subjects were not exhausted with this negative status. Since they are free creatures, they must not only obey, but also agree. The ruler's will must become their own free will. Stahl therefore demanded a people's representative body that could approve laws and taxes or reject them, that would monitor proper financial management, the constitutional implementation of laws, and just administration of justice, and thus become the guardian and guarantor of human freedom. It must be a popular representation, so Stahl rejected feudal estates. But it should reflect the actual balance of power; hence Stahl was for universal but against equal suffrage and for a House of Lords. The representatives of the people have not just an advisory, but a decision-making voice and must be heard. Since it stands on a legal basis, it can resist, but only passively. Reception Contemporary There was already criticism from Stahl's contemporaries: The historian and politician Friedrich Christoph Dahlmann criticized that Stahl only wanted to grant freedom in "homeopathic droplet particles." The liberal politician and political scientist Robert von Mohl counted Stahl among the opponents of the rule of law and advocates of a theocracy. Eduard Wippermann dedicated an appendix to Stahl in his work Die Altorientalischen Religionenstaaten, published in 1851, because he saw him as the representative of the doctrine of the "Christian state" who was the only one who "scientifically processed these doctrines in a comprehensive system", and stated that it was easiest to govern in the religious state. The constitutional lawyer Rudolf Gneist also said ironically that Stahl's personality and way of life was in "sharp contrast" to that of his "party comrades". Imperial Era The conservative historian Heinrich von Treitschke certified Stahl that he had become "completely Christian and German", called him a pioneer of national unity and the "only great political mind among all thinkers of Jewish blood". In the Wilhelmine Empire, legal positivism had prevailed and Stahl was largely forgotten, at best found historical interest, for example with Erich Kaufmann, while Laband paid no attention to Stahl in his Constitutional law of the German Reich in 1876. Nazi Era In National Socialist Germany, following Reich Minister of the Interior Hans Frank , e.g. Johannes Heckel ("The intrusion of the Jewish spirit into German constitutional and canon law by Friedrich Julius Stahl") and Edgar Tatarin-Tarnheyden (because of the "atomization of state power") Stahl was considered the "alien." To Carl Schmitt,