Geist (Spirit): History of the Concept

Eric R Lybeck, Girton College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Abstract
In the century before the Classical period of social science, a number of modes of scholarship made use of the concept of
Geist translated in English as Spirit or Mind. The concept was relational, and connected the universal and particular in an
organic unity. This article traces the history of the concept from its origins in Christian theology to Montesquieus Spirit of the
Laws. Later applications in German philosophy included Herders nationalism and Hegels dialectical idealism. The concept
had direct inuence on the historical legal sciences until falling into disrepute as a result of application in spiritualism and
Nazi ideology.

Introduction
Early in his classic essay, Max Weber asked the readers
forgiveness for using the somewhat pretentious sounding
expression Spirit of Capitalism (Weber, 2002: p. 8). He then
explained that his object of study could not be dened, but
only illustrated. To that end, he referenced Benjamin Franklins
words embodying this ethically slanted maxim for the
conduct of life (Weber, 2002: p. 11). No one doubts the
inuence of Webers Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalisms
inuence on the social sciences. Yet, few today recognize that
Webers use of the term spirit, or Geist in the original German
was not of his own invention. Rather, within the legal sciences
in which Weber was trained, the term was a technical concept
characteristic of his Age. To grasp this usage, we must reconstruct the context in which the concept was situated.
Unfortunately, though widely used throughout the nineteenth century, Geist did not have a clear-cut conceptual denition, translatable across different disciplines or authors
employing the term. The word reects a disparate set of meanings sometimes referring to a specic object of study in
cultural studies, and sometime to the totality of the cosmos. The
complex denitional constellation in the German language,
where the term was employed most regularly, is reected in the
difculty of translating Geist into English. The three most
widely used translations are Spirit, Mind, or Ghost. The last is
etymologically closest, reecting the Germanic origins of
English. However, in academic texts, Spirit and Mind are more
frequently employed. In other instances, as in, Zeitgeist
literally, the spirit of the age the term is left as is.
This summary conceptual history will not provide a rm
denition, but rather traces the historical development of
a wide set of usages that the term has engendered during the
modern period. Just as Weber could not dene the particular
spirit of capitalism, but only describe it, so too will this history
of the conceptual usage of Geist provide illustration of the
meaning for those who used it.

Origins of the Term

Theology: The Holy Ghost
Over the course of the modern era, particularly since the
eighteenth century, the concept of spirit took on secular
connotations. But these origins were pregured by the use of

666

the term in Theology. The notion of the Holy Spirit had

substantive import within Christian religious conceptions of
the relationship between God and humanity. A comprehensive
history of theological interpretations of the Holy Spirit exceeds
present purposes, but we might begin by noting the change that
occurred during the Protestant Reformation. Traditional church
doctrine had established that the Holy Spirit was the mediating
force between humans and God. However, Protestantism
grounded this relationship within the individual, rather than in
the institution of the church and its hierarchy. In John Wesleys
Methodism, for example, the Spirit reected holiness and
love, which was embodied in the individual before he or she
noticed it. By recognizing this Spirit in themselves not
through scholarly exegesis, but through faith, love, and deeds
the faithful converted their lives into one in accord with Gods
will. The separation between God and Man was mediated by
the Spirit, so the elected came to see herself as enacting the will
of God through her worldly action.
This brief illustration of the meaning of Spirit in Christian
theology highlights several aspects retained in the secularized
concept. First, Spirit is relational. Though there are two realms
of experience human and divine the Holy Spirit mediates
between the two. Second, Spirit is particularistic, while
remaining universal. No contradiction between part and
whole adheres precisely because the individual and God are
mutually related through Spirit. Finally, the Christian
encounters the Holy Ghost through nonrational experience
irreducible to logical form or cognitive effort. Spirit is felt, not
thought.

Montesquieus The Spirit of the Laws

Though some aspects of the theological notions of spirit were
retained, the term was secularized and grounded further within
the mundane, human realm during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The most inuential source of this development was certainly Baron de Montesquieus De lesprit des lois
(The Spirit of the Laws) (1989). As Raymond Aron (1998) noted,
Montesquieu can be considered the father of modern social
science insofar as his aim was to analyze and to comprehend
the social as such, both as element and as entity (Aron, 1998:
p. 10). The Spirit of the Laws reected a revolution in legal
writing, providing the lay reader access to the logic of given
modalities of law, while adding a novel demonstration of laws
fundamentally relational character. Various environmental

International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 9

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.03120-2

Geist (Spirit): History of the Concept

particularities, including climate, size, population, wealth,

trade, manners, and custom, were essential conditioning
factors in the function of different laws. These related environments particularized the function of law within given
territories and societies. On one hand, the spirit of the law
refers to the sum totality of all the relations of law to other
elements. On the other hand, the general spirit, moral, and
customs of a Nation represents one essential element itself
(Montesquieu, 1989: bk. XIX). This general spirit prepares
peoples minds to receive the best laws, thereby delimiting the
possibility of wholesale overhaul of the law. To change the law,
one must rst address the spirit in which the laws are to be
situated.
As a foundational Enlightenment text, The Spirit of the Laws
contributed to a trans-European conceptualization of a spirit
which lay behind and through the laws and practices of given
societies. The spirit was no longer that of God, but a quality and
product of the people themselves. Though, of course, inuential in his native France, Montesquieus inuence was felt most
rmly in England, as in Edmund Burkes conservatism, or in Sir
Henry Maines comparative legal scholarship. Appreciating the
Frenchmans valorization of English institutions, Burke also
asserted the priority of historical tradition which limited the
possibility (or ethical validity) of wholesale political revolution
outside the peaceful evolution of the customs, practices, and
beliefs of a people. Similarly, Maines comparative
investigation of the historical shift from status-based to
contract-based societies would have been inconceivable
without Montesquieus revelation of an object, spirit, which
historically pregured emergent, positive laws.

Nation and Spirit in Romantic Germany

The history of the concept of Geist in Germany is part and
parcel of the development of idealist philosophy, and therefore
can begin with Immanuel Kants posing of the question: how is
valid knowledge possible? However, Kants program was
primarily epistemological, and it was through the rejection of
his formalistic, systemic account of knowledge that future
idealist philosophers developed their various notions of Spirit.
These early criticisms of Kantian epistemology moved, generally, from the level of cognition toward that of experience.
Relinquishing the primacy of the transcendental subject
encouraged substantive inclusion of history, which was traceable to the spirit of the time or people. Furthermore, the
dualisms and formalism of Kants schemas tended to be contrasted against the organic unity of reality and humanity. The
resulting Romantic notion of Geist, in a sense, stood as a place
holder for this relational, experiential, nonrational unity.
These Romantic counterpositions were not univocal and
developed in various directions. Again, this multiplicity is reected in the numerous connotations the term, Geist, obtains in
German thought. One line of conceptual development can be
traced within idealism itself, leading from Kant to Fichte to
Schelling to Hegel. Another can be read in parallel, which
includes the hermeneutics of Herder, whose inuence on legal
science and history was perhaps most signicant. Following the
initial ourishing of idealism in Germany, however, intellectual trends, including materialism, positivism, empiricism,

667

utilitarianism, and Darwinism, led the term into temporary

disrepute until Wilhelm Dilthey recovered the science of spirit
Geisteswissenschaft in the late nineteenth century. It is important to recall the overlapping discursive contexts of the terms
usage.

To Hegel
Since the dense history of philosophical idealism cannot be
condensed easily, a summary of the line from Fichte to Schelling to Hegel can serve as a point of arrival at the high watermark for the role of Geist in German thought.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte was the rst to take the inaccessible
thing-in-itself from Kants noumenal realm to human
consciousness itself, asserting the knowing subject becomes
truly and authentically Geist in the course of wilful activity.
Rather than subjective consciousness contrasted against an
objective real, Fichte recognized the intersubjectivity of selfconsciousness accessible through human action.
Friedrich Schelling further extended Kants observation that
the world must be organized in a way that allowed
consciousness access to reality to develop a natural philosophy
in which the ideal springs from the real. The world becomes
one of the ineffable experience and feeling. In contrast to the
scientic knowledge given primacy by Kant and the Enlightenment, the Romantic world of Nature becomes the ultimate
site of truth.
Hegels philosophical system represents the synthesis of the
three positions of Kant, Fichte, and Schelling. In The Phenomenology of Spirit, he criticized Kants formal system as a synoptic
index like a skeleton with tickets stuck all over it which
loses connection to living reality (Hegel, 1967: p. 110).
Schellings Romantic alternative vision of an Absolute world of
sensation and feeling proves no solution as Kants bright
noonday light becomes a night in which all cows are black
(Hegel, 1967: p. 79). Mediating between the two extremes,
Hegel extended Fichtes emphasis on self-consciousness by
positioning the emergence of reexivity within a historical
trajectory of the Absolute Idea. Over time, the Absolute has
developed the means through which it can nally become
conscious of itself.
Hegels synthesis extends Schellings Idea as objectively
encountered in Nature. And yet, reality is always being realized
through an objective process moving teleologically toward
higher levels of self-knowledge. Idealist philosophy has
provided the basis upon which Spirit now recognizes itself as
the grandest conception of all, and one which is due to
modern times and its religion. Spirit is alone Reality. It is the
inner being of the world (Hegel, 1967: p. 86).
Hegel introduced his conception of Geist in The Phenomenology of Spirit completed in 1806 at the very moment French
Revolutionary forces entered his home town of Jena. Indeed,
Hegel described Napoleon Bonaparte as the World-Spirit
(Weltgeist) on horseback. As the embodiment of the concrete
universal, Napoleon, like other great men of history, realized
objectively the unfolding Absolute. This social philosophy of
history is revisited within the Philosophy of Right written in 1821.
The State is objectied spirit for Hegel, which is achieved to the
extent social freedom is actualized in law. Coercive prohibitions allow individuals to go about their business without

668

Geist (Spirit): History of the Concept

interference, while the law reects the morals and will of the
people. The citizen confronts the State as an ordered, objectied Idea, which is rational, not in a formal logical sense, but
rather as dialectic moving through the spiral of historical
trajectories and higher planes of integration.
Hegels political theory obtained an immense inuence
within the Prussian state during the Vormrz (pre-1848) period.
His conception of the State as the objective embodiment of the
World-Spirit provided conservative justication for the statusquo and the ultimate authority of civil servants, like himself
as professor of philosophy at the University of Berlin.

To the German Historical School

Hegels philosophical system certainly provided the most
prominent use of the term, Geist. Yet, other related scholars and
discourses developed the term in directions that limited the
concept in such a way as to ground the object in society,
language, and culture, thereby encouraging the treatment of
spirit through social science. Indeed, scholarly attention to
spirit can be seen to be the very source of the emergence and
proliferation of social science in German academia, beginning
especially within the historical legal sciences of Friedrich Carl
von Savigny and Jacob Grimm.
Before encountering the German Historical Schools recognizably social scientic, empirical, and historical treatment of
societies, we must step back to revisit the hermeneutic inspiration provided especially by Johann Gottfried Herders
concept of Volksgeist. Indeed, Herder should be read as the
most important theorist of Spirit since even Hegels broader
conception was, in part, inspired by the earlier theologian. In
1769, Herder coined the term Zeitgeist, dened as the general
cultural, intellectual, ethical, spiritual, and political climate of
a given era. This reected Herders essential role as midwife of
history, which thoroughly penetrated German consciousness in
years to come. And, just as Zeitgeist cast, the general spirit in
diachronic time, the term, Volksgeist, dened as national
culture, grounded the overall climate of particular cultures and
peoples in territorial space.
Later commentators have seen Herder as a source of racial
thinking insofar as particular groups national character and
history are determined by their nature and heredity. There is
certainly merit in this interpretation, especially in light of later
inspiration drawn by National Socialists and other racist
ideologies. However, Herders conception of the Volk was
a suprabiological category. Spirit was grounded, not in blood
or physical attributes but in culture and language; a unique
manifestation of groups and societies reected in dress, food,
customs, domestic economy, arts, and amusements (Herder,
1803: p. 8). Thus, Herder was among the rst proponents of
cultural studies and anthropology.
The Volksgeist is natural in that it engenders a real and
constraining force upon the development and character of
nations and their citizens connecting all classes and subgroups
into one community. Herder provided an original theory of
nationalism from which later modern forms derived
a vision of a unied German spirit nearly a century before
a united German empire came into legal existence in 1871.
Herders philosophy of history moved in the direction of
social science when Friedrich Carl von Savigny produced an

inuential pamphlet titled Vom Beruf unserer Zeit fr Gesetzgebung und Rechtswissenschaft (On the Vocation of our Age for
Legislation) (Savigny, 2002) during the course of a debate over
legal codication with the jurist Anton Friedrich Thibaut in
1814. The document would become the foundation of the
German Historical School of Law. Savigny suggested that the
law was derived from the Volksgeist (spirit) of the population;
the result of custom, language, and the particularities of the
nation from which the law emerged. At the same time, an
internal, organic drive compelled the evolution of law
according to silently operating powers (Reimann, 1989). In
contrast to the formalism and positivism of Thibauds projected codication project, Savigny insisted that too little was
known of the actual cultural spirit of the German people.
Without precluding the possibility of codication in the future,
the task of a realistic historical jurisprudence managed by
trained legal scientists was a necessary precondition for
successful legislation.
Savigny separated the study of legal science into two
modes the systematic and the historical. With reference to the
Roman Institutiones collated during the sixth century CE reign
of Justinian I, Savigny argued for the systematic treatment of
the abstract relations between laws and civilization. However,
equally essential was historical analysis of the particularities of
the Geist at different times and places. The historical school
Savigny inaugurated became consolidated around the Zeitschrift fr geschichtliche Rechtswissenschaft founded in 1815 with
Karl Eichhorn and Johann Gschen. Though Savigny, like
Hegel, was criticized in 1848 as a spokesman of the conservative forces of the Vormrz period, the Zeitschrift had been one of
the primary vehicles for political criticism during a period of
radical censorship in German lands as a result of Metternichs
Carlsbad Decrees. Embedded within the arcana of Roman
historical detail were indirect claims for ideal constitutional
reform. Though presented as the objective description of
historical fact, legal science was a Trojan horse for political
science and normative political theory. Romanist scholars, like
Savigny and Berthold Niebuhr, focused on the ideal freedom
obtained in the early Roman Republic, contrasted against the
conict and chaos of the later Empire. In so many words, liberal
Republicanism for Germany was projected on and through
historical Roman images. All the while, the conservative
inuences of Montesquieu, Burke, Herder, and Hegel came
through insofar as no revolution was projected; rather, careful
thoughtful evolutionary reform according to tradition and
national spirit.
A second wing of the legal science movement dedicated
attention to scholarship into existing German culture itself.
Through the work of Eichhorn and especially Jacob Grimm,
who collected the folktales and customs of German villagers
with his brother, an image of the German Geist was obtained
and interpreted by the Germanists. Images of the Gemeinwesen,
or, civil community, were constructed out of the etymological
and philological interpretation of symbols in faerie tales.
For example, Grimm traced the legal concept of Lsegeld
(compensation in tort claims) to the archaic form of the word
Otter, thereby connecting to a story of a hunter who infringes
upon the property rights of farmer whose son had transformed
into an otter (Crosby, 2008: p. 112). Similarly, the familiar
Cinderella story of the glass slipper should be understood in

Geist (Spirit): History of the Concept

terms of the custom of the groom tting a shoe on his virgin
bride as a symbol of property ownership exhibited before
the community. Grimm and his liberal legal scientic
colleagues sought enshrinement of these traditional customs in
the rapidly developing German legal apparatus, which they
often perceived as aristocratic, elitist, and overly rationalist, in
contrast to the organic unity of the common German
national spirit.
The intellectual debates between the Germanist and
Romanist wings of legal scholars encouraged, on one hand,
considerable investment in historical scholarship especially
in Classical texts. On the other hand, the application of
linguistic study to their own cultures and peoples secured
description of the object Geist in the present, and was the rst
iteration of anthropology, sociology, and ethnology as recognizable within modern disciplines.

The Decline of Geist and the Rise of Geisteswissenschaft

In large part due to the arrogance and totalization of Hegel and
his followers, several anti-idealist reactions set in within German
philosophical thought after 1830. Empiricism, positivism, and
materialism for example, in Ernst Haeckels Darwinian
evolutionism replaced the metaphysics of Geist with that of
concrete reality veriable through scientic procedures. Politically, the Left Hegelians, including Marx and Engels, demanded
the ipping of idealism upon its head, so that culture became
interpreted as the product of economic and material interests
rooted in class conict. Similarly, in legal science, rejection of the
perceived conservatism of Savigny and his followers contributed
to a returned interest in codication and positive theories of law
as outlined by Rudolf Ihering. This utilitarian analysis of law and
the product of will and conict led directly to the next phase of
legal science and political economy, in which Ferdinand
Tnnies, Max Weber, and Werner Sombart were inculcated.
Prominently, the German historical school of economics
surrounding Gustav Schmoller, Lujo Brentano, and others
rejected the abstraction of both the classical English political
economy Manchesterismus and Hegelian idealism. Focusing
instead on empirical material, especially statistics and monographic surveys of urban conditions, the German historical
school further extended the trend toward objective study of
contemporary society. At the same time, historical interest in
Prussian bureaucracy resulted in the Acta Borussica in 1887
a team research project led by Schmoller and Otto Hinze.
Thus, both the historicist particularism of the jurisprudential
tradition were maintained, while the efforts away from grand,
abstract theorizing brought researchers closer to the ground,
where they could address issues of social reform according to
local circumstances.
This was a period of frequent visitation from American
scholars, who would become the founders of many of the early
social science departments in America, including John W.
Burgess, Albion Small, Edward Ross, and others. The inuence
of both historical legal studies and historical economics cannot
be underestimated. The German scholars principles of empiricism and social reform found their way into historical institutionalist economics, sociology, and political science.
Meanwhile, within Germany, Wilhelm Dilthey struggled to
rehabilitate and revise the science of Mind, which he called

669

Geisteswissenschaft (Ermath, 1978). Unlike Hegel, Dilthey did

not posit an Absolute teleological entity operating through the
totality of the cosmos. Rather, Diltheys historicism recognized
that the concepts that actors, communities, and discourses use
are constantly shifting and evolving, so the context in which
action takes place is constantly changing and becoming
something new. Like Fichte, Dilthey emphasized the role of
self-consciousness in this process. Indeed, the human sciences
must be distinguished from the natural sciences precisely
because conscious reection is built into human experience, so
that our confrontation with human life is not a confrontation
with passive external objects as in natural science. An adequate
philosophy of knowledge would engage with the history of
knowledge itself. Thus, the primary science should be that of
Mind hence, the priority of Geisteswissenschaft, or humanities, as the basis for a science of science.
Diltheys conception of psychology differed from the
materialist and empiricist variants developing concurrently
through the experimental work of Gustav Fechner, Hermann
von Helmholz, and Wilhelm Wundt. In this sense, his work
stands in closer relation to Friedrich Schleiermachers social
psychology, as well as the Lebensphilosophie (life philosophy) of
Henri Bergson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, and,
later, Martin Heidegger. Dilthey insisted that the object of
human scientic study is life the processual energy owing
through the concrete course of conscious experience. Though
constantly changing, life contains relatively stable coherence
and structure which can be analyzed and studied scientically.

Spirits Tail: The Lost Legacy of the Concept of Geist

Despite Diltheys best efforts and initial success in carving
a space for Geisteswissenschaft, developments in Germany and
elsewhere during the course of the twentieth century led to
changes in the human sciences that relegated the concept of
Geist to the dustbin of history. Most signicant in this decline
was the political use of the term Volksgeist during the Nazi era.
Drawing on Herders nationalism, Adolf Hitler developed the
ideology of the Third Reich according to a racist image of the
Aryan race and the German Volk. Ever since, the idea of positively studying an objective national spirit has become suspect
within the social sciences.
Well before this nail in the cofn, however, the term was
losing its salience, even as the approach engendered by its
use was leaving nal imprints on the emerging disciplines of
sociology, legal realism, psychology, anthropology, and
philosophy. During the late nineteenth century, popular
mystical movements associated with spiritualism grew in
prominence within English-speaking countries especially.
Spiritualist groups sought access to transcendental realms via
Mediums, tarot, astrology, and other practices since deemed
pseudoscientic (Brandon, 1983). Broadly linking with
novel European interest in Eastern religions, scientic
advances in electromagnetism and totalizing metaphysical
philosophies including Theosophy, Anthroposophy, and
Occultism, these discourses were typically rejected by
academia. This exclusion reected not only nonconformity
with prevailing scientic methods, but also the overrepresentation of women in these circles (Braude, 2001).
Still members of spiritualist societies overlapped with

670

Geist (Spirit): History of the Concept

public sociological, nationalist, and political movements,

including the social reconstruction efforts of Patrick Geddes
in Scotland, womens suffrage movements, and, indeed,
Comtes Positivist religion of humanity. In the long run,
these associations between spirit and spiritualism only
made matters worse, as pre-World War II social philosophies
of this kind were lumped together in a general outdated and
dangerous irrationalism quite out of fashion in the
postwar positivist mainstream.
Nonetheless, many social scientic disciplines had already
been marked by the ideas and agendas of prior scholars
interest in Geist. Franz Boas four-eld anthropology, for
example, is widely recognized as a foundational paradigm for
modern anthropological study. And yet, Boas nonracial, culturalist, and systematic study has been described by George
Stocking (1996) as Volksgeist as Method and Ethic. Just as
the legal scholars, historical economists, and Geisteswissenschaftlicher, in Germany distinguished the historical,
positive, and empirical from the cultural, meaningful, and
abstract so, too, did Boas separation of cultural anthropology
from bioanthropology, archaeology, and linguistics reect the
organic unity of differentiated analytic spheres.
Similarly, the legal realism of Oliver Wendell Holmes, and,
indeed, pragmatist philosophy more broadly would have
appeared out of an historical vacuum without reference to
Hegelian idealist inuences (Menand, 2002). To this day, the
social sciences struggle to connect the logical contradictions
between the dualisms of individual/society, structure/agency,
and so forth. In so doing, we follow the contours of problems
that earlier scholars of Geist often found noncontradictory
precisely because the mediating, relational concept of spirit
provided the organic connection between universal and
particular. Contemporary terms e.g., habitus, network relations, reexivity, etc. provide substitutes with greater technical precision, but, perhaps, less ethical force; and, certainly
with less of the spirit of the previous Age at the roots of our
disciplinary history.

The Spirit of Capitalism in the German Geist

We can thus return to the discussion of Webers classic study of
the spirit of capitalism. Some scholars have rightly drawn
attention to Webers training in the historical jurisprudential
tradition of Wolfgang Mommsen, and the homology between
his categorical scheme and that of Rudolph Ihering (Turner and
Factor, 1994). Others have noted the inuence of the younger
German historical school of Schmoller et al. (Shionoya, 2006).
Certainly, Weber was extending these traditions into new
territory, and in so doing, he helped differentiate sociology
from these older traditions.
In its most specic context, Webers work was an extension
of Werner Sombarts own description of capitalism as an
objectied Geist embodied in new forms of organizations and
technology. Sombarts cultural source for this spirit of acquisitiveness, competition, and rationality came from the bourgeois mentality emerging from the Renaissance. Webers
contribution repositioned the same spirit, within the paradoxical source of ascetic Protestant sects. Without diminishing
Webers achievement, he was not necessarily the father of all
that he is given credit for in contemporary social science. The

notion of objected Spirit, the notion of Weltanschauung, and

the Verstehen approach were recognizable in Diltheys Geisteswissenschaft program, and Webers ideal-typical approach
was only a few generational iterations removed from the early
post-Kantian idealists, Hegal and Herder.
In recalling the admittedly archaic terminology in his
foundational essay, Weber recovered the utility of addressing
an object which was familiar to contemporary German
scholars. Though positive usage had lapsed by 1905, the term
Geist nonetheless retained a technical terminological thrust
even in his own time. Though this object has since been
equated with culture, or religion, or rationalization depending
on ones interpretation of the Protestant Ethic thesis, we are
wise to position Webers innovative analysis within the ideational context in which it historically emerged. Indeed, in so
doing, we recover the original historicist spirit of these scholars
foundational contributions to the human sciences.

See also: Anthropology, History of; Community and Society:

History of the Concepts; Cultural Sociology, History of;
Enlightenment: Impact on the Social Sciences; National
Character, History of; Political Theory, History of; Sociology,
History of.

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Twentieth Centuries. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London.
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Crosby, M.B., 2008. The Making of a German Constitution: A Slow Revolution. Berg,
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Shionoya, Y., 2006. The Soul of the German Historical School: Methodological Essays
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Stocking, G.W., 1996. Volksgeist as Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasian Ethnography
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Turner, S.P., Factor, R.A., 1994. Max Weber: The Lawyer as Social Thinker. Taylor &
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Relevant Websites
www.academia.edu/428817/BASIC_CONCEPT_OF_SAVIGNYS_VOLKSGEIST Basic
concept of Savignys Volksgeist.
www.counter-currents.com/2011/05/herders-theory-of-the-volksgeist Herders
Theory of the Volksgeist
www.counter-currents.com/2011/05/savigny-the-volksgeist-and-law Savigny: The
Volksgeist & Law.