ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the principles of the body according to German legal historian Otto von Gierke, the historiography of the concept, and its impact upon social thought in late medieval Europe and, specifically, in English social thought. The argument advanced here is that the organic theory enjoyed wide currency into the mid-sixteenth century in England. It was an idea that straddles the conventional chronological divisions of medieval and modern, or medieval and Renaissance. Von Gierke was the first to identify what he termed the body social. Von Gierke's analysis of the body social appeared in a four-volume study of German community law, which was published between 1868 and 1913. From the concept of what he also called the social organism, he deduced a number of mid-range principles of social and political organization. Von Gierke's oeuvre was a positive, if idealized, statement of the possibility of incorporating individual needs within a corporatist social framework.
