Friedrich Julius Stahl - Page 3

While Drucker emigrated to England, the publisher Oskar Siebeck remained in Germany. In a letter of January 5, 1999, Georg Siebeck, who today runs J.C.B. Mohr, wrote Peter Drucker about the further fate of his grandfather: "He was the director of the publishing house from 1920 and in 1936, after hopeless negotiations with the Reichs-chamber of literature, he took his own life."
In his first letter to Oskar Siebeck, Drucker indicated that his essay on Stahl was originally part of a larger work on conservative state theory. In "Reflections of a Social Ecologist," the epilogue to his essay collection The Ecological Vision (Transaction Books, 1992), Drucker mentioned details of this planned work, which was to have the title Der Rechtsstaat ("The Constitutional State"):

"I was barely twenty at the time, in early 1930 ... All around me society, economy, and government - indeed civilization - were collapsing. There was a total lack of continuity. And this drew my attention to that remarkable trio of German thinkers who in a similar period of social collapse, a little over a hundred years earlier, had created stability by inventing what came to be known as Der Rechtsstaat ... They were a remarkable trio, both because of the breadth of interests and activities of each of them, but also because they were respectively an agnostic Protestant, a romantic Catholic, and a converted Jew. The first of them, Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) was the last great figure of the European Enlightenment, a leading statesman during the Napoleonic Wars, the founder of the first modern university, the University of Berlin in 1809, and later the founder of scientific linguistics. The second, Joseph von Radowitz (1797-1853) was a professional soldier and the King's confidant and first minister, but also a crusading magazine editor and the progenitor of all Catholic parties in Europe - in Germany, in France, in Italy, in Holand, in Belgium, in Austria. The third and last, Friedrich Julius Stahl (1802-1861), was Hegel's successor as professor of philosophy at the University of Berlin. A legal philosopher he also revived the moribund theology of Lutheran Protestantism. And he was the most brilliant parliamentarian, in fact the only brilliant parliamentarian in German history." (pp. 442f.)