he traces the supposedly Roman origins of the modern notion of property rights back to the ideologically motivated writings of natural lawyers such as Gundling andThomasius, thereby demonstrating and illuminating inconsistencies in the modern doctrines of contracts.And finally, in his magnum opus Der römische Obligationsbegriff im Lichte der allgemeinen römischen Rechtsanschauung I and II (1927 and1941), he subjects the entire 19th and20th Century science of private law, the so-called Pandektenwissenschaft, to a painstaking test when, taking early Roman law as his vantage point, he casts in doubt the validity of modern private jurisprudence. To start with, Hägerström gives a brief account of the development of legal thought and legal science, and then compares these ideas with the basic postulates of epistemology and ontology. Much would be lost in translation if Hägerström’s own words were not used: p a r t v, c h a p t e r 1 294 1. 1 phi losophy and juri sprudence se parated - a new role for the phi losophy of law “‘Is Saul also among the prophets?’ Roughly speaking, what has a philosopher to do with jurisprudence? Whilst it was still held that an objective rational law is of importance as the basis for interpreting actual laws, and even more so as something which stands over and above those laws, the line of separation between philosophy and jurisprudence was not hard and fast. But it has now entered into the common consciousness that only positive law can serve as a basis for legal decisions, and that rational law (if such there be) is of importance only as an ideal for legislation, or, as Stammler puts it, as the rightful and not necessarily the actual law. So jurisprudence has become one of the special sciences. Like physics and chemistry, e.g., its function is merely to establish the facts within a certain region, to reach general principles by induction, and to make deductive inferences from the inductively established results. The representatives of the special sciences have long ago issued to philosophers the command ‘Hands off!’ But what induces a certain boldness in the philosophers, notwithstanding this command, is the fact that the notions which are used for describing what is actual may very well be delusive. If they disclose to analytic scrutiny a contradiction, they
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