Ganze Rechtswissenschaft ist Rechtsgeschichte. Savigny and the Historical Method as Revolution

The article examines the relationship between history, method and revolution in Savigny's conception of legal science, arguing that the Historical School's programme, despite its explicit anti-revolutionary stance, operated as a genuine scientific revolution. Drawing on Savigny's 1806 review of Hugo's Lehrbuch der Geschichte des Römischen Rechts and on the successive drafts of his Vorlesungen über juristische Methodologie, the article traces the emergence of a methodological project that fused historical treatment of sources with systematic legal construction. The claim that "all legal science is nothing but legal history" is read not merely as a theoretical assertion but as the foundation of a practical enterprise that required new scholarly networks, collective research practices and epistolary communication systems. Savigny's political conservatism, the article suggests, was not incompatible with intellectual transformation: by channelling the disruptive energy of the past into the construction of a new scientific order, he carried out his own revolution without cutting off the king's head.