Natural Law, Laws of Nature, and Natural Rights. Continuity and Discontinuiy in the History of Ideas (review)

2007 ◽  
Vol 93 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-113
Author(s):  
Brian. Tierney
Keyword(s):  
Natural Law ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
History Of

Riccardo Saccenti, Debating Medieval Natural Law: A Survey. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016, XIII, pp. 155.

Mediaevistik ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 318-320
Author(s):  
Scott L. Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Legal Positivism ◽  
Great Chain Of Being ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Concepts ◽  
Hans Kelsen ◽  
University Of Notre Dame ◽  
Conceptual Shift

Saccenti’s volume belongs to the category of Begriffsgeschichte, the history of concepts, and more particularly to the debate over the existence or nonexistence of a conceptual shift in ius naturale to encompass a subjective notion of natural rights. The author argues that this issue became particularly relevant in mid-twentieth century, first, because of the desire to delimit the totalitarian implications of legal positivism chez Hans Kelsen; second, in response to Lovejoy’s The Great Chain of Being and its progeny; and third, as a result of a revival of neo-Thomistic and neo-scholastic perspectives sometimes labelled “une nouvelle chrétienté.”

The Contribution of Medieval Thought to the American Political Tradition

1956 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 462-474 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ewart Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
The Body ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Full Understanding ◽  
Political Tradition ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Thought

That there was a continuity between medieval political thought and the body of systematic theory that surrounded the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution is by now a commonplace. But when we speak of the medieval contribution to the American political tradition, it is important to avoid the implication that what medieval thought contributed was identical with what American thought received. Between the close of the fifteenth century and the latter part of the eighteenth lie some two and a half centuries of crowded thought and experience, which more or less profoundly changed the meaning of concepts continuously in use. The more we learn of medieval theory, the clearer it becomes that it must be interpreted in its own terms rather than in terms of its derivatives. And the American political tradition, of course, cannot be fully understood in terms of its historic roots. Perhaps the chief service which the history of ideas can offer to political theory lies in providing material for the sharpening of concepts through a comparative analysis. For the full understanding of the meaning of an idea, one needs to know not only what it is, but also, I suggest, what it is not. Thus there may be value in an attempt to define the medieval meaning of some concepts that were a significant part of the medieval contribution: in particular, sovereignty, natural law and natural rights, and consent.

American Interpretations of Natural Law

1926 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 524-547
Author(s):  
B. F. Wright
Keyword(s):  
Natural Law ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Natural Right ◽  
Law Of Nature ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Higher Law

When James Otis in 1764 declared that government “has an everlasting foundation in the unchangeable will of God, the author of nature, whose laws never vary,” and that “there can be no prescription old enough to supersede the law of nature and the grant of God Almighty, who has given to all men a natural right to be free,” he was at once making use of one of the oldest and most important conceptions in the history of political thought and giving to that concept a distinctly American meaning. His was merely one of the earliest examples in this country of a kind of political theory which was to find reflection in the Declaration of Independence in one generation, in the higher law doctrine in another, and in a famous trilogy of decisions of the Supreme Court in still a third. However, the natural-rights theory is by no means the only usage found for the natural-law concept in the political thought of this country, and it is the purpose of this paper to trace briefly the various interpretations placed upon it and the different forms through which it has passed.It is easy enough to say that natural law has meant just what the individual theorist desired to have it mean; for its content has varied from philosophical anarchy to paternalistic aristocracy, and from the assertion of strongly individualistic democracy to the defence of highly centralized government. But this statement does not dispose of the problem. It is necessary to know why and when these varying interpretations were advanced and what their exponents meant when they spoke so confidently of the laws of nature.

scholarly journals Trzy „odczarowania” nowożytnej koncepcji prawa naturalnego

2020 ◽  
Vol 6(161) ◽  
pp. 169-187
Author(s):  
Michał Wendland
Keyword(s):  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Modern Concept ◽  
The Third ◽  
Law Of Nature ◽  
Theological Foundations ◽  
History Of

he article addresses, in the perspective of the history of modern philosophy, the issue of the transformation to which the concept of natural law was subject in the 17th and 18th centuries. The author shares the views of, among others, Habermas and Bobbio, according to which the modern concept of natural law has been made “more positive” or “disenchanted” (after Weber), and thus the traditionally understood law of nature was transformed into the concept of natural rights. The article distinguishes three forms of this process: the first one, i.e., the so-called bourgeois school of natural law (Grotius, Thomasius, Pufendorf); the second one, developed by representatives of the early (moderate) Enlightenment (Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu); the third one, the most radical one, represented by the thinkers the late Enlightenment, mainly French encyclopaedists and materialists (La Mettrie, Holbach, Condorcet, Paine). Their common feature was the gradual abandonment of the metaphysical or theological foundations of natural law in favour of a naturalised ethic.

Hugo Grotius: On the Conquest of Utopia by Systematic Reasoning

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Kadelbach
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Legal Scholarship ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many

This chapter seeks to reconstruct the basic elements of Grotian thinking from his two most famous treatises, De jure praedae and De jure belli ac pacis. Both have different biographical and historical backgrounds and an entirely different history of reception. The first is foremost considered as a memorandum to serve commercial interests, whereas the latter is, with some justification, seen to pursue humanist idealism, the systematic ambition of legal scholarship, and the ordering idea of peace. However, since some of what has been called ‘Grotian’ is not much more than a standard taxonomy of the history of ideas, the chapter deals with adaptations of Grotius’ philosophy in natural law thinking and internationalist reception to assess how much of Grotianism came about in later epochs. The many contradictions in the work of Grotius both inspire and invite us to explore the distinctions between moral imperatives and positive international law.

Morality and Responsibility of Rulers

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Study ◽  
International Law ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Chinese Thought ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ethical Thinking

A comparative study of the history of ideas on rule of law. This book examines Eastern and Western traditions to reveal ‘rule of law as justice’ conceptions with differ from the positivist conceptions of the liberal internationalist rule of law today. From an examination of Northern Humanism and natural law it considers whether comparable concepts existed in Chinese thought of the same era. It focuses on the possibilities of traditional Chinese and European ethical thinking in the context of current world affairs, and examines the obstacles to integration of these concepts in modern day international law.

Natural Rights and Natural Law

2020 ◽  
pp. 20-36
Author(s):  
Dennis Klimchuk
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Philosophical Foundations ◽  
Natural Laws ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Right

This chapter argues for the continued relevance of the natural law tradition to inquiry into the philosophical foundations of private law. It focuses on the arc in the history of political philosophy that starts in Hugo Grotius and ends in Immanuel Kant. The original community of property on Grotius’s account and throughout the early modern tradition is a conceptual starting point, a representation of how people stand with respect to one another in the world abstracted from the institutions through which people administer the regime of private property. Grotius and others in the natural law tradition cast the moral aspect of that standing in terms of the natural laws that protected the natural rights of equals. The chapter then looks at two debates. Grotius’s and John Locke’s disagreements about the foundations of property rights and Grotius’s and Samuel von Pufendorf’s about the foundations of the right of necessity are, at their core, disagreements about how to render private ownership consistent with equality. The common ground against which these disagreements is framed is the view that, through its doctrines, the institution of private property inevitably expresses some view on this question, and in this way reveals its connection to the rest of people’s moral lives.

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