Franz Böhm’s Private Law Society and Lessons for Our Age

Abstract

Abstract Franz Böhm, Bildungsbürger, son of a protestant-catholic public servant, First World War hero, committedly radical (market) liberal, anti-Nazi, post-war University Rector and Christian Democrat member of the German Bundestag, was a man of his age, and is for that all the more a man for our times. Where progressive academic thought has dissected Böhm, probing for his affinities with Carl Schmitt, most discomforting of all legal dissenters, we are now drawn to relearn his biography in the light of strains placed upon the contemporary liberal state. Likewise, where Michel Foucault decried Böhm as simple forerunner for neoliberalism, constrained only by a fundamental fear of the masses, we need now to differentiate, to better understand, with the aid of Böhm’s writings, the defining distinctions between (failing) technocratic universalisms, nihilistic seekers-after-power and ‘ordered’ exchange within a ‘free’ but constrained market. Even as we continue to doubt the existence of equity and equality within Böhm’s ‘private law society’, we can celebrate and still make use of his writings in defence of the core of the liberal state against civil disintegration, market anarchists and attack by power-hungry authoritarians.