Knud Haakonssen presents a working paper on 'Early Modern Natural Law: An Introduction'

This text is part of a basic introduction to early-modern natural law. It has to be read with the following limitations in mind. The piece has been written for an Englishlanguage audience, and all the references (except for titles of primary sources) are to works in English. In its fuller and properly scholarly version I do of course draw on the extensive literature in other languages, especially German, just as I engage with the critical literature. Secondly, the seminar text barely goes beyond the middle of the 18th century, except for a few references concerning French thought; the section on German natural law in the later 18th and early 19th century has been cut entirely for reasons of space – but see the final reference. Thirdly, it is useful to distinguish the history I am trying to outline from the overlapping history of rights (see some remarks on this at pp. 16-17). Finally, this paper sticks – more or less – to the highways of natural law, but it is meant as a map from which the byways are pursued through much closer contextualisation, especially localisation, in the form of case studies of individual thinkers, locales and themes. A few of my case studies have been presented in earlier seminars at MWK, and a great deal more is being done within the network on Natural Law 1625-1850. The cumulative effect of this work is likely to be that my current routes have to be amended and supplemented, indeed that some of them may turn out to be blind alleys. In other words, this is work that I explicitly entertain as an invitation to have it undermined.