Souveranitat. Entstehung und Entwicklung des Begriffs in Frankreich und Deutschland vom13. Jahrhundert bis 1806. by Helmut QuaritschReview by: Thomas A. Brady, Jr.The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Summer, 1989), p. 330Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2540688 .

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330 The Sixteenth CenturyJournal XX no. 2, 1989

Souveranitat. Entstehung und Entwicklung des Begriffs in Frankre- ich und Deutschland vom 13. Jahrhundert bis 1806. Helmut Qua- ritsch. Schriften zur Verfassungsgeschichte, vol. 38. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1986. 128 pp. n.p.

This small monograph studies the French origins and the German reception of the idea of sovereignty in the context less of political thought than of public law. Quaritsch examines the meaning of "sovereign" and "sovereignty" in the French legal sources from the thirteenth century to Bodin and then examines the ideas reception in the German practice of diplomacy, public law, and political speculation during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He finds that the very concept of sovereignty was lacking in the German-speaking world, until the Peace of Westphalia forced German diplomats to receive French political language. Their practical acknowledgement of sovereignty received theoretical confirmation from Pufendorf's and Leibniz's speculations on the form of the state. The concept's first important German application came in 1656-60, when the duke of Prussia gained recognition from foreign powers as the possessor "iure supremi Dominii cum summa atque absoluta potestate." Sovereignty's final penetration of Germany came with Napoleon's estab- lishment of the Rheinbund in 1806, which shattered the old German concepts of empire, estates, and people (Reich, Stande und Nation) but also blocked "the German national state which became historically due (historisch fallig) in 1813-15" (122). Quaritsch thus shares the old National-Liberal view, according to which Germany's unfortunate "special path" (Sonderweg) began at the end of the sixteenth century, when the Germans failed to receive and apply Bodin's idea to a sovereign, German state.

Quaritsch's interesting study has two main points of interest for students of sixteenth-century Europe. First, Quaritsch shows that the concept of "sovereignty" developed in France, because the practice of sovereignty already existed there by the later Middle Ages. Bodin gave the idea a translatable form, though by his time it already existed in other western European lands. The German reception - and this is the second point - did not begin to be domesticated until after the Thirty Years' War; the first breakthrough came within the sovereignty of Prussia; and the final, full domestication came only with Napoleon. Quaritsch complains of the reception's belatedness (he writes it was "delayed for decades" [122]), but his French story shows that the idea was fully formulated only after the practice was fully formed. Sixteenth- century Germany had no rulers who could dip their hands at will into subjects' pockets, not even in the brutally overtaxed Austrian lands. That royal ability, at least in German eyes, did exist in France, and they called it "Latin Tyranny (We/sche Tyrannei)" which they contrasted most unfavorably with "German freedoms (deutsche Libertdten)." Military absolutism is more or less a French creation, just as capitalism is an English creation. Each spread - first as practice, then as idea - more through imitation than through historical inevitability.

Thomas A. Brady, Jr. University of Oregon

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