German, French and English law. The first book of much consequence which he published was Die Einheit des Staats und der Kirche mit Rücksicht auf die Deutsche Reichsverfassung (1797), a work on the relations of church and state, with special reference to the constitution of the empire, which displayed the writer's power of analysis and his skill in making a complicated set of facts appear to be deductions from a few principles.

In 1805 appeared Versuch einer allgemeinen Hermeneutik des Rechts; and in 1806 Die Wissenschaft der Gesetzgebung, an attempt to find a new theoretical basis for society in place of the opportunist politics which had led to the cataclysm of the French Revolution. This basis he seemed to discover in something resembling Jeremy Bentham's utilitarianism.

Zachariae's last work of importance was Vierzig Bücher vom Staate (1839–1842), to which his admirers point as his enduring monument. It has been compared to Montesquieu's L'Esprit des lois, The Spirit of the Laws and covers no small part of the field of Buckle's first volume of the History of Civilization. But though it contains proof of vast erudition and many original ideas as to the future of the state and of law, it lacks logical sequence, and is, consequently, full of contradictions.

Its fundamental theory is that the state had its origin, not in a contract (Rousseau-Kant), but in the consciousness of a legal duty. What Machiavelli was to the Italians and Montesquieu to the French, Zachariae aspired to become to the Germans; but he lacked their patriotic inspiration, and so failed to exercise any permanent influence on the constitutional law of his country.

Among other important works of Zachariae are his Staatsrecht, and his treatise on the Code Napoléon, of which several French editions were published, and which was translated into Italian.

Zachariae edited with Karl Joseph Mittermaier the Kritische Zeitschrift fur Rechtswissenschaft und Gesetzgebung des Auslandes, and the introduction which he wrote illustrates his wide reading and his constant desire for new light upon old problems. Though Zachariae's works have been superseded, they were in their day epoch-making, and they have been superseded by books which, without them, could not have been written.

For an account of Zachariae and his works, see Robert von Mohl, Geschichte u. Literatur der Staatswissenschaften (1855–58), and Charles Brocher, K. S. Zachariae, sa vie et ses oeuvres (1870); cf. also his biography in Allgem. Deutsche Biographie (vol. 44) by Wilhelm Fischer, and "Zachariae von Lingenthal" in Franz von Holtzendorff's Rechts-Lexicon.