Inheritance

Abstract

Abstract Chapter 6 takes up an issue in which both of the institutions we have seen so far—property and the family—are related to each other: inheritance. Inheritance lies at the intersection of family structure, individual property rights, and the economic structure of society. Laws concerning who gets to bequeath what to whom, and who gets to inherit what from whom, play an important role in tracing the outlines of the family by giving economic structure to its multigenerational nature. The issue of the legitimacy of inheritance is one of the crucial social questions of the late 18th and 19th centuries. In contrast with our own contemporary reflections on inheritance, which is spurred by the enormous inequality of capital wealth produced by multi-generational inheritance, the distinctiveness of the issue in the Sattelzeit comes from its reaction to feudal inheritance structures before the advent of capitalist industrialization.