Josef Bohatec: The First Historian of the Calvinist Reformation of Rights

This Article analyzes the pioneering work of the first great historian of Calvinist rights talk, Josef Bohatec (1876-1954), a Moravian-born and Vienna-based church historian. Bohatec built on the earlier efforts of several German scholars who were excavating pre-Enlightenment sources of human rights going back to antiquity. But Bohatec placed strong new emphasis on the original rights contributions of sixteenth-century Protestant reformer John Calvin (1509-1564) and his followers. Bohatec showed how Calvin's legal training shaped the many new statutes and rights ordinances that he crafted for Geneva. He also showed how Calvin's theological training shaped his highly innovative Protestant legal and political theory. On Bohatec's account, Calvin presented church and state as living bodies that exercised limited and balanced authority in society. Calvin presented natural law and natural rights as ongoing gifts of "divine clemency" to guide human agency, behavior, legislation, and adjudication. And Calvin insisted on "written constitutions" with a clear enumeration of powers and forms of government, and a clear differentiation of fundamental rights of life, property, religion, election, due process, and more. Calvin's rights ideas not only reformed Genevan law, but also drove the growing movements of rights, resistance, and revolution in France, Netherlands, Scotland, England, and eventually America as Calvinists faced repression, tyranny, and genocide. Particularly this latter theme underscored Bohatec's use of history as a form of political critique. He lived through much seismic political turmoil in his day: the breakup of his homeland in the Austro-Hungarian Empire; the devastation of World Wars I and II; the rise of National Socialism; and the escalating Cold War between the West and the Soviets. Just as Nazism was on the rise in Europe, Bohatec presented historical Calvinism as a powerful source of resistance against autocracy. Just as fellow Christians were readily acquiescing in Hitler's and Stalin's claims to absolute power, Bohatec reminded them of Calvin's most fundamental political teaching that even God chose to limit his absolute sovereignty and submit himself to the law for the sake of justice, peace, and love.