affairs which constituted the burning question of the hour, and held this post until 1837. In 1844, he was awarded the Order of St. Sylvester by Pope Gregory XVI. Restauration Earlier work In connection with his other work, Haller had propounded and defended his political opinions as early as 1808 in his ‘’Handbuch der allgemeinen Staatenkunde, des darauf begründeten allgemeinen Rechts und der allgemeinen Staatsklugheit nach den Gesetzen der Natur’’. This, considered by some his most important work, impelled Johannes von Müller to offer Haller the chair of constitutional law at the University of Göttingen. In spite of the great honour involved in this offer, he declined it. The Handbuch itself was an extended version of his inaugural lecture Über die Nothwendigkeit einer andern obersten Begründung des allgemeinen Staatsrechtes, published on November 2, 1806 and delivered shortly after his return to Bern. Two other essays would follow in 1807: the Über den wahren Sinn des Naturgesetzes: dass der Mächtigere herrsche, dealing with his doctrine of natural superiority as the basis for political authority; and Über die Domainen und Regalien, covering the jura regalia, sovereign rights of kings deriving from their ownership of the royal domains. By that point, Haller’s political doctrine had been fully formed. Haller published three essays in Friedrich Schlegel’s "Concordia," (1820-1823), and his various writings in journals and periodicals were collected in two volumes and published as Mélanges de droit public et de haute politique (1839). Magnum opus Haller's magnum opus, however, was the Restauration der Staats-Wissenschaft oder Theorie des natürlich-geselligen Zustandes, der Chimäre des künstlich-bürgerlichen entgegengesetzt. It was published in Winterthur in six volumes from 1816 to 1834. In this he uncompromisingly rejected the revolutionary conception of the State, and developed a natural and juridical system of government, arguing at the same time that a commonwealth can endure and prosper without being founded on the omnipotence of the state and official bureaucracy. The first volume, which appeared in 1816, contains his history and his rejection of the older political theories, and also sets forth the general principles of his system of government. In the succeeding volumes he shows how these principles apply to different forms of government: in the second to monarchies; in the third (1818) to military powers; in the fourth (1820) and fifth (1834) to ecclesiastical states; and in the sixth (1825) to republics. It was written primarily to counteract Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Social