scholarly journals Natural Law and Civilizational Progress: Assumptions of a Political Theory in Simonas Daukantas’s Historiography

Politologija ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 95 (3) ◽  
pp. 56-82
Author(s):  
Saulius Pivoras
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Founding Father ◽  
Private Property Rights ◽  
The People ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
Natural Law Theory ◽  
Conjectural History

This article aims to identify and reconstruct a few main elements of political theory upon which the works of Simonas Daukantas, the founding father of the national Lithuanian written history, are based. Daukantas’s major works on Lithuanian history were researched while identifying and closely analyzing the passages where Daukantas specifically speaks about natural law and civilizational progress. Daukantas’s history works were considerably influenced by authors of Neostoic natural law theory, such as Hugo Grotius, Samuel Pufendorf, and Antoine-Yves Goguet. This influence shows in the adopted conceptions of natural needs, natural sociability, and a characterization of the emergence of private property rights in Lithuania with the help of conjectural history methods. Daukantas traces natural law elements in the oldest customs of the people and therefore gives most attention to reconstructing and describing the mores of the ancient Lithuanians. In describing historical evolution, he applied in his works the concepts of bright and dark periods as well as the distinctions of other separate stages of civilizational progress as discussed in Enlightenment historiography and conjectural history in particular.

Natural Law Republicanism

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael C. Hawley
Keyword(s):  
Natural Law ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
John Adams ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
The People ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual

By any metric, Cicero’s works are some of the most widely read in the history of Western thought. This book suggests that perhaps Cicero’s most lasting and significant contribution to philosophy lies in helping to inspire the development of liberalism. Individual rights, the protection of private property, and political legitimacy based on the consent of the governed are often taken to be among early modern liberalism’s unique innovations and part of its rebellion against classical thought. However, this book demonstrates that Cicero’s thought played a central role in shaping and inspiring the liberal republican project. Cicero argued that liberty for individuals could arise only in a res publica in which the claims of the people to be sovereign were somehow united with a commitment to universal moral law, which limits what the people can rightfully do. Figures such as Hugo Grotius, John Locke, and John Adams sought to work through the tensions in Cicero’s vision, laying the groundwork for a theory of politics in which the freedom of the individual and the people’s collective right to rule were mediated by natural law. This book traces the development of this intellectual tradition from Cicero’s original articulation through the American founding. It concludes by exploring how modern political ideas remain dependent on the conception of just politics first elaborated by Rome’s great philosopher-statesman.

scholarly journals Towards sustainable property? Exploring the entanglement of ownership and sustainability

2021 ◽  
pp. 053901842110114
Author(s):  
Philipp Degens
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Emissions Trading ◽  
Private Property ◽  
German Law ◽  
Conceptual Level ◽  
Private Property Rights ◽  
Carbon Emissions Trading ◽  
The Social ◽  
Bundle Of Rights ◽  
Do So

This article explores the relation between ownership and sustainability on a conceptual level. It specifically examines different imaginaries of sustainable property by asking how private property rights and their restrictions are conceptualized as instruments for sustainability. To do so, conflicting notions of property that underlie Western jurisprudence and political theory are contrasted. This brings us to the identification of two major traditions in property thought that build on atomist or relational conceptions of society and property, respectively. Property might be conceived as an owner’s exclusive control over an object, or as a ‘bundle of rights’ that comprises entitlements, restrictions, and obligations to various actors. Largely within the paradigm of modernization as a trajectory of sustainability, these two fundamental traditions in property theory relate to different approaches to encode sustainability into property law: i) propertization, i.e. the extension of private property forms, as in the case of carbon emissions trading schemes; ii) the acknowledgment of social and environmental obligations inherent to property, illustrated by the social obligation norm in German law.

The Puritan Natural Law Theory of William Ames

1971 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lee W. Gibbs
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
New World ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social ◽  
Historical Importance ◽  
Natural Law Theory ◽  
Inalienable Rights ◽  
The Right ◽  
Right Of Resistance

This essay is an analysis of the natural law theory of one of the most important of the seventeenth-century Puritan philosophers and theologians, William Ames (1576-1633). Ames' theory of natural law has historical importance because of its contribution to the formulation of fundamental doctrines upon which modern democratic institutions were raised — such doctrines as the duties and inalienable rights of individual citizens, the social contract or government by consent of the people, and the right of resistance when a government exceeds the bounds of its authority. For although Ames spent his life in England and Holland, and although he died in the midst of his preparations to emigrate to America from Holland, his greatest impact and predominating influence were in the New World, He has justifiably been called ”the spiritual father of the New England churches,” ”the favorite theologian of early New England,” and ”the father of American theology.”

scholarly journals Three Grotian Theories of Humanitarian Intervention

2015 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Evan J. Criddle
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
International Law ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Humanitarian Intervention ◽  
First Century ◽  
Responsibility To Protect ◽  
Self Defense ◽  
The People ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
Law Of Nations

AbstractThis Article explores three theories of humanitarian intervention that appear in, or are inspired by, the writings of Hugo Grotius. One theory asserts that natural law authorizes all states to punish violations of the law of nations, irrespective of where or against whom the violations occur, to preserve the integrity of international law. A second theory, which also appears in Grotius’s writings, proposes that states may intervene as temporary legal guardians for peoples who have suffered intolerable cruelties at the hands of their own state. Each of these theories has fallen out of fashion today based on skepticism about their natural law underpinnings and concerns about how they have facilitated Western colonialism. As an alternative, this Article outlines a third theory that builds upon Grotius’s account of humanitarian intervention as a fiduciary relationship, while updating Grotius’s account for the twenty-first century. According to this new fiduciary theory, when states intervene to protect human rights abroad they exercise an oppressed people’s right of self-defense on their behalf and may use force solely for the people’s benefit. As fiduciaries, intervening states bear obligations to consult with and honor the preferences of the people they seek to protect, and they must respect international human rights governing the use of force within the affected state. By clarifying the respective responsibilities of the Security Council and individual states for humanitarian intervention, the fiduciary theory also lends greater coherency to the international community’s “responsibility to protect” human rights.

Natural Law in the Positive Laws: A Legislative or Adjudicative Issue?

1993 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Russell Hittinger
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Natural Justice ◽  
Positive Law ◽  
Single Method ◽  
Natural Law Theory ◽  
Written Law ◽  
Carry Over ◽  
Philosophical Questions ◽  
Different Levels

Debates over natural law routinely confuse three quite different sets of issues. First, there are the properly philosophical questions of (i) whether a natural law exists, and (ii) whether positive laws are valid completely apart from their moral specifications. Second, there are questions that properly belong to political theory. These include, (iii) how a constitution ought to allocate responsibility to make natural justice effective, and (iv) how a particular system of positive law handles this issue. Third, assuming that a judiciary is limited by written law, it can still be asked whether this necessarily prohibits judicial uses of natural law theory. Questions at these different levels are sufficiently different that what it takes to solve a question at one level does not necessarily carry over to the others. It is vain, therefore, to search for a single method that brings closure on these issues.

scholarly journals GROTIUS, DESCARTES E O PROBLEMA DO CETICISMO NO SÉCULO XVII: AS ORIGENS FILOSÓFICAS DO DEBATE JUSNATURALISMO VS. POSITIVISMO LEGAL

2011 ◽  
Vol 38 (120) ◽  
pp. 5
Author(s):  
Marcelo Araújo
Keyword(s):  
Natural Law ◽  
Rene Descartes ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
Legal Positivism ◽  
Historical Understanding ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
René Descartes ◽  
Natural Law Theory

O objetivo deste texto é contribuir para uma compreensão da história do debate entre jusnaturalismo e positivismo legal. Esse debate teve sua origem no século XVII, mais especificamente no contexto do ceticismo moderno acerca dos fundamentos da legitimidade do exercício da autoridade política. As respostas de Hugo Grotius e René Descartes ao problema do ceticismo, como se pretende mostrar, contribuíram para a emergência do debate entre jusnaturalismo e positivismo legal.Abstract: This paper aims to develop a historical understanding of the debate between natural law theory and legal positivism. This debate has its roots in the 17th century, particularly in the context of the modern skepticism about the justification for the exercise of political authority. I intend to show that the answer given by both Hugo Grotius and René Descartes against the skeptical attack contributed to the emergence of the debate between natural law theory and legal positivism.

Two Ciceronian Traditions in the Aftermath of Machiavelli

2021 ◽  
pp. 89-136
Author(s):  
Michael C. Hawley
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
John Milton ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Political Order ◽  
The People ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
The One

This chapter examines two parallel tracks on which Cicero’s influence was set during the seventeenth century. On the one hand, new natural law philosophers, Hugo Grotius and Samuel von Pufendorf, sought to vindicate a political order based on Ciceronian natural law. But in doing so, they tended to diminish the role of the people as ultimately politically sovereign. At the same time, English republicans such as James Harrington and John Milton sought to reconcile Ciceronian and Machiavellian republicanism, while minimizing the place of natural law. In short, the two pillars of Cicero’s original republican formulation became bifurcated.

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