Early Modern Natural Law Research Articles

Sophie de Grouchy's Political Thought in the Letters on Sympathy (1798).

This article proposes a reading of Sophie de Grouchy's moral, political, and economic thought as embedded in the tradition of natural jurisprudence, adapted to the context of the French First Republic. A close reading of her French translation of Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiment and her eight Letters on Sympathy confirms that there are points to be made by reading her works in the context of the language of early modern natural law. This sheds light on the important question of how to read revolutionary republicanism emanating from multiple traditions other than the neo-Roman discourse of non-domination.

Was early modern natural law secularized? The current debates

Was early modern natural law secularized? The current debates

The Law of Nations and Natural Law 1625–1800, hg. v. Simone Zurbuchen (= Early Modern Natural Law 1)

Article The Law of Nations and Natural Law 1625–1800, hg. v. Simone Zurbuchen (= Early Modern Natural Law 1) was published on July 1, 2022 in the journal Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte: Kanonistische Abteilung (volume 108, issue 1).

Christian Wolff on Common Notions and Duties of Esteem

While contemporary accounts understand esteem and self-esteem as essentially competitive phenomena, early modern natural law theorists developed a conception of justified esteem and self-esteem based on naturally good character traits. This article explores how such a normative conception of esteem and self-esteem is developed in the work of Christian Wolff (1679–1754). Two features make Wolff’s approach distinctive: (1) He uses the analysis of common notions that are expressed in everyday language to provide a foundation for the aspects of natural law on which his conception of natural duties of esteem depends. (2) He develops a non-competitive conception of esteem and self-esteem into a cooperative conception, according to which enhancing the esteem in which others are held is seen as a tool for promoting self-perfection. Wolff’s ideas offer a solution to the well-known problems connected with competitive life-styles, and at the same time assign a central role in moral motivation to the desire of being esteemed and of having high self-esteem. Moreover, due to his emphasis on presenting a philosophical analysis based on common notions, he offers a solution that is meant to be persuasive from the perspective of everyday morality.

Political Atheism and Early Modern Natural Law

This essay examines how natural law ideas of early modern Protestant and Catholic thinkers unwittingly conspired to undergird the conceptual possibility of political atheism. Political atheism refers to the idea that there could be a domain of action, the temporal, which could be effectively governed without need for recourse to spiritual instruments or authority. Pierre Bayle shocked his contemporaries in 1682 when he argued for the possibility of a well ordered society of atheists. The essay looks at the foundations of this kind of argument in the epicurean anthropology of Protestant jurisconsults, Samuel Pufendorf and Christian Thomasius, and in the concept of “indirect papal power” developed by Catholic canon lawyer Robert Bellarmine. The essay takes as its case study the papal interdict issued to Republican Venice in 1606-1607.

III. Verwicklungen und Entflechtungen

Entanglements and disentanglements. Differentiating and dedifferentiating law and religion, statute and legal reason in early modern natural law debates. The article reconstructs the connections between modern (17th and 18th century) natural law and the 15th and 16th century catholic natural law discourse. It is shown that the modern natural law was based on the work of catholic theologians who treated questions of conscience as legal issues. The natural law was then cut out of theology by Grotius and by later natural lawyers, who reformulated within the law what they perceived as the universal elements of catholic natural law. In those debates the natural lawyers established the - since then evident - differences between positive law and natural law on the one hand and between legal and religous natural law on the other. Yet, those debates did not concern a ‘secularization’ of natural law. Much more specifically, the natural lawyers disentangled the universal logic of law and those religious elements that could, in the confessional age, no longer be regarded as universal.

The Social and the Sociable

Beginning from Kant’s famous idea that “unsociable sociability” stimulates human progress and civilization, the essay investigates Kant’s categories of the “unsociable” and the “sociable,” and argues that the fundamental difference between them is that the former presuppose a social perspective that is third personal , whereas the latter is always a second-personal affair, instantiated when people relate to one another in various ways, or manifest the disposition to do so. Kant’s “unsociable” attitudes, like “competitive vanity,” are deeply social. They are the fruit of Rousseauean “ amour propre ,” presupposing a social “observer’s” (third-personal) perspective from which we can desire to be positively (and justifiably) regarded or seen . Sociability, as the concept enters into the early modern natural law tradition of Grotius and Pufendorf that led up to Kant, is an irreducibly second-personal phenomenon, realized in our mutual relatings, and the social and legal institutions that govern these. This essay explores these conceptual differences and interactions and the historical background of Kant’s remark in Grotius, Pufendorf, and Rousseau.

Changes of State: Nature and the Limits of the City in Early Modern Natural Law, by Annabel S. Brett

Changes of State. Nature and the Limits of the City in Early Modern Natural Law, by Annabel S. Brett. Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 2011. xiv, 242 pp. $35.00 US (cloth). Annabel Brett's book is an accomplished study of the contested boundaries between and the in early modern natural law discourse. She traces the various discourses on the relation between the political and natural spheres from the influences of ancient and medieval political thought on early modern writers to the debates between and amongst scholastic Catholic political thinkers, Protestant Aristotelians, and others, highlighting the often radical departures from earlier traditions in the thought of Hugo Grotius and especially Thomas Hobbes. The book's achievements are at several levels: as an impressively detailed intellectual history of some of the wide-ranging controversies preoccupying natural law theorists in sixteenth- to mid-seventeenth-century Europe; as a cogent analysis of what is at stake in Grotius's and above all Hobbes's significant developments of natural law theory: and as an innovative approach to the study of political thought. Brett's introduction nicely sets out the major themes of her work and reveals her methodological concerns. As is clear from her copious footnotes, Brett's study arises out of the so-called Cambridge School approach to the history of political thought as epitomized by the work of such scholars as Quentin Skinner, Noel Malcolm, and James Tully. Hence she is concerned with the formation of the political languages of natural law as they emerge in European thought, and her interpretation of Hobbes is indebted to Skinner's analysis of Hobbesian liberty in contradistinction to republican notions of freedom--implicitly, she shares Skinner's critique of Hobbes's position. But her focus is on intellectual context as much as on the context of historical practice: as she writes, her analysis is trained upon the characteristic argumentative motifs of this idiom or way of talking as a whole, rather than on particular authors as agents within their specific contexts (p. 9). Thus her work both broadens, for example, contextualist interpretations of Hobbes by situating his thought relative to continental European natural law (rather than focusing mainly on the historical circumstances in England surrounding Hobbes's work), and offers a unique historical perspective which indirectly engages with the work of such contemporary political thinkers as Carl Schmitt, Michel Foucault, and Giorgio Agamben on natural, territorial, juridical, and political spaces. The study is framed by the divisions between nature and the city, or Libertas and Imperium--in the frontispiece to Hobbes's De Cive (reproduced in Brett's introduction)--divisions which nevertheless are interpenetrated in various ways in Hobbes's thought. Brett shows how Hobbes's account relates to earlier treatments of the nature/city problematic by addressing a dominant theme in each chapter as dealt with by natural law theorists. In Travelling the Borderline, she relates Francisco de Vitoria's treatment of ius gentium as a law of humanity which sanctions the free movement of travellers into foreign countries to Domingo de Soto's assertion of the right of beggars to travel freely across borders: their chief activity as mendicants seeking to preserve themselves as human beings straddles the borderline between city and nature, in the physical but not political space of animals (p. …

Arguments from Natural Law Reevaluated Through a Dialogue between Legal History and Legal Theory

The paper suggests several ways to rediscover the legacy of early modern and classical natural law of the 18th century in contemporary legal thought through the joint efforts of legal history and legal theory with particular reference to the domain of contract law. Additionally, the paper justifies the revival of the research in the domain of natural law in connection with legal argumentation.

Changes of State: Nature and the Limits of the City in Early Modern Natural Law. By Annabel S. Brett. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. Pp. xiv+242. $35.00 (cloth); $35.00 (e-book).

<i>Changes of State: Nature and the Limits of the City in Early Modern Natural Law</i>. By Annabel S. Brett. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. Pp. xiv+242. $35.00 (cloth); $35.00 (e-book).

Brett, Annabel S.Changes of State: Nature and the Limits of the City in Early Modern Natural Law. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. Pp. xii+242. $35.00 (cloth).

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewBrett, Annabel S.Changes of State: Nature and the Limits of the City in Early Modern Natural Law. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. Pp. xii+242. $35.00 (cloth).Ian HunterIan HunterUniversity of Queensland Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Ethics Volume 122, Number 1October 2011Symposium on Jeff McMahan’s Killing in War Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/662062 Views: 54Total views on this site © 2011 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Miserable Comforters: International Relations as New Natural Law

In his ‘Perpetual Peace’, Kant indicts the natural law tradition (Grotius, Pufendorf, Vattel) as ‘miserable comforters’ whose principles and doctrines ‘cannot have the slightest legal force’. The indictment emerges from Kant’s critique of natural law in both its empirical and rationalist variants as unable to uphold a really ‘binding’ notion of cosmopolitan legality. Since the early 1990s a new literature has emerged in the International Relations field that speaks about the effectiveness and legitimacy of international law as a form of supranational ‘governance’. This article argues that that literature raises precisely the same problems that Kant detected in early modern natural law. Like the latter, this literature is best seen as an attempt to appropriate the voice of international legality to a fully instrumentalist discipline dedicated to serving the interests of power.

Natural Law Theories in the Early Enlightenment. By T. J. Hochstrasser. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 246p. $54.95.

This detailed historical study focuses on Protestant natural law theories in the early German Enlightenment (explicitly excluding the French and British sectors) and traces their influence, or fate, through Kant. Despite its title, it is more than a specialist tome devoted to an historically isolable development, and it is not merely a subsidiary, underlaborer's attempt to recount the prehistory of Kant's achievement. Rather, by tracing several important background currents through the period concerned, Hochstrasser illuminates the odd historical fact that German enlighteners at the end of this span knew or thought so little of those at its beginning. The central topics are eclecticism; the so-called “histories of morality” that were part of its self-conscious legitimation method; the rationalism-voluntarism split in early modern natural law; and the associated distinction among moral philosophy (ethics), natural (positive) law, and international law (ius gentium) that developed out of these debates.

Early modern natural law theories and their contexts

Early modern natural law theories and their contexts

The Principles of Natural and Politic Law

The year 1694 saw the death of Samuel Pufendorf, who, with Hugo Grotius, was the foremost representative of the modern tradition of natural law theory, and the birth of Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui, who helped transform the tradition and convey it to new generations. As professor of natural law in Geneva, Burlamaqui used Pufendorfs works on natural law but taught and wrote on the subject in the vernacular, not in the traditional university Latin. By making natural jurisprudence more accessible, Burlamaqui helped make it part of civic education. Burlamaqui intended his writings to defend a middle road between the two main rival traditions in early modern natural law theory, that deriving from Leibniz and Wolff and that from Pufendorf and Barbeyrac. In fact, he seems closer to the former. The basis of this version of 'The Principles of Natural and Politic Law' is Thomas Nugents 1763 English translation, which became a standard textbook at Cambridge and many premier American colleges, including Princeton, Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania. The first scholarly work on Burlamaqui was written by an American, M Ray Forrest Harvey, who in 1937 argued that Burlamaqui was well known among Americas Founding Fathers and that his writings exerted considerable influence upon the American constitutional system. In his introduction, Nugent said of Burlamaqui: His singular beauty consists in the alliance he so carefully points out between ethics and jurisprudence, religion and politics, after the example of Plato and Tully, and the other illustrious masters of antiquity.