central and peripheral courts Various forms of governance, especially since the late eighteenth century, were also affected by this paradigm based on a basic configuration around a centre and a range of peripheries. The modern state, for example, as it was restructured in France during the Revolution and under Napoleon, and which served as a model to many other countries, whether they had been subjected to French rule or not, was a model of public governance where the hierarchical apex was also at the centre of the whole state edifice. The pyramidal administrative structures, which were also reflected in the pyramid-like construction of the courts’ system from the eighteenth century onwards, were adaptations in the area of public governance of an all-encompassing reform of state powers according to the paradigmof a central source of all legitimate power, expressed through the hierarchy of state institutions.5 By the nineteenth century, the notion of a country’s capital city became much more than a mere location, such as the seat of higher or even supreme constitutional authorities. It became in practice the unique source of political decisions and the administrative hub from where all communication – sometimes literally: cf. the nineteenth-century structure of many national railway systems – would flow. In spite of earlier examples – in ancient times, all roads were said to lead to Rome –, the scale and intensity of centralisationwere unparalleled when the rationalist way of thinking was transposed into public governance during the nineteenth century.6 Legal historiography, in particular in general introductions, often privileged in its “internal legal history” approach (Dogmengeschichte) on private law topics. Until recently, that was also true in the area of comparative law: for example, several taxonomies of “legal families” worldwide, considered primarily the private law of legal systems. 5 Auer, Leopold –Ogris, Werner –Ortlieb, Eva (eds.) 2007; Van Rhee, C.H. –Wijffels, Alain (eds.) 2013. 6 A distinct discussion in this context ought to be allowed for the development of complex states. In this context, it may simply be pointed out that the establishment of federal states (such as the United States of America, Switerland, Germany) from the late-eighteenth century onwards included, whatever the powers left to the component states of the union, a clearly defined central power. If nothing else, federal states at least implied a popular basis which had reached a sufficient degree of unity for legitimising a democratic polity. During the twentieth century, the transformation of unitary states to complex polities (federal states, or at least states with a measure of regional devolution), and, conversely, the creation of the European Union standing on a “federal middle ground”, see Schütze, 34
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