Joseph von Sonnenfels

Origins and early life

Joseph von Sonnenfels was born in 1732 or 1733 at Nikolsburg in Moravia as Joseph Lipmann, the son of Perlin Lipmann, a Jewish teacher of Hebrew, and the grandson of the chief rabbi of Brandenburg. This fiche states plainly that his father had the family baptized between 1735 and 1741, taking the name Aloys Wiener and later von Sonnenfels, so that Joseph was born a Jew and christened as a small child; his grandmother refused to follow and remained a Jew, and the Viennese public never let him forget his origin, mocking him for it throughout his career.

Work and career

He served five years as a private soldier, then studied law in Vienna, and in 1763 Maria Theresa appointed him to the new chair of political science and cameralism, the first in the monarchy. From that chair, and as the empress's adviser, he became the most effective reformer of the Austrian Enlightenment. His treatise Über die Abschaffung der Tortur, published in 1775, argued that judicial torture produces confessions rather than truth, and Maria Theresa abolished it throughout the Habsburg lands the following year, 1776; he also campaigned successfully against the death penalty in Joseph II's reign.

As censor and man of letters he fought the crude improvised comedy of the Viennese stage in his journal Der Mann ohne Vorurteil and helped create a serious German-language national theatre, and he presided over the Academy of Fine Arts for decades. Beethoven dedicated his piano sonata opus 28 to him. He died in Vienna on 25 April 1817, and the abolition of torture in central Europe is, more than any other single act, his.