HERTLING, GEORG FRIEDRICH von. — Philosopher and statesman, born 31 August 1843 in Darmstadt, died 4 January 1919 in Ruhpolding (western Bavaria). He studied at the Universities of Münster, Berlin, and Würzburg. He taught in Munich between 1882 and 1912. President of the Bavarian ministry in 1912, he became a count in 1914 and Chancellor of the Reich in 1917–18.
A noble figure among Catholic thinkers, H. devoted his writings and his wide-ranging political and social activity to the elaboration of a philosophy in harmony with Christian thought, and to the triumph, through sincere cooperation between State and Church, of the Catholic ideal.
The fundamental points of his thought are the affirmation of an absolute moral law, to which human action must conform in carrying out God’s plan, and which, in opposition to the Hegelian and materialistic conception, transcends the State itself. Positive law is therefore founded on natural law, and over against the power of the State stand the rights and conscience of the individual. Philosophy is in itself a valid aid to religion, and its fundamental task is to provide human beings with certainty of God’s existence. Within these general lines of Christian philosophy, inspired by the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition, H. discussed particular problems in polemic with liberalism, socialism, and state absolutism, and against the conceptions of materialism and pantheism.
Principal works: Über die Grenzen der mechan. Naturerklärung (Bonn 1875); Aufsätze und Reden sozial-polit. Inhalts (Freiburg 1884); Naturrecht und Sozial-Politik (Cologne 1893); Kleine Schriften zur Zeitgesch. und Politik (Freiburg 1897); Das Prinzip des Katholizismus und die Wissenschaften (there 1899); Recht, Staat und Gesellschaft (Kempten 1906); Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben (2 vols., there 1919); also monographs on Alberto Magno (1880), Locke e la scuola di Cambridge (1892), and Agostino (1902), as well as extensive contributions to the first four volumes of the Staatslexikon. Among his posthumous works, the principal one is Vorlesungen über Metaph., ed. C. M. Maier (Kempten 1922).