The new era Wiirttemberg on a contractual basis. The only way a new constitu tion could be formulated, so they argued, was through a deal, freely arrived at, between the King and the estates, premissed on the assumption that the historical rights and privileges of the nobility remained inviolable so long as they had not been freely traded in for royal concessions. It is against such a feudal conception of political rights as per sonal property that Hegel uses some of his strongest language in bis essay; his argument here follows the one he had voiced fifteen years earlier in the essay on The German Constitution. This is the argument of rationalism versus prescription, Hegel states, adding: ' Old rights ' and 'old constitutions ' are such fine grand words that it sounds impious [to contemplate] robbing a people of its rights. But age has nothing to do with what 'old rights' and ' constitution ' mean or with whether they are good or bad. Even the abolition of human sacrifice, slavery, feudal despotism, and countless [other] infamies was in every case the cancellation of something that was an 'old right'. It has often been repeated that rights cannot be lost, that a century cannot make wrong into right, but we should add: ' even if this century-old wrong has been called right all the time', and further that an actual positive right a hundred years old rightly perishes if the basis constituting its existence disappears.4S
Hegel's old argument against 'positivity' reappears, this time in a specific political context: 'The fundamental error in the position adopted by the Wiirttemberg estates lies in this, that they start from positive law:ff Recalling the experience of the French Revo lution Hegel says that <one must regard the start of the French Revolution as the struggle of rational constitutional law against the mass of positive law and privilege by which it had been stifled'. The Wiirttemberg estates, however, Hegel adds; would like to dis regard the history of the last 25 years: One might say of the Wiirttemberg Estates what has been said of the returned French emigres: they have forgotten nothing and learnt nothing. They seem to have slept through the last twenty-five years, possibly the richest that world history has had, and for us the most instructive, because it is to them that our world and our ideas belong.u
The problem of traditional as against codified law Hegel sees as settled in favour of the latter because of the ultimate subjectivity of traditional, customary law. The <Good Old Law of Wiirttemberg', f3 Political �ritings, pp. 282-3. The strong anti-Burkean tone in this passage is mo� s trikI? g. Heg rs opposition to prfJScriptive, traditional law comes up � . agaIn In hIS polemIC against Philosophy of Right, § § 258-9. if Political Writings, p. 281. von Savigny, fS Ibid. p. 282. 74