  Rehberg's importance for the historicist tradition has long been appreciated by the few scholars who know him.  It is scarcely recognized, however, among scholars of historicism, who either ignore him or treat him in a footnote.[46] In his magisterial Entstehung des Historismus Friedrich Meinecke treated Rehberg en passant, as if he were but a disciple of  Möser.[47]  This too is an injustice, since Rehberg was as great an influence on the historicist tradition as Möser himself.  Though Möser was the more original thinker, Rehberg had a better understanding of its relevance for the post-revolutionary era.  It is surely a telling sign of Rehberg's significance for historicism that Friedrich Savigny, the founder of the historical school of law, had praised him repeatedly for his critique of the Code Napoleon, the French attempt to impose a rational constitution upon the Electorate of  Hannover.[48]  Resistance to the Code Napoleon was the first cause célèbre of historicism, its first case in its battle against the legal rationalism of the Enlightenment; and in this respect Rehberg was Savigny's most weighty precedent.  In sum, Rehberg's chief contribution to historicism was making it the antithesis to revolutionary ideology.  