Philosophy, Rights and Natural Law

Over his long and illustrious career, Knud Haakonssen has explored the role of natural law in formulating doctrines of obligation and rights in accordance with the interests of early modern polities and churches. The essays collected in this volume range across this exciting and contested field. These 13 new essays acknowledge Haakonssen's immense academic achievement and give us new insights into the cultural and political role of law and rights in a variety of historical contexts and circumstances.

“No-one has done more than Knud Haakonssen to facilitate and lead the study of Protestant Natural Law in early modern Europe, and to explain its significance for moral and political philosophy. This volume repays that achievement with an excellent set of essays on the subject. A combination of outstanding contributors, well-chosen topics, and broad geographical coverage ensures that the volume is not only an apt tribute to Haakonssen, but will be an essential reference-point for future development of the field.”

-- "John Robertson, Professor Emeritus of the History of Political Thought, University of Cambridge"

Ian Hunter is Ian Hunter is Emeritus Professor of Intellectual History in the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Queensland. He is author of The Secularisation of the Confessional State: The Political Thought of Christian Thomasius (Cambridge University Press, 2007). He is co-editor of Law and Politics in British Colonial Thought (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), Essays on Church, State and Politics (Liberty Fund, 2007), The Philosopher in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2006), Heresy in Transition (Ashgate, 2005) and Natural Law and Civil Sovereignty (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).

Richard Whatmore is Professor of History at the University of St Andrews and Director of the St Andrews Institute of Intellectual History. He is the author of What is Intellectual History? (Polity, 2015), Against War and Empire (Yale University Press, 2012) and Republicanism and the French Revolution (OUP, 2000). He is the co-editor of Commerce and Peace in the Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Companion to Intellectual History (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), David Hume (Ashgate, 2013), Advances in Intellectual History (Palgrave, 2006) and Economy, Polity and Society: Essays in British Intellectual History, 2 volumes (Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Contributions to philosophy, rights and natural law inspired by the work of Knud Haakonssen Over his long and illustrious career, Knud Haakonssen has been centrally interested in the role of natural law in formulating doctrines of obligation and rights in accordance with the interests of early modern polities and churches. A hallmark of his approach has been to show how in early-modern Europe natural law was less a unified doctrine than a field of cross-cutting idioms in which competing political and juridical programs were prosecuted for many cross-cutting purposes.The essays collected in this volume range across this exciting and contested field. In doing so they pay tribute to the work of Knud Haakonssen who, over four decades of scholarly activity, uncovered this field in all of its variety and depth. Not only do these studies acknowledge his immense academic achievement but they also offer new insights into the cultural and political role of law and rights in a variety of historical contexts and circumstances.Ian Hunter is Emeritus Professor of Intellectual History in the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Queensland. Richard Whatmore is Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews and Director of the St Andrews Institute of Intellectual History.

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