Zum Wohle aller?

This article reconstructs the constitutional history of the German university as an unresolved tension between two legal forms: the member-based corporation (Körperschaft) and the user-based institution (Anstalt). Its genealogy from the medieval civitas academica to the present reveals not decline but a recurring oscillation between corporatist autonomy and functional subordination. Under the Basic Law, the participatory turn of occupational freedom subordinated the university to the market economy and left it as public infrastructure for a society of rights-holders.