Chapter Eleven presents Romanticism as a nationalist phenomenon. After defining Romantic nationalism, it reviews three intersecting phenomena central not only to European Romanticism but also to nationalism: the linguistic revolution, the spread of idealism, and the rise of historicist dialectics. In each case, the author shows how these Romantic principles spread transnationally across various media, influencing political thought and emerging nationalisms. The wide-ranging chapter addresses France’s revolutionary nationalism, recuperated under the Restoration, and even more importantly the German nationalism that arose in reaction to French hegemony, but also touches on other Northern, Central and Eastern-European nations that have so far received little coverage in the volume, including, among others, Finland, Latvia, Estonia, Ireland, the Netherlands, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, and Albania. Its looks at the influence of philology on folklore, and on other literary genres such as the national epic, the patriotic hymn, and the historical novel, as well as the other arts, including music, architecture, and painting. Leerssen argues that Jacob Grimm and his teacher, the legal scholar Carl von Savigny, played central roles in the development of Romantic nationalism and of the notion of Volksgeist.

This chapter explores the slow and uneven property reform path ushered in by the short-lived liberal reformers that gathered around Baron von Stein. After Stein’s resignation, the discourse of property modernization was shortlived and the reconcpetualization of property was carried on by two leading,moderately conservative Roman law scholars who had been close to Stein’s cicle: Barthold Georg Niehbur and Friedrich Karl von Savigny. Animated by sincere scholarly devotion, and yet not shy to use Roman law and agrarian history to support their political agenda, Neihbur built a powerful narrative equating the liberation of the German peasantry to the struggle of the dispossessed Roman free peasant. Simultaneously, Savigny outlined a new Romanist architecture for the law of property designed to enable and protect the full mastery of the owner’s will over a physical thing.

Chiassoni explains that in the early 1960s Norberto Bobbio put forward a descriptive theory of legal positivism consisting of two main parts, namely, a definition of legal positivism, according to which there is no law but positive law (the exclusivity thesis) and an analysis of legal positivism that identifies three versions of legal positivism: legal positivism as an approach to the study of law (scientific positivism), legal positivism as a theory of positive law (theoretical positivism) and legal positivism as a doctrine of obedience to positive law qua law (ideological positivism). He explains that legal positivism as an approach to the study of law involves a commitment to a value-neutral study of positive law; that legal positivism as a theory of positive law encompasses (what he refers to as) narrow theoretical positivism as well as broad theoretical positivism; and that we may distinguish between three versions of legal positivism as a doctrine of obedience to positive law qua law, namely, an unconditional version, a moderate, conditional, relative version, and a very moderate, conditional, relative version, and that these versions differ in important ways.