
The implementation of the unified civil law for the entire monarchy was to serve, on the one hand, the progressive centralization of the royal power, on the other hand, the
universality and certainty of the codified law were to effectively protect the interests and freedoms of subjects in private-law relations. The process of unifying the law in Austria was, therefore – as rightly emphasized – the result of two tendencies of that time: the paternalistic vision of a centralized Enlightenment monarchy and the legal-natural conception of the individual’s natural rights. For this reason, the process of codification of civil law in Austria
was essentially linear and evolutionary, not revolutionary. In the history of the creation of the Austrian civil code ABGB, there is a continuity of legal thought from the Teresian Code through the West Galician Code, which was the first complete, modern, and legal-natural codification of private law in Austria. ABGB was its perfect version in terms of structure and editorial.