Natural Law and Civil Sovereignty : Moral Right and State Authority in Early Modern Political Thought

Annotation In Natural Law and Civil Sovereignty new research by leading international scholars is brought to bear on a single crucial issue: the role of early modern natural law doctrines in reconstructing the relations between moral right and civil authority in the face of profound religious and political conflict. In addition to providing fresh insights into the hard-fought struggle to legitimate a desacralised civil order, the book also shows the degree to which the legitimacy of the modern secular state remains dependent on this decisive set of developments Cover......Page 1 Contents......Page 6 Preface......Page 8 List of Contributors......Page 9 Introduction......Page 14 Part I Natural Law and Civil Authority......Page 24 1 The Rule of the State and Natural Law......Page 26 2 The Moral Conservatism of Natural Rights......Page 40 3 Pufendorf’s Doctrine of Sovereignty and its Natural Law Foundations......Page 56 Part II The Struggle over Church and State......Page 72 4 Natura naturans: Natural Law and the Sovereign in the Writings of Thomas Hobbes......Page 74 5 Probability, Punishments and Property: Richard Cumberland’s Sceptical Science of Sovereignty......Page 89 6 The Prince and the Church in the Thought of Christian Thomasius......Page 104 Part III Natural Law and the Limits of Sovereignty......Page 120 7 Civil Sovereigns and the King of Kings: Barbeyrac on the Creator’s Right to Rule......Page 122 8 Sovereignty and Resistance: The Development of the Right of Resistance in German Natural Law......Page 136 9 From the Virtue of Justice to the Concept of Legal Order: The Signifcance of the suum cuique tribuere in Hobbes’ Political Philosophy......Page 152 Part IV Natural Law and Sovereignty in Context......Page 166 10 Natural Law and the Construction of Political Sovereignty in Scotland, 1660–1690......Page 168 11 Self-Defence in Statutory and Natural Law: The Reception of German Political Thought in Britain......Page 183 Part V Early Modern Thought and Modern Politics......Page 200 12 Hobbes and Pufendorf on Natural Equality and Civil Sovereignty......Page 202 13 Natural Law, Sovereignty and International Law: A Comparative Perspective......Page 217 14 Property, Territory and Sovereignty: Justifying Political Boundaries......Page 232 15 Pufendorf and the Politics of Recognition......Page 248 Index......Page 266 "Early modern natural law theorists were confronted by a single crucial problem: how to provide a new, secular legitimacy for civil authority under circumstances in which confessional conflict had rendered the standard religious justifications inoperable or suspect. In Natural Law and Civil Sovereignty fifteen leading historians of political thought provide fresh accounts of how early modern writers rose to this challenge. In addition to offering novel treatments of figures well known to English readers (Grotius, Hobbes, Locke, Cumberland), the chapters also reveal the crucial role played by lesser-known writers (Althusius, Pufendorf, Thomasius, Barbeyrac, Burlarnaqui), paying particular attention to the circumstance their doctrines were intended to address and to the milieux in which they were disseminated, in the context of today's fears and hopes for the demise of the sovereign state, this book provides a series of timely insights into the early modern struggle that gave birth to the modern concept of sovereignty - the struggle to legitimate a desacralised political order."--BOOK JACKET. Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved