12 - The End of Natural Law

Summary

Having found a way to justify a world of state-machines, German lawyers thought about how to manage those machines so as to produce "happiness", which would eventually be understood to include the freedom of the nation and its members. At the University of Göttingen from 1734 onwards ius naturae et gentium eventually produced four specialised idioms: empirical state-science, economics, philosophy and modern law of nations, each opening a distinct way to address an increasingly international world. Among legal professionals, the view of the law of nations as the formalisation of European diplomacy became generally accepted. But the most influential aspect of the German debates concerned the role of the state in realising freedom in conditions of political modernity. Individual rights were to be reconciled with the flourishing of the nation; the state was to adopt its historically appropriate position in relationship to expanding bourgeois civil society. The search for a new vocabulary to address such features of modernity persuaded international lawyers finally to settle on “civilisation”, as will be briefly noted in the Epilogue.