Talk:Hugo Krabbe

untitled
Hello and thanks for your article. You mention he was in the civil service. Did he do anything notable? How does that impact his later writings? His Doctorate is on the civil service so I would think some more discussion on what he did during that time is warranted. Why was he chosen to be chief commissioner at the Ministry of the Interiors? Why were his reformations to the electoral system opposed? "Die Lehre der Rechtssouveränität ... one of the most controversial works in Dutch legal science" can you source that? What is the controversy over?Czarking0 (talk) 22:39, 7 June 2022 (UTC)

buidhe comments
Citation issues: La Torre 2010, p. 18. is giving a harv error. Citations to Carl Schmitt and other contemporaries should probably be replaced by modern scholars writing about Krabbe. Unless it's specifically for attributed opinions of the author. You can probably access many recent sources using WP:TWL. Other issues: the content gaps mentioned above by Czarking have not been resolved or responded to. I would also suggest potentially splitting up sections based on contemporary responses to Krabbe and long-term influence that continues to the present day. The article is quite short so there is room to expand it with more information. (t &#183; c)  buidhe  18:40, 4 October 2022 (UTC)


 * Hello @Buidhe, thank you so much for the time you spent of Krabbe! It's also very helpful, thanks.
 * La Torre 2010 ✅
 * Actually replacing Carl Schmitt with others contemporaries might be questionable. Carl Schmitt is an exceptionally important jurist of the time as well as a very controversial author (he became the leading jurist of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1936). Schmitt's views on Krabbe are in itself relevant from the viewpoint of history of ideas and legal doctrines, and the very fact that Schmitt wrote about Krabbe makes Krabbe more notable (in fact Krabbe is a relatively minor author, incomparably less known than Carl Schmitt and Hans Kelsen). But you're right: the reader doesn't understand why Schmitt's views are mentioned here. Therefore I added a bit of text, in particular the following sentence: I hope it's an improvement!
 * The content gaps highlighted by @Czarking0 have been addressed during the peer review, here. To put it shortly, I don't have any information about Krabbe's activities as civil servant. Perhaps something could be found here and here. As I don't read Dutch, I'm now wickedly trying to force a fellow user, @Nederlandse Leeuw, to take a look at this (sorry for the ping, Nederlandse Leeuw: I meant no harm).
 * Re expanding the article, splitting it into separate sections (contemporary debates + long-term influence), etc., I'd be very happy to comply, but unfortunately there aren't many sources about Krabbe. As I said, this is quite a minor author, surely relevant in the context of 1920s debates on international law, but nowadays almost forgotten. I might be wrong, but I think that vast majority/near totality of works about Krabbe are already quoted in this article.
 * Gitz (talk) (contribs) 20:18, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
 * Hmm. I double checked and most of the sources I'm finding in English either don't have much coverage or are already cited here. (t &#183; c)  buidhe  20:32, 4 October 2022 (UTC)

Life section
I've been taking a first look at the article, and made some changes. As said in the edit summary, the Gelderland and North Holland appointments happened after his 1883 graduation. 'Academic career' is too vague. Translations of titles to English is risky, as all of these Dutch titles are defunct and have neither clear modern Dutch nor English equivalents. To be on the safe side we should leave them untranslated. (I'm not even sure if griffier is a law clerk or court clerk, but the difference between these various kinds of commies mostly seems to be in rank rather than function).
 * Much of the text appears to be based on inaccurate machine translations, and that detracts from both the text's quality and aesthetics, as some things are just said differently in English. E.g. De idee der persoonlijkheid in de staatsleer ("The idea of personality in the state doctrine") may be better rendered as "The Idea of Personhood in Public Administration Theory", as it is probably personhood that Krabbe refers to, and staatsleer is an obsolete Dutch word for nl:bestuurskunde, which links to public administration theory on English Wikipedia. I don't know whether 'state doctrine' means anything in English, but if it does, it seems quite a different issue than 'public administration theory'.
 * There are few cases (which I haven't yet marked as such) where a claim is not in the citation given, such as that minister Tak van Poortvliet should be grouped with (progressive liberals), or that the bill if approved, would have extended the right to vote to the whole adult male population. Neither Kranenburg 1937a nor Kranenburg 1937b actually says either of those things, so this seems WP:SYNTH. The reader may find these things if they click on Johannes Tak van Poortvliet, but that article is completely unsourced as well. It's important to back up your own claims and not rely on links to do the work for you, because they don't necessarily do the work for you, as this case shows.
 * Finally, I must also say that I find the Harvard citation style to be rather inconvenient, as I've switched to sfn style which makes it far easier to identify author, date, and page(s) for verification without having to look up which citation ':4' stood for again. With your permission, I'd like to convert all citations to sfn; if not, that's fine, but I will be less motivated to continue the review, as it is really annoying.
 * Those are just a few remarks for the first two paragraphs. It seems to me there is a lot still to be done, so I'll leave it hear for now, hoping this will help you make further improvements. Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 13:41, 5 October 2022 (UTC)


 * Thank you for your comments, Nederlandse Leeuw, I'm happy I succeeded in forcing you to take care of the article... I will reply to your comments asap, but to speed up the process I wanted to make it clear that I’ve nothing against changing the reference system – so please go ahead and change it as you think it’s best. Gitz (talk) (contribs) 14:09, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
 * I've converted the harvard refs as agreed, except for the 7 cases in which you used them in footnotes. Normally I would convert these to Template:efn and put a Template:Notelist at the bottom, but that may be more trouble than it's worth. The goal of making verification and correction easier has been achieved, so I'll leave it here. :) Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 15:06, 6 October 2022 (UTC)
 * Thank you very much, that's great. Gitz (talk) (contribs) 15:28, 6 October 2022 (UTC)
 * You're welcome! On interlanguage link practices, see H:FOREIGNLINK. Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 00:32, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
 * Thanks Gitz, that will make it a lot easier for me to carry out some changes myself. Incidentally, I've been reading some of De idee der persoonlijkheid in de staatsleer (1908) from this printed book that you linked to, and I must say that it is quite interesting. Krabbe claimed that at the time he spoke (in 1908), the prevailing idea was collectivism, that state policy should coincide with the supposed 'interest of the community', and that the lives of individual members should be completely subjected to contributing to their community's interest. What Krabbe is arguing for is that, instead, the primary concern of the state / public administration should be to ensure that the individual human person can flourish in life. Human personhood, that is, the rights and interests of the individual human person, should be put front and centre in society, as opposed to the supposed 'rights/interests' of 'the community', which are neither clear nor uniform. Democracy is a good principle, but it is not good enough on its own, because what the majority wants is not always necessarily what is good/healthy for the majority, let alone always good/healthy for some or all individual members of the 'community'. (It reminds me of the 'tyranny of the majority' idea of Tocqueville, although Krabbe hasn't invoked it yet). He regarded ancient Greek ideas about public administration as collectivist and bad for individuals. Although crediting Christianity with the 'realisation' that individual personhood exists, Krabbe argued that the Church distorted the idea by creating theocracy, another collectivist idea. Monarchical absolutism as well as Rousseau's social contract and popular sovereignty were, according to Krabbe, yet more iterations of political collectivism that negated individual personhood and the rights/interests of individuals. The core of what Krabbe is arguing for seems to be found on page 11:
 * "This individualism now gives rise to a view of the state that can be considered the antipode of the Greek idea of the state. No longer is the state or the community the natural bearer of intellectual/spiritual/mental (geestelijk) life, but the individual, who demands freedom to be able to develop [themselves]. Any hindrance to that freedom is in principle an evil, so that, given the recognition of the indispensability of the community, the restriction of that freedom must be reduced to the smallest possible dimensions. A certain degree of freedom is given up in order to benefit all the more from the remainder. And the principle is that the smaller the reduction which the community makes to the freedom of the individual, the greater the gain, because the smaller the percentage of freedom that must be surrendered to make the inevitable community possible, the further the intellectual/spiritual/mental (geestelijk) life of a human being can develop."
 * What I am reading seems to me to foreshadow ideas of personal human rights (not just the rights of citizens), although it may be early to speak of 'human rights' in Krabbe's 1908 speech as we have come to know them since the 1948 UDHR. If more information can be found in secondary souces about Krabbe's possible contribution to the development of human rights (based on this speech and perhaps other works), that could be quite interesting and relevant material to add to this biography. Just a recommendation. Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 15:14, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
 * PS: This quote alone demonstrates that we must be careful how to translate pre-war Dutch texts to English. The phrase geestelijk leven (compare German Geistesleben) in modern Dutch has an almost exclusively religious meaning, but that doesn't seem to be what Krabbe is talking about. It is about all parts of life that happen in the human mind, the thoughts, emotions and reasoning of people, not just their religious beliefs (if they have any). So it could be variously translated as intellectual/spiritual/mental life. intellectual seems most appropriate, as Krabbe focuses on the development of the individual human mind, and that seems to be intellectual development: an individual human person's developing understanding of how the world works and how to live in it, the protection and stimulation of which is to be the primary purpose of the state. Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 15:26, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
 * I'm happy you find Krabbe's work quite interesting. I think that your reading is entirely correct and that Krabbe's work has much to do with the emergence of human rights discourse in international law. However, the problem is always the same: sources. We need to avoid WP:OR and we must find a reliable source dealing with that aspect of his work. Unfortunately I didn't find it yet, because Krabbe is a relatively minor author, as I said. Who knows, maybe in the near future he will be rediscovered by the critics and his work will be popular and fashionable again. If that will happen, I'm sure academics will find this article quite useful: for the time being, it is the most complete and accessible presentation of his life and thought. Gitz (talk) (contribs) 15:36, 6 October 2022 (UTC)
 * on Tak van Poortvliet. We have Kranenburg 1937a: en had als zoodanig een groot aandeel in de voorbereiding van het bekende ontwerpkieswet Tak van Poortvliet (and as such he had a large share in the preparation of the well-known draft electoral law of Tak van Poortvliet) and Kranenburg 1937b: hij had in die functie een belangrijk aandeel in de voorbereiding van het bekende kieswet-ontwerp Tak van Poortvliet (In that position he played an important part in the preparation of the famous Tak van Poortvliet electoral law draft). However, we need references for the claim that Tak van Poortvliet was a progressive liberal and for the claim the bill if approved, would have extended the right to vote to the whole adult male population. I found the following ones:
 * : Mr. J.P.R. Tak van Poortvliet (1839–1904) was a progressive liberal
 * : In 1893 Tak van Poortvliet proposed allowing all persons who could read and write and who were self-supporting to be eligible to vote. That proposal, however, was too large of an expansion for moderate liberals and conservatives at that time, and so it was withdrawn
 * I'm adding these two sources and I'm also modifying the text so as to make it identical to Congleton (instead of "whole adult male population" we'll have "all persons who could read and write and who were self-supporting", although I'm quite sure that those "persons" were actually men and not women). Gitz (talk) (contribs) 20:32, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
 * Looks good. I did a little googling and found this on Parlement.com (widely held to be reliable on Dutch parliamentary history): [Tak van Poortvliet] Diende in 1892 een ontwerp-Kieswet in, waarbij een aanzienlijke uitbreiding van het mannenkiesrecht (circa 75% van alle mannen) werd voorgesteld. Vereisten voor het verkrijgen van kiesrecht waren volgens dit voorstel: het kunnen lezen en schrijven en het niet van de bedeling leven. "[Branch van Poortvliet] Submitted a draft Electoral Act in 1892, proposing a significant extension of male suffrage (approximately 75% of all men). According to this proposal, the requirements for obtaining the right to vote were: being able to read and write and not living off poor relief." So it's indeed not women (who at the time had no legal right to paid work, and until 1901 girls were not required to go to school and thus lacked access to education), nor was it all men, but about 75%. 'Self-supporting' thus means 'not living off poor relief'. Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 21:02, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
 * That's great. I would then write "male citizens" instead of "persons" and add the source you found. Thanks, Gitz (talk) (contribs) 21:06, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
 * Translation of De idee der persoonlijkheid in de staatsleer. Much of the text appears to be based on inaccurate machine translations. This I find both inaccurate and a bit harsh... I'm sorry, but this is my area of expertise, it's what I do for a living: my bread and butter. "De idee der persoonlijkheid in de staatsleer" cannot be translated as "The Idea of Personhood in Public Administration Theory". "Personality" is the standard way of referring to legal subjectivity (capability of bearing rights and duties). Many references could be provided, e.g. . "Staatsleer" is identical to the German Staatslehre and cannot be translated as Public Administration Theory (Staatslehre also dealt with constitutional law and with international law as well). "State doctrine" is quite a common and uncontroversial translation for Staatslehre in academic writings (e.g.,   ). However, if that expression sounds puzzling and weird to you, we may use an equally common and uncontroversial translation for Staatslehre: "theory of the state". So the "De idee der persoonlijkheid in de staatsleer" translates as "The idea of personality in the theory of the state". Gitz (talk) (contribs) 21:01, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
 * I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be harsh. I'll admit that despite being a native Dutch speaker, I am not a legal expert; my training is in history and so I may well be mistaken in this case. nl:staatsleer currently redirects to nl:bestuurskunde, which is therefore probably wrong. "theory of the state" sounds fine. I ran into "political theory" as another alternative, but that may not be specific enough; although 'political' derives from polis (ancient Greek city-state), 'politics' is a very broad term, and we're talking about what states are supposed to be for, so "theory of the state" is probably better. I'll also admit that, while reading Krabbe 1908, most times persoonlijkheid seemed readily translatable as 'personhood', but at other times that was not possible and 'personality' was more accurate. E.g. on page 22 and 23, where he argues every individual has a unique persoonlijkheid and thus should sometimes not be treated the same because that could be unfair. 'Personhood' would not make sense in this context, I think, so you are probably right. Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 21:16, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
 * Thank you, no harm done! "Political theory" is not accurate because Staatslehre was often meant to be a purely juridical science: the legal methods as applied to public law (e.g., Paul Laband, Carl Friedrich von Gerber, Georg Jellinek). In fact, another viable translation for Staatslehre is simply "public law": "the idea of personality in public law". However, I think that "Theory of the State" is more accurate and more common. For example, Jellinek's Allgemeine Staatslehre is usually translated as General Theory of the State. Gitz (talk) (contribs) 21:25, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
 * I'm re-reading some texts. Does personality/persoonlijkheid refer to the state of being a judicial person (Dutch: rechtspersoon)? This is what Krabbe appears to mean when writing (p. 20): 'the contraposition of government (overheid) and subject (onderdaan) has been replaced by an equalisation of both as autonomous persons (zelfstandige personen), subjects of/to [the] law (subjecten van rechten), because each possesses its own legal value, not derived from each other'. I'm sorry if this is a really basic legal question; I thought I understood the text, but now I am confused. Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 21:59, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
 * Maybe I almost got it: a legal person (rechtssubject) may be a natural/human person (natuurlijk/menselijk persoon) or a judicial/juridical person (rechtspersoon); the latter may include states/governments, companies, NGOs etc.. All legal persons have rechtspersoonlijkheid or juridische persoonlijkheid. So, a subject/citizen and a state/government are both legal persons, in that sense they are autonomous persons, equal before the law, but not the same because they are unique and have different rights and obligations. Am I getting that right? Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 22:19, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
 * It seems to me that you understand it perfectly, although the concept of juridical person (better than "judicial") is perhaps too narrow, because it applies only to corporations. A better translation of "rechtspersoon" is perhaps legal person: an entity that is recognised by the law as holder of rights and duties. That includes both natural (or physical) persons and juridical persons - that is, both individuals and corporations. So basically Krabbe is saying that the contraposition between ruled and ruler (or, to put it with Léon Duguit, between those who govern and those who are governed) is now replaced with the equalisations of all legal persons (or legal subjects) before the law. So the policeman, the MP, the President and even a corporation such as the State are no longer my "rulers": they are just legal persons like me, and like me they should operate within the confines of the law. Gitz (talk) (contribs) 22:23, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
 * You got it perfectly right! Gitz (talk) (contribs) 22:24, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
 * Thanks! Now it all makes sense. I first thought that Krabbe was arguing from the point of view of individualism (school of natural law), because in everyday parlance 'individual' and 'personal' are synonymous, but "legalese" has once again proven to be a language on its own. ;) Krabbe is in fact arguing that the concept of personality in law (specifically, theory of the state) solves the ongoing struggle between collectivism/community/state/government and individualism/individual/subject/citizen, recognising that both have their place in society, they are equal but not the same, with different rights and obligations, complementing each other rather than being superior or inferior to one another. Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 22:47, 5 October 2022 (UTC)

Main themes section

 * rechtssouvereiniteit: is rechtssouvereiniteit best translated as "sovereignty of the law"? I think "sovereignty of law" is better, without 'the'. 'The law' (Dutch: de wet) usually refers to legislation (Dutch: wetgeving), below the level of constitutional stipulations, whereas 'law' (Dutch: recht or rechten; depending on context, these can also mean "right" or "rights") refers to any legal stipulation, no matter the level. To quote Kiewiet 2018 (himself quoting Schmitt): 'His [Krabbe’s] theory of laws rests on the thesis that it not the state but law that this sovereign.[97] (...)'. Stella 2016 p. 65 says: 'The first of these (Krabbe 1906) frontally took on the question of the sovereignty of law: It was published in Dutch and immediately translated into German under the title Die Lehre der Rechtssouveränität (The theory of legal sovereignty: Krabbe 1906).' Further, the phrase 'sovereignty of law' appears 16 times in Stella 2016 (including other chapters of that book), but 'sovereignty of the law' never. (And although she herself translated Rechtssouveränität as "legal sovereignty", that phrase doesn't appear anywhere else in that book). The word 'law' in English without the article 'the' in front it it also took me quite a while to understand, and I've often incorrectly added 'the' to it myself (or always translated recht(en) as "right(s)", e.g. "I want to study rights" instead of "I want to read/study law", a common mistake Dutch people make), but now I know the difference. Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 15:07, 7 October 2022 (UTC)


 * I think you're right. English is not my mother tongue (obviously) and I'm happy to leave the final judgment to a more proficient speaker than myself, but I think you have a point there. I see that "Sovereignty of the Law" is used (very authoritatively) by William Blackstone  but it might be a bit archaic. Moreover, I see that Martti Koskenniemi translates "Kelsen’s Rechtssouveränität" as "sovereignty of the law" in this book . But I also see that "sovereignty of law" is quite common, e.g.   , so I think that both options are viable and the choice is a matter of style, which I'd leave to others. Gitz (talk) (contribs) 15:25, 7 October 2022 (UTC)


 * rechtsbewustzijn: Legal normativity is founded on "legal consciousness"[17][18][19] or "juridical conscience"[20] (rechtsbewustzijn, also translated "sense of right"[21]), which is common to all mankind. Legal consciousness is a normative feeling inherent to human psychology, which explains and justifies the binding nature of the law. This is a difficult one. Strictly speaking, bewustzijn in modern Dutch means either
 * 1) (mostly biological) 'the state being awake' or 'conscious/aware of what is currently happening outside (and inside) one's body' (as opposed to being asleep or unconscious). It has to do with how (well) the brain functions in a given moment, how well a person is able to perceive/observe things that are happening); or
 * 2) (mostly educational) 'the situation in which one has knowledge of something', 'being informed', 'knowing', 'being aware of a fact' (as opposed to ignorance, unawareness). If you say Ik ben me daarvan bewust, it means 'I am aware of that' or simply 'I know (that)'.


 * I think Krabbe meant the second, but I'm not sure. When Krabbe talks about 'a capacity for abstract thinking' (Stella 2016 p. 69), he could mean the ability of the brain to function well when observing things or thinking about things (1), or a person having knowledge of how law is supposed to work (2). It's kinda both. If we can't decide which one Krabbe meant, both are probably best translated as (legal) awareness.
 * "sense of right" is probably incorrect, unless we change it to "(having) (a) sense of what is right (and wrong)", which aligns more closely with the second meaning of 'knowing'. When compared to what I said above about 'law', an alternative could be 'sense/awareness/knowledge of law'. If we're talking about one's own subjective ideas about law, or what is right and wrong, the word 'sense' is neutral because those ideas might not be correct. If we're talking about what a person has heard or read about (prevailing) law, or (prevailing ideas about) what is right and wrong, 'awareness/knowledge' is a better word, because that describes something objective or normative.
 * "conscience" is better translated from geweten, which isn't the word Krabbe used. If Krabbe did mean it, it is about what a person knows they themselves should or shouldn't do, either because'(1) they feel it's wrong, (2) they feel/know that the community will find it wrong, or (3) they feel/know that it is (probably) illegal. The first two better translated as something like moral/ethical conscience, and (3) is probably rendered as "sense/knowledge/awareness of law", because it has little to do with one's conscience. Whichever way we look at it, "legal conscience" doesn't seem to be a thing. I have no idea what it could mean, and it's probably not what Krabbe meant.

I hope this helps illuminate some things, although I'm still uncertain if 'legal awareness' is the best way to translate it. Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 16:02, 7 October 2022 (UTC)


 * Actually the concept was not invented by Krabbe. In German, Rechtsbewußtsein was quite a common notion during the XIX century, and it played a prominent role in the work of the Swiss jurist Johann Kaspar Bluntschli. I'm quite sure that also Friedrich Carl von Savigny uses Rechtsbewußtsein somewhere. Its translation in French and Italian is well-established: conscience juridique, coscienza giuridica. If I had to chose, I'd say that the best translation in English is "legal consciousness", which I think is also the most common rendering of Bluntschli's concept (e.g., here ). I think, however, that the solution I found for this article is good: I provided all the translations in English I encountered, including the bad translations - "sense of right" and "juridical conscience" - so that if somebody bumps into these expressions and googles them, they might find out that they refer to rechtsbewustzijn/Rechtsbewußtsein/legal consciousness. Gitz (talk) (contribs) 18:03, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

De moderne staatsidee
The odds are good this is a notable book, I recommend redlinking it per WP:RED. I thought about stubbing it but I think most sources are in Dutch? Btw, here's a ref for the translation of the title to English. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 12:09, 18 March 2023 (UTC)


 * Thank you, Piotrus. I made this edit because I think that Die moderne Staatsidee translates as "The Modern Idea of the State" (which is also the title of the English translation of Krabbe's book, here) instead of "The Idea of the Modern State" or "The Modern State Idea" (as translated by Navari). I'm adding a red link to the book, as you suggest. As I worked on the article on Krabbe, the really big gap in the Encyclopedia that I noticed is that we still do not have an article on Alfred Verdross, who is far more influential and controversial than Krabbe: he was a famous internationalist, a judge of the European Court of Human Rights, but in interwar Austria he was also a conservative Catholic close to Othmar Spann and then a Nazi sympathizer. I've started working on a sandbox here. Gitz (talk) (contribs) 14:51, 18 March 2023 (UTC)
 * @Gitz6666 Nice, hope we can look fwd to another GA in few weeks or months :) Our social science coverage is full of gaps. The recent debacle that you are aware of interupted my blue-linking of Template:American Sociological Association presidents, among other things :( Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 14:59, 18 March 2023 (UTC)