We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
SUMMARY
This study broadly aims to investigate the influence exercised by the theories of natural law developed by Grotius, Hobbes and Pufendorf on the early stages of the Enlightenment in Germany. When the notion of ‘influence’ is applied to a long span of time and to a large number of writers it can easily deteriorate into nothing more than the correlation of supercially similar doctrines, unless there also exists a range of contemporary sources which discuss self-consciously the relation of contemporary practice to past achievement. Such sources exist for this topic in the form of a series of ‘histories of morality’, published between approximately 1680 and 1750 in both France and Germany. These were written either as separate works or as introductions to editions of the works of recent writers on natural law theory. Their stated purpose was to provide an account of how the seventeenth-century achievement in natural law was progressively refined and revised, pre-eminently so by Pufendorf, and to relate that achievement to previous discussion of natural law by Christian and Classical writers. By studying these histories we are able to expose to view the fierce theoretical disagreements between the exponents of natural law theories in Baroque German culture and thus recover the parameters of the debate contextually in a way that is not possible from the main texts viewed in isolation.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
