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Now that we have reached the end of our journey through the history of criminal law of our legal-historical period, it is worth casting our minds back to our initial statements on broadening the perspective of the history of law and the history of criminal law. Contemporary legal history should examine the development of law in our legal-historical period critically, and its questions should be based on legal theory. In order to conduct such an examination, we considered the state of the criminal law at the beginning of the legal-historical period, and encountered Enlightenment philosophy's postulate of a secular, rational and humane criminal law. Of course, we also saw the danger posed to the humanitarian aspect by Enlightenment thought's utilitarian rationalism, which was opposed by Immanuel Kant's philosophy of law. Furthermore, we observed that this philosophy was characterised by strict respect for legality and the citizen's autonomy, but that criminal law on the whole maintained a high degree of punitiveness throughout the nineteenth century, moving from a protection of rights to the less strict protection of legal interests, and with interventionist, opportunist political and police criminal legislation as its constant companion.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-37273-5_7

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