Economising Natural Law: Pufendorf on Moral Quantities and Sumptuary Legislation

Pufendorf’s theory of moral entities imposes a normative grid upon an indifferent world and articulates the positive, non-metaphysical nature of morality. This chapter focuses especially on the function of moral quantities, which set the prices of things and the esteem of persons. It clarifies the moral economy constituted by these values through an examination of Pufendorf’s view of sumptuary laws and their role in the state. The need to calculate particular values within a broader normative context shows also how Pufendorf’s method is both demonstrative and casuistic.

Calvinists, Arminians, Socinians: Popular Sovereignty and Natural Rights in Early Modern Political Thought

This chapter focuses upon natural rights in the writings of Hugo Grotius, the Levellers and John Locke and the manner in which their understanding of rights was informed by distinctive Protestant theologies: by Arminianism or the theology of the Remonstrant Church and by Socinianism. The chapter argues that their theological principles and the natural rights theories that followed from those principles were in conflict with the theology of Calvin and the theologians of the Reformed church. The political theory that marks the distinctive contribution of Calvin and the Reformed to political theory was the idea of popular sovereignty, an idea revived in the eighteenth century, in the political writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Natural Equality and Natural Law in Locke’s Two Treatises

This chapter discusses John Locke’s account of natural equality as presented in his Two Treatises of Government. Together with its sister concept natural liberty, natural equality is often associated with the idea of Locke as an early representative of liberal political thought. Locke’s notions of natural liberty and equality are seen as sings of his commitment to the values of individual autonomy and political equality held central in liberal-democratic societies of today, and his political theory is read as a more or less successful attempt to articulate those values. The chapter argues that such approach to Locke’s remarks on natural equality is historically misleading, and they are best understood when we take seriously the fact that he developed his political theory within the parameters of seventeenth-century natural law.

The ‘Iura Connata’ in the Natural Law of Christian Wolff

Whether Christian Wolff’s concept of innate rights is a substantial contribution to the development of the concept of human rights or not has been a major concern of recent literature. This chapter explores the role of Christian Wolff’s conception of iura connata or innate rights as possible foundations for the modern doctrine of human rights, imbuing natural law with a degree of transhistoricality and engaging with Knud Haakonssen’s rather different treatment of Wolff’s natural rights as alienable.

Dignity and Equality in Pufendorf’s Natural Law Theory

The chapter explores the ambiguity of the notion of dignity in Pufendorf’s natural law theory. On the one hand, dignity (dignatio) denotes the moral status of human beings in virtue of which they have to treat each other as equals. On the other hand, Pufendorf holds dignity and natural equality to be compatible with social inequality, notably with servitude and slavery. Moreover, when he deals with the comparative value and reputation (existimatio) of human beings, he admits that their moral status is conditioned by their readiness to behave as social beings. Human beings can thus lose their basic moral standing and are then considered as common enemies of all.

Introduction

Work on the intellectual history of philosophy, rights and politics is a palimpsest of many underlying inscriptions. Such work is written upon and with (or against) the historical legal, political and religious orders characteristic of national settlements and transnational networks. It is also written on top of unresolved intellectual and ideological conflicts that materially affect the flows of scholarship. Also visible just beneath the surface of such writing are the scholarly networks through which reflection on the history of national and transnational legal and political thought is shaped by academic affiliation, disciplinary training, publication outlets, intellectual and ideological commitments, and friendships. The papers collected in this volume are all to some degree tied to a particular, if loose and expansive scholarly network whose two poles were initially formed by Sussex School intellectual history and Cambridge School history of political thought. The book grew out of a symposium dedicated to honouring the work of Knud Haakonssen in the history of natural law, natural rights, human rights, religion and politics from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. That an expatriate Danish scholar should have played a pivotal role in this network might seem surprising at first sight. Nonetheless, the fact that Haakonssen’s orbital career moves through so many mediating points – crossing national, disciplinary, intellectual and ideological borders – holds the key to viewing the present array of chapters, each of which is tethered to the network at a particular point in Haakonssen’s scholarly transit. The collection thus offers an unusually wide and variegated overview of the legal and political contexts in which rights and duties have been formulated, bringing together an array of regional, national and transnational cases. Nonetheless, these cases and contexts remain centred on Knud Haakonssen’s trademark interests in the role of natural law in formulating doctrines of obligation and rights in accordance with the interests of early modern polities and churches. ...

Natural Law and Natural Rights in Early Enlightenment Copenhagen

This chapter discusses the earliest teaching of post-grotian natural law by Henrik Weghorst and Christian Reitzer in Copenhagen in the decades around 1700. This teaching has often been presented as merely derivative of the ideas of Hugo Grotius or Samuel Pufendorf. In contrast, this chapter argues that Weghorst and Reitzer developed two very different, and antagonistic, forms of natural law, reflecting academic teaching in Kiel and in Halle. However, it also shows how Weghorst and Reitzer illustrate the common ground of much Lutheran natural law theorising in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Thus, for all their differences, both gave primacy to natural law and focused on duties, rather than rights, as constitutive of social and political life.

The History of the History of Ethics and Emblematic Passages

This chapter first considers the way that “emblematic passages” – passages taken to be emblematic of a philosopher’s import – function as an organizing device in the history of philosophy, and through this the import of the history of the history of philosophy for the history of philosophy. The second half of the essay focuses on one emblematic passage from Joseph Butler to illustrate and argue for this claim.

Rights After the Revolutions

The period of the French Revolution was famous for erecting an entirely new system of government and social mores on the basis of a declaration of the rights of man and the citizen. Everything changed in France, over a remarkably short period of time, leading to an especially intense debate about what a society founded on equal rights for all ought to look like. This chapter examines two of the systems expounded, derived from the political philosophies of Thomas Paine and Emmanuel Sièyes. The chapter examines the shock with which opponents such as Edmund Burke and Edward Gibbon greeted rights-based politics, and what happened when the new worlds of peace and prosperity promised by Paine and Sièyes descended into chaos and poverty. Around the turn of the eighteenth century the chapter charts a turn away from France and towards Britain as a possible model state for rights compatible with order and with civil liberty; in this turn the history of Scotland, and the existence of brilliant Scottish philosophers played a prominent role, being proof that Britain was not an empire run for the benefit of a mercantile class based in London, but was rather a cosmopolitan empire whose peripheries benefitted as much as the metropole. Republican voices still dedicated to the kinds of transformative natural jurisprudence promised in the early years of the French Revolution, shouted from the sidelines that if Britain was now the model state for humanity, then all of the reform projects of the eighteenth century had altogether failed.

Declaring Rights: Bentham and the Rights of Man

Critics who were sceptical of the particular fusion of law and history in natural jurisprudence launched their assaults in the later eighteenth-century from within established religious denominations, or asserted the view that the anticipated reforms would fail, being insufficiently grounded on an accurate portrayal of human nature. The latter approach has been especially associated with Jeremy Bentham, who for many scholars has become the most prominent opponent of rights-based theories. This chapter reconsiders this view, charting Bentham’s view of natural rights from his earliest writings to the summary Constitutional codes developed for post-Napoleonic Europe. The Bentham who emerges, rather than being a consistent enemy of the kinds of declarations of rights that marked the American and French Revolutions, was instead building upon much of the jurisprudence he condemned in his rhetoric. The chapter revises the commonplace view of Bentham and his intellectual origins in consequence.