Charlotte Johann explores the relationship between law and history articulated in a fierce debate between two of the most prominent legal scholars of nineteenth-century Germany: Friedrich Carl von Savigny, the leading exponent of historical jurisprudence, and Eduard Gans, the foremost advocate of Hegelian legal philosophy. Situating their confrontation in the aftermath of the Napoleonic occupation of German Europe, the chapter argues that the two thinkers used concepts of history to counter the rupturing effects of revolution and empire on the German legal system, albeit in radically different ways. Savigny proposed to re-build the German legal system based on the hermeneutically rigorous academic study of pre-revolutionary legal orders, especially classical Roman Law. Gans, by contrast, defended the primacy of legislation as a vehicle of legal continuity by grounding it in an origin story of the modern state. Johann challenges interpretations of the debate as simply a clash between liberal and conservative versions of law’s history. Rather, she suggests that the issue at stake was whether, or to what extent, politics and law share the same temporality – an issue that continues to preoccupy legal theorists and historians alike.

Historians have recognized parallels between the temporalized chain of being and early ideas about human progress, both being seen as the ascent of a linear scale of development towards a predetermined goal. But the sequence of developmental stages postulated by social thinkers could be defined in different ways depending on whether the goal was a spiritual one (paradise) or a more utilitarian vision of a perfectly ordered society guaranteeing happiness for all (utopia). This chapter outlines the emergence of the more spiritual approach, noting its origins in Christian millenarianism and the hope that Christ's message would eventually lead humanity to regain the state of perfection it enjoyed before the Fall. Eighteenth-century advocates of social progress such as Joseph Priestley saw it as a process of spiritual evolution, a view developed further by liberal Christian thinkers in the following century. Idealist philosophers such as Hegel also defined history in terms of humanity's ascent of a spiritual scale, although their later followers over-simplified the message. There were speculations about the nature of the future society which would give full rein to our spiritual nature.