Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jens Beckert is a director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Germany. His books include Beyond the Market: The Social Foundation of Economic Sociology (Princeton).

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"This excellent book is the first major comparative exploration of inheritance law as it pertains to the social sciences that I know of. Marked throughout by the author's erudition on the subject, its analysis is framed in sociological terms, but the main chapters can be read without any knowledge of sociology. Indeed, they contain much that will prove extremely useful for historians, political scientists, economists, and others, and which is hard to find elsewhere."--Richard Swedberg, Cornell University

"Inherited Wealth is a fine piece of scholarship, worth reading from beginning to end. We learn much in this book. First and foremost, we learn the guiding principles of inheritance law in three very influential countries. In a highly readable manner, Jens Beckert presents a very complex topic that has, until now, been accessible only to legal scholars."--Juan Díez Medrano, Universidad de Barcelona and Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals (IBEI)

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Inherited Wealth

Princeton University Press

Chapter One

The regulation of inheritance law on the basis of the essential personal or social conditions always appears to be a reflection of the various opinions of an age, which are shaped by national character, its cultural level, and economic considerations. Heinrich Ahrens (1871, 249)

1.1. Inheritance and Modern Society

Everyone who dies leaves something behind. Everyone who owns property leaves it behind. But to whom does this property belong? All societies that recognize individual property rights need rules to reallocate property upon the owner's death. In modern societies, a codified inheritance law defines the rights of the testator to dispose of his or her property by will, the rights of the deceased's family members, and the rights of the state to appropriate all or part of the property. But societies regulate these issues in different ways. How to regulate them became a major topic of intense political, legal, economic, sociological, and philosophical debate in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For Alexis de Tocqueville the question of inheritance was so important to a society's development that when "the legislator has once regulated the law of inheritance, he may rest from his labor" (1980 [1835], 1:48). John Stuart Mill (1968 [1848], 202-3) saw inheritance law as the most critical area of law, equaled in significance only by contract law and the status of laborers.

The present book explores the development of inheritance law in Germany, France, and the United States since the late eighteenth century. By examining four central controversies over inheritance law during these three centuries, I try to explain how inheritance law developed and why differences exist to this day between the legal systems of these three countries. The four areas of conflict are (1) the degree of testamentary freedom; (2) the legal rights of the testator's relatives, especially his or her spouse and children; (3) entails; and (4) inheritance taxation. Why is the testator allowed only minimal testamentary freedom in France, while that freedom is almost unlimited in the United States? Why did the principle of real partitioning come to prevail in France? Why do family interests play a much more important role in German inheritance law than in American inheritance law? Why, in all three countries, was inheritance taxation introduced or fundamentally reformed in the early twentieth century? Why were much higher estate taxes introduced in the United States than in Germany? Why were entails banned in Germany only in 1919, 140 years later than in the United States and 70 years later than in France?

Inheritance Law and Social Solidarity

These questions lie at the heart of the present study. At the same time, its analysis is embedded in a comprehensive theoretical framework that owes much to mile Durkheim's sociology of law (1984, 1992). Durkheim analyzed the development of legal institutions as an aspect of the macrosocial evolution of society. He regarded the development of the relationship between individuality and the normative structures of society as a major topic for the sociological analysis of the process of modernization. According to Durkheim, the development of the law is an indicator for the relationship "of the individual to social solidarity" (1984 [1893], xxx).

As early as The Division of Labor in Society, but especially in the lectures Professional Ethics and Civic Morals, Durkheim applied his view of the law to property rights. According to Durkheim (1992 [1957], 146), the right of property expresses a direct moral bond between the thing owned and the owner. The moral position of the individual is reflected in the legal rights of the owner. The violation of property rights is punished because society recognizes it as a violation of the owner himself. According to Durkheim, the moral status of the individual in relation to the family, to intermediary institutions, and to the state is admitted into the rights and duties of the disposition of property because of the link between property rights and the person. These law-based normative structures of modern society become visible through an examination of the historical genesis of property law.

Durkheim touched on inheritance law in the fragmentary book of lectures Professional Ethics and Civic Morals, but his analysis concentrated on contract law. Yet it is the study of the development of inheritance law that allows us to trace most clearly the structures of the relationship of individuality and its social embeddedness. In conflicts over inheritance law, questions about the relationship between individual freedom in the disposition over property, the claims of the family and the state to this property, as well as the role of ascription and individual achievement take center stage and provide a concise indicator of the normative structures that carry out the social integration of the individual. The close link of inheritance law to this question of social integration can also be seen in the fact that inheritance as a social problem emerges only when property rights are individualized and a purely family-based understanding of private property is transcended.

The development of modern inheritance law is linked to the dissolution of the economic unit of the household, in which there was no right of inheritance in the modern sense, because the unit itself was considered immortal (Weber 1978 [1922], 1:359). Upon death, a member ceased to be the bearer of an idealized "share" of the property, but that did not amount to a real transfer of property. According to Max Weber, it was only the processes of differentiation through individualized forms of acquisition, the separation of household and workplace, the growing significance of capital in relation to land as a factor of production, and the institution of dowry that led to increasingly calculated internal family relations and to the individualization of property rights. This, in turn, contributed to the dissolution of the household and created the social problem of assigning property mortis causa. Thus, the development of inheritance law is intimately linked with processes of social differentiation. However, as I want to show, this is not a process of individualization, understood as an increasing separation of the individual from society, but rather, in the Durkheimian sense, a transformation of social solidarity. How individual disposition over property mortis causa is embedded in conceptions of social solidarity in the three societies investigated is the subject of the present book.

Discourse on Inheritance Law and Legal Development

Although this book follows Durkheim in connecting the examination of the evolution of law with the understanding of modernization, my approach is different from Durkheim's: in The Division of Labor in Society, Durkheim suggested that we consider social reactions to violations of the law as an indicator of the development of individuality and social solidarity. For Durkheim, the declining importance of criminal law reflected the diminishing relevance of "solidarity through likeness" and the increasing crystallization of the individual as the moral subject of modern society. The decline of the repressive sanctions of criminal law, through which traditional societies assure their social cohesion, can be read as a sign of the waning significance of...