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Editor:
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 exerted on the teaching of politics and moral philosophy as well as on policies regarding public law, codification praxis, or religious toleration.
Contributors are: Péter Balázs, Ivo Cerman, Karin Friedrich, Gábor Gángó, Anna Grześkowiak-Krwawicz, Knud Haakonssen, Steffen Huber, Borbála Lovas, Martin P. Schennach, and József Simon.
Drawing on a large amount of previously neglected printed or handwritten sources, the authors highlight the impact that Grotius, Pufendorf, Heineccius and others exerted on the teaching of politics and moral philosophy as well as on policies regarding public law, codification praxis, or religious toleration.
Contributors are: Péter Balázs, Ivo Cerman, Karin Friedrich, Gábor Gángó, Anna Grześkowiak-Krwawicz, Knud Haakonssen, Steffen Huber, Borbála Lovas, Martin P. Schennach, and József Simon.
Editor:
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 exerted on the teaching of politics and moral philosophy as well as on policies regarding public law, codification praxis, or religious toleration.
Contributors are: Péter Balázs, Ivo Cerman, Karin Friedrich, Gábor Gángó, Anna Grześkowiak-Krwawicz, Knud Haakonssen, Steffen Huber, Borbála Lovas, Martin P. Schennach, and József Simon.
Drawing on a large amount of previously neglected printed or handwritten sources, the authors highlight the impact that Grotius, Pufendorf, Heineccius and others exerted on the teaching of politics and moral philosophy as well as on policies regarding public law, codification praxis, or religious toleration.
Contributors are: Péter Balázs, Ivo Cerman, Karin Friedrich, Gábor Gángó, Anna Grześkowiak-Krwawicz, Knud Haakonssen, Steffen Huber, Borbála Lovas, Martin P. Schennach, and József Simon.
Abstract
In Prague, secular natural law had been discussed already before the reforms of Maria Theresia. Even before it was imposed from above, Nicolas Ignaz Königsmann and several others university professors discussed Grotius, Pufendorf and other more modern authorities out of interest. The reforms of Maria Theresia after 1748 introduced a chair of natural law, but its survival was threatened by short-sighted staffing policies. The competition for the new professorship in 1758 secured a new incumbent and provided for the division of the discipline between a specialized chair of public law, held by Franz Lothar Schrodt, and a chair of natural law, held by Josef Anton Schuster. It also helped to silence the Jesuit teacher in Philosophy Josef Jurain who sought to compete with the Faculty of Law. The 1760s then saw a series of new works on natural law by the new professors. Archival material (in part newly discovered) documents the competition of 1758. Analysis of the printed publications shows the type of natural law ideas advanced, including Schrodt’s strongly absolutist conception of public law, and their relationship to major Protestant authors.
Abstract
Much of the scholarship on the Unitarian Church that emerged during the Reformation in the Principality of Transylvania has dealt with theological concerns. This paper rather examines the degree to which one of the major Unitarian figures, György Enyedi, engaged with the concept of divine law and natural law in the late sixteenth century through his sermons, in which he addressed a range of topics – including divinity, miracles, human behaviour, conscience, moral law, property, the social order, state theory, the ethics of war and civil law. A study of these topics reveals how the Unitarian articles of faith were tied to earlier traditions but also involved many ideas that would later be systematized by philosophers in the seventeenth century. Given that copies of Enyedi’s magnum opus, Explicationes, was in the possession of such writers as Locke and Newton (and general readers from Adrian Heerbord, Samuel Pepys and Robert Sharrock to Richard Allestree, Thomas Gataker and William Wake), Enyedi’s views on the oneness of God, the freedom of religious belief (and the true religion), and the role of minorities in society, are deserving of closer attention.
Abstract
The paper offers an overview, based on hitherto underexplored print and manuscript sources, of the institutionalisation of natural law as an academic discipline at all three academic gymnasia in the Polish province of Royal Prussia, i.e. Toruń, Elbląg, and Gdańsk. In this first synoptic account of the teaching of moral or political philosophy and jurisprudence based on natural law in these institutions, the author shows that the inspiration that Ernst König, rector at Toruń and later Elbląg, drew from Samuel Pufendorf’s works, De officio hominis et civis in particular, exerted a lasting impact, directly or indirectly, on the curricula of all three gymnasia. In contradistinction to Western academic institutions, the introduction of natural law as part of modern philosophy proved to be a reversible process in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. From the mid-eighteenth century, the gymnasia in Toruń and Elbląg returned to the humanist curriculum.
Abstract
Taking Hugo Grotius’s comment that ‘Poland does not legislate on religion’ as point of departure, this article traces the impact of natural law discourses on the debates around toleration in the multi-religious and multi-national Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania. Starting from earlier sources of natural law thinking in the Polish conciliarist tradition, it explores the ‘process of Confederation’ as an attempt to implement the decisions of the Interregnum Sejm of Warsaw (1573), leading up to the mid-seventeenth century, it shows how political writers linked the desire to maintain religious peace with a defence of the forma mixta constitution, appropriating a natural law discourse to balance the conflict between self-interest and the common good through the exercise of virtue and civic duty. With a focus on the rights of the individual (noble) citizen and freedom of conscience, Polish natural law discourse promoted the participatory republican model of the Commonwealth, rather than the need for state-building. The transfer of ideas did not just flow from West to East. The Polish model of civic responsibility also left an imprint on Grotius’s own thinking on matters of faith and state.
Abstract
The paper examines the problem of human freedom as related to moral obligation in Miklós Apáti’s Vita triumphans civilis (Amsterdam 1688). At a first glance, the vast majority of Apáti’s work provides its readers with paraphrases of passages from Pierre Poiret’s Cogitationum rationalium de Deo, anima et malo (Amsterdam 1685) and Antoine Le Grand’s Institutio philosophiae secundum principia Renati Descartes (Nürnberg 1683). Having identified Apáti’s main sources, the paper moves on to describe the indifference theory of human freedom, as it is developed by the Hungarian author following Poiret’s discussions. Regarding Le Grand, Apáti’s paraphrases focus on the closing chapters of the last Part of the Institutio that quote Pufendorf’s De officio (Lund 1672) almost verbatim. Therefore, the corresponding passages in the Vita triumphans raise the question in what way Apáti composed his own paraphrases of Le Grand’s compilations of Pufendorf’s De officio. Against this complicated philological background, the paper qualifies the Vita triumphans civilis as an insightful constellation of Cartesianism and natural law theory.
Abstract
In the 18th century the doctrines of Austrian and Hungarian public law were both strongly influenced by the Reichspublizistik, id est the science of public law of the Holy Roman Empire, and by the doctrine of the Territorialstaatsrecht, the legal study of the public law of the territories of the Holy Roman Empire. Nevertheless, natural law and the Allgemeine Staatsrecht played a different role in each case. The absolutistic-friendly Austrian writers obviously avoided any reference to natural law out of concern for its critical-emancipatory potential. In contrast, Hungarian legal scholars listed natural law among the sources of Hungarian public law without further ado. In Hungary, natural law (theoretically) served to fill in the gaps left by positive public law and thus occupied the same position in the systematics of legal sources as the ius publicum of the Empire did in the case of Austrian public law. With regard to the concrete use of natural law, there is hardly any difference between Hungarian and Austrian authors, especially since natural law could also be used in a pro-absolutist sense. This was the case, for example, with the interpretation of the resistance clause in the Golden Bull of King Andrew II (1222).
Abstract
Hitherto natural law in early modern Poland-Lithuania has not been systematically researched. This is due to the usual problems in defining natural law, all the more so in Poland-Lithuania where natural law tended to merge with divine law and law of nations. Moreover, unlike in Western Europe, natural law was not seen as a systematic basis for positive law. Nevertheless, ideas of natural law found fertile ground in the specific circumstances of Poland, Lithuania and, especially, their various unions between 1386 and 1795: the vast geographic, cultural and religious diversity, the traditions of self-governance, the plurality of legal systems, the republican order of the monarchy and, from the mid-seventeenth century, the growing social tensions. Therefore, natural law should be defined otherwise than in the Western context, with more emphasis on the multi-cultural practices. After an overview of these factors, the chapter analyses selected sources for sixteenth-century humanism (Frycz Modrzewski, Roisius) and seventeenth-century school philosophy (an anonymous source of 1612, Olizarowski, Modzelewski, Puciłowski). Finally, after an outlook on the eighteenth century, I attempt a sketch of the specific understanding of natural law in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
Abstract
Miklós Bethlen (1642–1716), a Hungarian politician from the high nobility, composed his Autobiography in Emperor Joseph I’s prison during the years 1708–10. The present paper aims to reconstruct Bethlen’s philosophical themes in the Preface so as to introduce the extant narrative of his life. Reflecting on the Cartesian argument for consciousness in the use of language, Bethlen endorses his contrasting conviction on the low-level consciousness evident in public speech performances. A tendentiously mechanical interpretation of performative speech acts renders the psychological phenomena of honour, shame, ambition, disgust and even esteem crucial constituents of social reality. To contextualize these elements, Bethlen introduces the Pufendorfian terminology of ‘moral or civic qualities.’ During the 1661 academic year, Bethlen had attended young Pufendorf’s lectures on Grotius’s De jure belli ac pacis at Heidelberg. However, the theory developed in 1708 in the Preface to the Autobiography clearly contradicts the social philosophy of the German scholar. The paper investigates the tensions in Bethlen’s thought caused by his shift from an a priori construct of society.
Abstract
The study offers a comprehensive overview of the reception of natural law in the academic classes of Protestant gymnasia and colleges in the Kingdom of Hungary and the Principality of Transylvania. It encompasses the Calvinist Colleges in Sárospatak and Debrecen as well as the Calvinist and Unitarian gymnasia in Cluj. On the basis of available archives and library sources, the fullest possible chronological description of teachers and courses is provided, with excursions to library acquisitions as well. The general picture outlines a rich variety of tenets of modern natural law from Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf to Johann Gottlieb Heineccius and Christian Wolff, at some places also including post-Kantian German natural law, adapted to Hungarian and Transylvanian social, political and religious contexts from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century.