Hermann Heller

The 'Old Austrian' Hermann Heller (1891-1933) is regarded as a classic constitutional lawyer of the 20th century alongside Hans Kelsen and Carl Schmitt. Heller's fight against Nazism, his commitment to the social rule of law, his work in worker education, his academic activities at the universities of Berlin and Frankfurt, and his role in the legal methodological conflicts of the Weimar Republic are well known. This work discusses Heller's engagement with the idealistically bourgeois philosophy of history of Hegel, with the bourgeois historicism of Ranke, Droysen, Treitschke, Meinecke, up to Troeltsch and K. Mannheim, as well as Heller's stance on the historical materialism of Marx and Engels, and his views on the historiographical interpretations of Kautsky, Korsch, Lukács, and the 'Austro-Marxists.' The position of jurists towards historicism since the 1880s is comparably illustrated through the examples of Gierke, Bergbohm, Preuss, Radbruch, E. Kaufmann, Schmitt, Holstein, Smend, and many others. An appendix includes a contribution to the analysis of Nazi jurisprudence from the perspective of the Frankfurt School.