Geiger, Theodor (1891–1952)

Hardly known in the English-speaking world, Theodor Geiger is, at least in Germany, Italy, and Spain, one of the classic figures of sociology of law.

He shares the experience of exile with some of the other classic writers, and thereby the look at national law “from the outside.”

Born in Munich, Geiger studied law but never went on to practice it. Instead, he started to work in the field of adult education. He was a professor of sociology at the Technical University of Braunschweig (1928–1933) until he was dismissed by the Nazi government in 1933 and emigrated to Denmark. In 1938, he again became a professor of sociology, this time at Aarhus University. When the Danish started to appease Hitler, Geiger had to flee to Sweden, which brought him in closer touch with the Uppsala School of legal theory. At the end of the war, he went back to Aarhus, where in 1947 he published Vorstudien zu einer Soziologie des Rechts (Preliminary Studies for a Sociology of Law). He was also among the founders of the International Sociological Association in 1948.

Geiger's sociological program represented a radical break with the formal sociology of the 1920s, as well as with the conservative critique of civilization. His epistemological credo was, very much in tune with the Vienna Circle, the scientific illegitimacy (Erkenntnisillegitimität) of all metaphysical propositions. Among his many publications (in German and Danish) are works on general social theory, methodology, stratification, ideology, the role of intellectuals, and particularly on the sociology of law. While his earlier work contained traces of a naive belief in modernity and progress, his later self-proclaimed “intellectual humanism” is a close relative of Karl Popper's (1902–1994) critical rationalism.

Among the central quests in Geiger's sociological work is the problem of the integration of modern societies. After shared religious beliefs and symbols have lost their power, what binds these societies together? Answers to this question are present in many parts of his work, but especially in his Vorstudien.

He called his approach to law “sociological legal realism.” At the core of his conception was a theory of social norms as media of social interdependence, which he spelled out in detail. For the sake of conceptual clarity, he used symbols and formulas freely adapted from formal logic. Law is just one special form of social order, in which the organs of a central power (the [Page 630]state) take over the task of identifying norm violations and sanctioning. He intended to follow these theoretical “preliminary studies” with historical and empirical studies (including one about class justice). After Geiger's death, Heinrich Popitz and his school (Erhard Blankenburg, Gerd Spittler, and Hubert Treiber) took up some aspects of Geiger's approach to law.