Early Modern Natural Law Theories

1. Front Matter

   Pages I-XVIII

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2. Before and after Natural Law

   • Merio Scattola

   Pages 1-30

3. Taming the Leviathan: Reading Hobbes in Seventeenth-Century Europe

   • Jon Parkin

   Pages 31-52

4. Malebranche and Natural Law

   • Patrick Riley

   Pages 53-87

5. The Reception of Hugo Grotius’s De Jure Belli AC Pacis in the Early German Enlightenment

   • Frank Grunert

   Pages 89-105

6. Revolution Principles, IUS Naturae and IUS Gentium in Early-Enlightenment Scotland: The Contribution of Sir Francis Grant, Lord Cullen (C. 1660–1726)

   • Clare Jackson

   Pages 107-140

7. Natural Jurisprudence, Argument from History and Constitutional Struggle in the Early Enlightenment: The Case of Gottlieb Samuel Treuer’s Polemic Against Absolutism in 1719

   • Robert von Friedeburg

   Pages 141-167

8. The Love of a Sage or the Command of a Superior

   • Ian Hunter

   Pages 169-193

9. Voluntarism and Moral Obligation: Barbeyrac’s Defence of Pufendorf Revisited

   • Petter Korkman

   Pages 195-225

10. The Politics of Self-Preservation: Toleration and Identity in Pufendorf and Locke

    • Michael J. Seidler

    Pages 227-255

11. De Sympathia et Antipathia Rerum: Natural Law, Religion and the Rejection of Mechanistic Science in the Works of Christian Thomasius

    • Thomas Ahnert

    Pages 257-277

12. “Decorum” and “Politesse”: Thomasius’s Theory of Civilized Society in Comparative Perspective

    • Simone Zurbuchen

    Pages 279-296

13. Natural Law and Enlightenment in France and Scotland — A Comparative Perspective

    • Peter Schröder

    Pages 297-317

14. Back Matter

    Pages 319-341

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The study of natural law theories in the early Enlightenment continues to be one of the most fruitful areas of research in early modern intellectual history. In recent years there have been substantial reassessments of Grotius, Pufendorf, Thomasius 1 and the whole university-based tradition associated with the Frühaujklärung. The appeal of the discourse of natural jurisprudence to groups and individuals operating outside conventional educational and political structures - such as the Huguenot diaspora - has also been highlighted? Moreover the contextual understanding of the work of unambiguously major philosophers such as Hobbes and Kant - and its reception - has been greatly enhanced by studies that have sought to view them as 3 participants in rather than bystanders alongside the discourse of natural law. Thus thinkers previously not considered central to this discourse have been incorporated into it afresh. However, there is no danger of natural jurisprudence going unchallenged as the meta-discourse of political theory in this period, for recently new studies of the role of libertine and jansenist thought in shaping the priorities of the early Republic of Letters have challenged its position among the intellectual 4 achievements of the social and political theory of the early Enlightenment. This volume therefore offers a timely opportunity to reassess both the coherence of the concept of 'early Enlightenment' and the specific contribution of natural law theories to it.

• Christian Thomasius
• Grotius
• Hobbes
• Locke
• Revolution
• natural law
• will

• London School of Economics, London, UK

  T. J. Hochstrasser

• University College, London, UK

  P. Schröder

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