That same year, 1918, the German Emperor Wilhelm II would be ruler of his country for 30 years. In the second book, Pseudoreality Prevails, Ulrich joins the so-called 'Collateral Campaign' or 'Parallel Campaign', frantic preparations for a celebration in honor of 70 years of the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph's reign. Other protagonists are Ulrich's nymphomaniac mistress, Bonadea, and his friend Walter's neurotic wife, Clarisse, whose refusal to go along with commonplace existence leads to Walter's insanity. Meanwhile, we meet a murderer and rapist, Moosbrugger, who is condemned for his murder of a prostitute. Lack of any profound essence and ambiguity as a general attitude to life are his principal characteristics. Ulrich himself only knows he is strangely indifferent to all his qualities. Musil said that it was not particularly difficult to describe Ulrich in his main features. A kind of keenly analytical passivity is his most typical attitude.

His ambivalence towards morals and indifference to life has brought him to the state of being 'a man without qualities', depending on the outer world to form his character. Its aim is to highlight the Erklären-Verstehen controversy that lies at the heart of the epistemological debate and the methodological struggle between the natural sciences and the humanities at the end of the nineteenth century, one that has had far-reaching implications for law and literature.The first book, entitled A Sort of Introduction, is an introduction to the protagonist, a 32-year-old mathematician named Ulrich who is in search of a sense of life and reality but fails to find it. This article focuses on the blurring of the borders between fact and fiction by means of an analysis of The Man without Qualities.

The nineteenth-century concept of law as science led to a profound belief in the transparency of objective knowledge that Weber referred to as the disenchantment of the world. This debate raises the question of the dehumanization of scientific rationality in matters concerning the treatment of the criminally insane. The sex murderer Moosbrugger, whose mental competence to stand trial is at the heart of Robert Musil's novel The Man without Qualities, attracts our attention to the scientific debate on determinism that has captivated legal scholars since the late nineteenth century.

The man without qualities vol 1