The Law of Nations and Natural Law 1625-1800 offers innovative studies on the development of the law of nations after the Peace of Westphalia. This period was decisive for the origin and constitution of the discipline which eventually emancipated itself from natural law and became modern international law. A specialist on the law of nations in the Swiss context and on its major figure, Emer de Vattel, Simone Zurbuchen prompted scholars to explore the law of nations in various European contexts. The volume studies little known literature related to the law of nations as an academic...

This book is the first contextual account of the political philosophy and natural law theory of the German reformer Philipp Melanchthon (1497-1560). Mads Langballe Jensen presents Melanchthon as a significant political thinker in his own right and an engaged scholar drawing on the intellectual arsenal of renaissance humanism to develop a new Protestant political philosophy. As such, he also shows how and why natural law theories first became integral to Protestant political thought in response to the political and religious conflicts of the Reformation. This study offers new, contextual...

First published in Italian in 1990, Fiammetta Palladini’s ground-breaking study of Samuel Pufendorf (1632–1694) remains one of the most important discussions of the subject to date. Now available in English for the first time, Palladini's book cuts through the existing field of Pufendorf studies, laying bare its inherited templates and tacit assumptions. Palladini is thus able to peel back the ‘Grotian’ commentary in which the great thinker had been shrouded, revealing a Pufendorf well-known in the 1680s—a formidable and dangerous natural jurist and political theorist—but doubly...

This volume presents ten studies on Kant's "Naturrecht Feyerabend", which emphasize the special significance of this transcription, especially for the development of his critical moral philosophy. Dieser Band enthält zehn Studien zu Kants „Naturrecht Feyerabend“, die die besondere Bedeutung dieser Nachschrift vor allem für die Entwicklung seiner kritischen Moralphilosophie herausstellen.

Which works and tenets of early modern natural law reached East-Central Europe, and how? How was it received, what influence did it have? And how did theorists and users of natural law in East- Central Europe enrich the pan-European discourse? This volume is pioneering in two ways; it draws the east of the Empire and its borderlands into the study of natural law, and it adds natural law to the practical discourse of this region. Drawing on a large amount of previously neglected printed or handwritten sources, the authors highlight the impact that Grotius, Pufendorf, Heineccius and others...