Heinrich Rommen

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Heinrich Rommen

Heinrich Albert Rommen (21 February 1897 – 19 February 1967) was a German jurist and social theorist who was involved in the rediscovery of Francisco Suárez, S.J. and the second Spanish scholasticism.

Biography

Heinrich Rommen was born in Cologne. He studied philosophy, theology and economics in Munich and Münster up to his doctorate in 1925, then studied law in Bonn up to his juris doctorate in 1927. From 1929, he worked as a consultant for the People's Association for Catholic Germany at the office in Mönchengladbach and held courses at the Franz-Hitze-Haus in Paderborn, which was closed in 1933.

The Gestapo arrested him for his anti-NSDAP writings and his membership in the Königswinter Circle, where he discussed social issues with Theodor Brauer, Götz Briefs, Gustav Gundlach, Paul Jostock, Franz H. Müller and Oswald von Nell-Breuning. Released after six weeks, he worked as a legal advisor to a business firm until 1938, when he emigrated to the United States after mediation by a Catholic refugee committee.[1] There he taught economics at St. Joseph's College, West Hartford (Connecticut) from 1938 to 1946 and political science at the University of St. Thomas (Minnesota) from 1946 to 1953, and taught at the University of Georgetown from 1953 to 1967. He held honorary doctorates from Boston University, the University of Granada, and the University of Nijmegen.

Central to Rommen's thought are the works Die ewige Wiederkehr des Naturrechts (1936) and Der Staat in der katholischen Gedankenwelt (1935). Rommen attributed the downfall of the Weimar Republic to the prevailing legal positivism of the time: "The modern total state and the ideologies that justify it ultimately mean the reductio ad absurdum of the axiom: voluntas facit legem.... It should also make one wonder that the National Socialist revolution was 'legal' in the sense of positivism." Translations into many languages made the work widely known. An English version appeared in the U.S. in 1948. From it, many philosophers of law began to rethink the foundations of the state: Leo Strauss in Natural Right and History (1950); Yves R. Simon in Philosophy of Democratic Government, Jacques Maritain in Man and the State, Hannah Arendt in Elements and Origins of Total Rule (all 1951) and Eric Voegelin in New Science of Politics (1952)

Heinrich Rommen died in Arlington, Washington.

Works

  • Die Staatslehre des Franz Suarez S.J. (1926)
  • Der Staat in der katholischen Gedankenwelt (1935)
  • Die ewige Wiederkehr des Naturrechts (1936)

Translated into English

Notes

  1. "Rommen, Heinrich." In: Werner Röder and Herbert A. Strauss, eds., International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés 1933-1945. 2. München: Saur (1983), p. 978.
  2. Reprinted several times, more recently in 2016, with an introduction by Bruce P. Frohnen.
  3. McAuley lectures for 1959.

External links