Karl Ludwig von Haller

• Region — Western philosophy • Era — 19th-century philosophy • Name — Karl Ludwig von Haller • Born — 1 August 1768 • Birthplace — Bern, Bern, Old Swiss Confederacy • Died — 1 August 1768 • Place of death — Solothurn, Solothurn, Switzerland • School Tradition — Conservatism • Notable Ideas — Patrimonialism, private law theory of the state, critique of Roman law

Von Haller was a son of Bern statesman and historian Gottlieb Emanuel von Haller, and grandson of poet and polymath Albrecht von Haller. His lineage descended from Johannes Haller (1487-1531), a Reformed preacher who died alongside Huldrych Zwingli in the Second War of Kappel. He did not, however, receive an extensive education, but only some private lessons and a few classes at the Gymnasium. As a child Haller studied at a Greek school under Philipp Albert Stapfer, the latter going on to serve as an official in the Helvetic Republic. At the age of sixteen he entered the chancery of the Republic of Bern as a volunteer. The family moved to Nyon due to his father's promotion as a Landvogt (bailiff). He studied by himself and so filled out the gaps in his education. Following the death of his father in 1786, he became the de facto guardian of his estate. He is elected substitute chancellor the next year, and begins attending the lectures of Swiss theologian Johann Samuel Ith. At the age of nineteen, he was appointed to the important office of Kommissionsschreiber, or clerk of a public commission. In this capacity, he obtained an insight into methods of government, practical politics, and criminal procedure. As secretary of the Swiss diet held in Baden and Frauenfeld, he became familiar with the conditions of things in the Swiss Confederation. In 1789 he began investing in a French annuity plan, which he resold two years later due to his ethical opposition to the French government's confiscation of church estates as biens nationaux. Around this time, he read the works of Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, and found himself drawn to constitutional liberalism.

A journey to Paris in 1790 provided him further acquaintance with new revolutionary ideas, and he was present at the Fête de la Fédération. The same year, he was elected to Bern's Kornkammer, responsible for managing the city's granaries. In 1792, he became a member of the Bernese Economic Society, and publishes his first written work, a report arguing against the export ban on butter. As secretary of legation he served several important embassies, for instance, one to Geneva in 1792, about the Swiss troops stationed there; to Ulm in 1795, regarding the import of grain from southern Germany; to Lugano, Milan, and Paris in 1797, regarding the neutral attitude of Switzerland towards the warring powers. These journeys acquainted him with some of the leading personalities of the day, including Napoleon and Talleyrand. When the Old Swiss Confederacy was threatened he was dispatched to Rastatt to allay the storm. It was too late, however, and by the time he returned in February 1798 the French army was already on Bernese territory. He tried to conciliate the authorities by penning a constitutional proposal, Projekt einer Constitution für die schweizerische Republik Bern, and attempted one last mediation with Gen. Guillaume Brune on March 1, 1798, but was unable to stay the dissolution of the Old Swiss Confederacy. Bern would fall definitively four days later at the Battle of Grauholz. Von Haller soon renounced any liberal principles entirely, and became an uncompromising opponent of the Revolution. Thereupon he resigned the government office he had held under the revolutionary authorities and established a paper, the Helvetische Annalen, running for 64 issues from April to November 1798, in which he attacked the excesses and legislative schemes of the Helvetic Republic with such bitter sarcasm that the sheet was suppressed, and he himself had to flee to escape imprisonment. The specific article that led to his being proscribed was Beiträge zum einem revolutionären Gesetzbuch (Contributions to a revolutionary code of law), a political satire. Featuring lines such as “To slander or overturn any authority means patriotism, and to the patriots one should be loyal, but an ‘oligarch,’ or a citizen from a former capital, or an honest magistrate who has done his duty, is not a man, but a wild animal with which one can do what he wants,” the work did not impress the Helvetic authorities. Henceforth, von Haller was a reactionary and a divisive figure. The Swiss physiognomist Johann Kaspar Lavater was his most vocal defender in Switzerland during this time, and Haller would pay tribute to him in an essay after Lavater's death.

After many wanderings, he came to Vienna, where he was court secretary of the council of war, from 1801 until 1806. Public opinion at home resulted in his being recalled by the Bernese Government in 1806, and appointed professor of constitutional law at the newly founded higher school of the academy. When the old aristocratic regime was reinstated in 1814, he became a member of the sovereign Grand Council, and soon after also of the privy council of the Bernese Republic, and he abandoned his professorship in 1817. But in 1821, when his return to Catholicism became known, he was dismissed. This change of religion caused great controversy, and the letter he wrote to his family from Paris, explaining his reasons for the step he had taken, went through about fifty editions in a short time, was translated a number of times, and called forth numerous rejoinders and apologies. In this document he made known his long-felt inclination to join the Catholic Church and his growing conviction that he must bring his political opinions in harmony with his religious views. Though he had expressed philo-Catholic sympathies for years, the immediate impetus for his conversion was a correspondence he started with Pierre Tobie Yenni, the bishop of Lausanne, in 1819. Haller was soliciting advice on the fourth volume of the Restoration of Political Science dealing with ecclesiastical states, whereupon Yenni began correcting his views on sacramental theology and other doctrinal subjects. After his conversion to Catholicism, his family soon followed him; with them he left Bern permanently and took up residence in Paris in 1822, after his initial requests to Friedrich von Gentz for settling back in Vienna were unsuccessful. In 1824 the Foreign Office invited him to assume the instruction of candidates for the diplomatic service in constitutional and international law, filling a vacancy left by Chateaubriand. After the July Revolution of 1830, he went to Solothurn and, from that time until the day of his death, was a contributor to political journals, including the Neue Preussische Zeitung and the Historisch-Politische Blätter. In 1833 he was elected to the Grand Council of Solothurn and exercised an important influence in ecclesiastical affairs which constituted the burning question of the hour, and held this post until 1837. In 1844, he was awarded the Order of St. Sylvester by Pope Gregory XVI.

In connection with his other work, Haller had propounded and defended his political opinions as early as 1808 in his ‘’Handbuch der allgemeinen Staatenkunde, des darauf begründeten allgemeinen Rechts und der allgemeinen Staatsklugheit nach den Gesetzen der Natur’’. This, considered by some his most important work, impelled Johannes von Müller to offer Haller the chair of constitutional law at the University of Göttingen. In spite of the great honour involved in this offer, he declined it. The Handbuch itself was an extended version of his inaugural lecture Über die Nothwendigkeit einer andern obersten Begründung des allgemeinen Staatsrechtes, published on November 2, 1806 and delivered shortly after his return to Bern. Two other essays would follow in 1807: the Über den wahren Sinn des Naturgesetzes: dass der Mächtigere herrsche, dealing with his doctrine of natural superiority as the basis for political authority; and Über die Domainen und Regalien, covering the jura regalia, sovereign rights of kings deriving from their ownership of the royal domains. By that point, Haller’s political doctrine had been fully formed. Haller published three essays in Friedrich Schlegel’s "Concordia," (1820-1823), and his various writings in journals and periodicals were collected in two volumes and published as Mélanges de droit public et de haute politique (1839).

The Swiss historian Béla Kapossy contextualizes Haller's thought by placing it in his Swiss background, and cites his criticism of Roman law as anticipating the field of conceptual history. Kapossy quotes Haller on the substance of his critique: The term "patrimonial state" would later make its way into the sociology of Max Weber. Haller also exerted a great influence on modern German jurisprudence and the debates over whether the constitutional form of the Holy Roman Empire could be said to constitute a modern state, as recounted by Austrian medievalist Otto Brunner in his work Land and Lordship (1939).

• Handbuch der allgemeinen Staaten-Kunde. Steiner’schen Buchhandlung, Winterthur 1808. • Politische Religion oder biblische Lehre über die Staaten. Steiner’schen Buchhandlung, Winterthur 1811. • Was sind Unterthanen-Verhältnisse?, 1814. • Restauration der Staats-Wissenschaft oder Theorie des natürlich-geselligen Zustands der Chimäre des künstlich-bürgerlichen entgegengesezt. 6 Volumes (in two editions), Winterthur 1817–1834. • Ueber die Constitution der spanischen Cortes. 1820. • Lettre de M. Charles-Louis de Haller, membre du conseil souverain de Berne, à sa famille, pour lui déclarer son retour à l'église catholique, apostolique et romaine [Letter from Mr Charles-Louis de Haller, member of the Sovereign Council of Bern, to his family, declaring his return to the Catholic, Apostolic and Roman Church.], Paris/Lyon 1821. • Freymaurerey und ihr Einfluss auf die Schweiz. Hurter, Schaffhausen 1840.

Karl Ludwig von Haller is recorded as writer, politician, economist, university teacher and jurist.