Hauriou, Maurice (1856–1929)

An influential French legal scholar, political scientist, and educator, Maurice Jean Claude Eugène Hauriou contributed to the development of French administrative law. He was born in the small town of Ladiville, France, near Bordeaux. He studied law at the University of Bordeaux and finished his doctoral dissertation in 1879. Graduating with honors from his professorial examination (agrégation) in 1882, he became a professor of law at the University of Toulouse the next year and was the dean of the Faculty of Law between 1906 and 1926.

Hauriou's most notable works include Précis de droit administratif contenant le droit public et le droit administrative (1892, Principles of Administrative Law) and Précis de droit constitutionnel (1923, Principles of Constitutional Law), neither of which was translated into English. His work on institutions has been a long established subject in public, constitutional, and administrative law curricula.

Hauriou proposed a theory of institutions that defined the state as an institution designed to protect civil life and liberty. He defended the “individualistic order” of private enterprise and private property and helped create legal procedures to protect citizens from [Page 695]undue administrative actions. He believed that government has legitimate power as the representative of the state. Nevertheless, the ruling power must organize the nation for action and conduct public business through making and enforcing laws as the representative authority.

According to Hauriou, an institution is an idea or enterprise, realized and enduring juridically within a given social context. This notion that the fundamental element of an institution is an idea is central to his theory. Hauriou believed that ideas existed objectively outside the subjective interpretation of individuals. Individuals did not invent ideas; rather, they discovered them. Once discovered, an idea became the idéedirectrice, or directing idea, for members of a group interested in its realization.

Beginning with a small number of individuals, supporters mobilize to advance the directing idea and the group of supporters subsequently continues to grow. Once the idea is “interiorized” by the larger social milieu, an institution is born. As the institution grows within the broader social milieu, it “incorporates” itself and becomes a lasting institution. If the social milieu does not accept an institution, it dies. This model argued that even if the institution dies, the idea that lead to its foundation lives on and might be later rediscovered and interiorized by a new group of people.

Considered the father of the Toulouse school of legal thought, Hauriou was one of the first theoreticians to apply a sociological lens to law. He analyzed the social dimensions of law and advocated a system of public law based on individualistic ideas rather than a theory of a national sovereignty. A quotation embodies his multidisciplinary consideration: “A little sociology takes you away from law, but a lot brings you back” (Hauriou 1893: 292). Hauriou's enduring legacy is his theory about the process by which a human group creates an organization and how its duration as an organization is a social phenomenon.