Neo-Hegelianism in Jurisprudence at a given moment, which requires not only a study of the institutions but of the strength and weakness of human nature, and of the tastes, aptitudes, and prejudices of mankind. A thorough going philosophical treatment of history is necessarily sociological in method, for thus only can we explain the genesis of cultural movements and the causation of great transformations of law and society. A vague general concept of the interrelation of law and economic institutions as matter and form will not suffice to explain the evolution of law throughout history. It is necessary, on the contrary, to show just how, from within, society can generate the force acting upon its own complex. If we say, for example, that the Reformation was primarily an economic movement for the emancipation of the middle class, we are on the threshold of a much broader inquiry. The economic de mands of the middle class remain to be explained. Were they due to economic conditions rendering the position of the middle class less favorable than in the previous age, to the moral deterioration of the governing class, or to a sudden elevation of the cultural standards of the middle class? These important ques tions are entirely ignored. We know that there is a tissue of social institutions not one of which may be changed without affecting every other institution. In the complex of moral, economic, legal, and miscellaneous insti tutions, and not only of fixed institu tions but of changing habits, tastes, and capacities, there is a Znsammenhang which makes it fruitless to consider one institution but in its interactions with all the other factors. Accordingly, the "modern inter-class state" is too com plicated an entity o be disposed of as merely a juxtaposition of economic groups. Granted that the most power
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ful economic group will always succeed in mastering every weaker group, and will thus exert a most potent action in determining the characteristics of the community in general, it remains to show the sources of its power and the nature of the %'arious cultural elements which not only confer power upon it but provide means for its exercise. II. The Absolute Criterion of Progress. — A correct use of the word "emanci pation" presupposes that a mediaeval class demanding emancipation was op pressed according to contemporary stand ards, yet that would often be difficult to establish, and Berolzheimer gives no indication of having made the inquiries necessary to give his conclusions sup port. On the eve of the Reformation, Aquinas declared it the subject's duty "to be justly obedient,"10 and that view was presumably concordant with the prevailing morality not only of the ruling class but of all classes. "The distinctive characteristic of the Middle Ages may be said to be the bondage, social and spiritual, of the individual,"11 but the individual acquiesced in that bondage in feudal Germany as truly as in feudal France. Can the Reformation in Germany be treated as a movement for the breaking of these bonds when there was every reason why a similar movement should have arisen likewise in the Latin countries? The historical problem is large and by no means free from difficulty for the historical student. Even greater would be the task of estab lishing by induction the thesis that all great historical movements originate in a contemporary demand for greater indi vidual liberty. In fact this is not the view which Berolzheimer seeks to estab-
10 P. 99. » P. 113.
