The Administrative World of Yesterday

This chapter claims that the decades between 1890 and 1910 were distinguished by a clear wave of globalization ante litteram, notwithstanding the existence of a great divide between national legal systems, depending whether they featured and harboured or not an ‘official’ administrative law. The main thrust of the thesis is that the overreliance on legal doctrines as the main source of historical research has to date shadowed and downplayed the keenness of answers to the question of how to tame the administrative hydra stemming and springing from judicial adjudications all over Europe. What an in-depth analysis of judicial case law highlights is, first, that there was everywhere an increasing attention for the respect of due process requirements. Second, that this judicial policy was swayed by the acknowledgement and protection of individual rights. Third, that all this judicial activity turned, irrespective of considerable national differences, into administrative discretion being increasingly constrained. Labelling such an outcome as the discovery of a bourgeois common understanding and sensibility toward administrative power and its boundaries represents in itself a path-breaking departure from a narrative where doctrinal discourse trumps the evidence provided by legal practices.