The Law of Nature and Nations

Abstract

...These conflicting programs and their rival natural law discourses had been driven by the great religious and political conflicts of the seventeenth century, whose carry-over into the eighteenth century makes it into something of a long seventeenth It is thus necessary to begin by discussing the works and contexts of some of the seventeenth-century giants of natural law, before moving on to discuss Christian Thomasius. Thomasius's natural law works straddle the turn of the century and provide a convenient conspectus of the main forms in which natural law would develop during the eighteenth century. This provides us with the proper perspective from which to view the development of a specifically philosophical form of natural law (or philosophy of law), culminating in Kant's political metaphysics, exclusive focus on which has led to the anachronistic view that natural law always had philosophical foundations. Finally, to overcome this anachronistic retrospect we will discuss the persistence of non-philosophical, specifically juristic and diplomatic developments in natural law in the eighteenth century, in the form of Maser's public law (Staatsreche) and Vattel's law of nations (jus gentium).