Renner, Karl (1870–1950)

An early Austro-Marxian contributor to sociolegal thought, Karl Renner alternated for most of his long life between the analytical distance of a scholar and the political commitment of a social-democratic politician. Central to Renner's work was the problem of the relationship between law and social transformation. While scholars today have forgotten many of his publications, Renner's and Otto Bauer's (1881–1938) ideas about the legal protection of cultural minorities are only now beginning to find acceptance and practical application.

Born in Unter-Tannowitz (Moravia), Renner came from an impoverished peasant family. While studying law at Vienna University in 1896, he worked as state librarian. His first publications on socioeconomic questions had to appear under a pseudonym because of his civil service status. He was a member of parliament for the Social Democratic Party from 1907 until 1933 and, from 1919 to 1920, head (Staatskanzler)of the Austrian government. In 1938, Renner caused controversy by coming out publicly for Austria's connection (Anschluss) to Germany. After World War II, voters elected Renner president of the Second Austrian Republic.

Besides his political activities, Renner continued writing and publishing in the fields of law, sociology, and politics. His best-known sociolegal work, Die Rechtsinstitute des Privatrechts und ihre soziale Funktion: Ein Beitrag zur Kritik des bürgerlichen Rechts (The Institutions of Private Law and Their Social Functions: A Contribution to Critique of the Civil Law), was originally published in 1904 under the pseudonym Josef Karner. Here Renner dealt with how legal institutions like property, contract, or inheritance, formally unchanged over long periods, can take on profoundly different social functions. His functionalist-Marxist answer to that question was that “the development of the law gradually works out what is socially reasonable” (Renner, in Aubert 1969: 44).

In articles dating from 1897, later joined by Bauer in 1907, Renner also concerned himself with designing a constitutional framework to allow the different national groups within a rebuilt Austro-Hungarian state to live together in harmony. A state of nationalities (Nationalitätenstaat) should replace the nationstate. Renner and Bauer conceived of the nation as a cultural community, with legal status, based not on territorial autonomy but on personal autonomy. The different nations within a state would have complete self-determination as to their own culture and codetermination in public (state) affairs. The plan was to try the system in the Austro-Hungarian republic after the Great War, but they also saw it as a possible model for a future world order.

Because of the collapse and ensuing disintegration of the multinational Hapsburg monarchy, these efforts did not have any practical consequence, even though the League of Nations briefly took up the proposals in its dealings with minority problems after the war. Several decades later, some of Renner's ideas have resurfaced and become the blueprint for minority laws and especially language laws in parts of central Europe.