Limits of Enlightenment: Joseph II and the Law (146P) - Hardcover

The Limits of Enlightenment: Joseph II and the Law.

Hardcover. Zustand: Sehr gut. XII, 146 p. Ein sehr gutes und sauberes Exemplar / A very good and clean copy. - CONTENTS Preface Chapter One Two Three Four Five Six Seven Eight Appendix: Biographical Sketches Bibliography Index. / PREFACE Most men in positions of power subscribe to one set of principles but, when they believe themselves to be hidden from public scrutiny, behave in accordance with another. Since every historian knows this, as a rule no degree of hypocrisy, no matter how monstrous, can elicit much astonishment from him. Nonetheless, when a man makes a point of wanting to be thought of as a child of enlightenment and a reformer, and there is in spite of this a large difference between what he says and what he does, the historian is entitled to pass judgment on him. Joseph II, co-ruler of Austria from 1765 to 1780 and sole ruler from 1780 until his death in 1790, is foremost among those whose names invariably crop up in any discussion of enlightened despotism. If professional historians are a long way from sharing in the uncritical admiration of Joseph that was characteristic of various nineteenth-century Austrian and German liberals, if they have come to realize that he was as much an autocrat as a reformer, they nevertheless continue to accept him as someone who was completely serious about reforming and liberalizing societys internal structure. If they sometimes criticize his methods, they concede the purity of his intentions. Real criticism of Joseph has come not from the liberals but from the ultra-conservatives, who are unable to forgive him his attacks on the Catholic Church. The present study examines the relationship between theory and practice, between proclaimed intentions and subsequent actions, in the area of what one might call civil liberties in Josephinian Austria. In particular, we shall concern ourselves with assessing the chances that someone coming into conflict with the law would be given the benefit of what, broadly defined, may be called due process. Every effort will be made to guard against making anachronistic judgments, or looking at eighteenth-century Austrian procedure from the purview of twentieth-century Anglo-Saxon opinions on what constitutes due process. It should be kept in mind that eighteenth-century justice was a compound of Christian precept, vulgar wisdom, and, to a certain extent, superstition, all tempering the existing farrago of hopelessly complicated and often contradictory statutes. Modern, mechanistic, bureaucratically administered blind justice was in the process of being born. In order, then, to establish a framework, we must begin with an account of Austrian criminal law as it was in the eighteenth-century, with a description of the criminal court system, and with an analysis of the existing mechanisms available for the enforcement of law: the police power and the punitive system. ISBN 9780252007354 Sprache: Englisch Gewicht in Gramm: 450. Artikel-Nr. 1229182

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