Topics in the History of Legal and Political Philosophy

Abstract

In this chapter, I consider Olivecrona’s treatment of certain topics in the history of legal and political philosophy. Olivecrona touches in these essays on questions that he had been, or would later be, concerned with when developing his own legal philosophy; and although the essays concern rather different topics, they all illustrate some aspect or aspects of his legal philosophy, such as his naturalism, his meta-ethics, his critique of will theories of law, or his analysis of the concept of a rule. Thus he considers the theory of the universitas, according to which a corporation is a type of composite entity that is neither fictional nor identical with its members, arguing that this theory correctly captures the Roman jurists’ understanding of the nature of corporations. He also considers the Swedish medieval practice of adjudging someone a king, explaining that the act of adjudging someone a king was a magical rite, in which the court aimed to confer an ideal legal property, namely kinghood, on the person in question. Moreover, he clarifies the import of the concept of a person’s suum, or private sphere, in the works of the natural law philosophers Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf, and points out that this concept is needed to understand the important natural law precept, that one must never harm another. Finally, he clarifies, though he does not clearly assess, John Locke’s thoughts on the appropriation of property and considers and rejects Jeremy Bentham’s view that law is the content of a sovereign will, arguing that the will theory cannot be squared with a thoroughgoing naturalism.