ABSTRACT
This chapter is dedicated to comparing the diametrically opposing understandings of the origins of law by two reputed 19th-century scholars, Rudolph von Jhering, the author of the celebrated Der Geist des römischen Rechts, and Baldo (Valtazar) Bogišić, historian of Slavic law, polymath and creator of the General Property Code for the Principality of Montenegro (1888), by focusing on the interrelation of force and violence (vis) with the law (ius). It is established that their differences stem from the opposing concepts of natura. For Bogišić, in his early years also Jhering’s student in Giessen, natura is a source of the law which is every time, everywhere and by everyone obeyed (quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus observatur). This view, firmly rooted in the classical ancient culture and Christian tradition, is diametrically opposed to Hobbes’ conception of the natural human state (status naturalis) as bellum omnium in omnes and Jhering’s construction of the “law of the stronger” (Recht des Stärkeren/Faustrecht) as the primordial natural law. Was Bogišić, therefore, some kind of anti-Jhering?
