3 - Gierke and the Genossenschaft

Summary

Parts of Otto von Gierke's Das deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht, to which we may now turn, bear a superficial resemblance to Oakeshott's survey of European ideas of the state. Like Oakeshott, Gierke placed great emphasis on the competing claims of the societas and the universitas as modes of conceptualising the state. And like Oakeshott, he found a special place at the heart of his story for the writing of Thomas Hobbes. But here the resemblances end. Gierke's story is quite different from Oakeshott's, and the Hobbes who emerges from it shares with Oakeshott's hero only the virtues of his intellectual courage (Gierke calls it ‘his Radical audacity’); in other regards, he is an equivocal figure, and his ideas are treated by Gierke with circumspection bordering on regret. Above all, Gierke's Hobbes is historical, and his character is determined by the particular sort of history he inhabits. For Oakeshott, the basic models of societas and universitas serve to divide up the history of political ideas, and then to transcend differences between theorists on one or other side of this divide. Thus the language of political thought might change – Hegel's civil association is not described in the terms of Bodin's – but the ideas being described remain essentially the same. But for Gierke ideas can never be understood in such static terms, and nor can they be understood apart from the historical conditions surrounding their formation.