A complete translation into English of Fichte's most important work of political philosophy.

This Guide examines Fichte's main political concepts including morality, the summons, social contract, freedom, the body and human rights.

The German philosopher, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), has long been recognized as an important and original figure in the history of philosophy and Western thought and as a seminal influence upon the Romantic tradition. The essays in this book focus on Fichte's contributions in political theory as set out in his Foundations of Natural Right. Fichte was notorious as a political radical and his ideas in in political theory proved to be decisive influences upon his contemporaries and of striking relevance to current political dispute. This volume of essays, which examine such issues as Fichte as a social contract theorist, his theory of gender relations and his theories on punishment and the criminal law among many other topics, remedies what has been a striking lacuna in the existing scholarly literature.

This Guide examines Fichte's main political concepts including morality, the summons, social contract, freedom, the body and human rights.

This Guide examines Fichte's main political concepts including morality, the summons, social contract, freedom, the body and human rights.

Recent years have seen a renaissance of interest in the relationship between natural law and natural rights. During this time, the concept of natural rights has served as a conceptual lightning rod, either strengthening or severing the bond between traditional natural law and contemporary human rights. Does the concept of natural rights have the natural law as its foundation or are the two ideas, as Leo Strauss argued, profoundly incompatible? With The Foundations of Natural Morality, S. Adam Seagrave addresses this controversy, offering an entirely new account of natural morality that compellingly unites the concepts of natural law and natural rights. Seagrave agrees with Strauss that the idea of natural rights is distinctly modern and does not derive from traditional natural law. Despite their historical distinctness, however, he argues that the two ideas are profoundly compatible and that the thought of John Locke and Thomas Aquinas provides the key to reconciling the two sides of this long-standing debate. In doing so, he lays out a coherent concept of natural morality that brings together thinkers from Plato and Aristotle to Hobbes and Locke, revealing the insights contained within these disparate accounts as well as their incompleteness when considered in isolation. Finally, he turns to an examination of contemporary issues, including health care, same-sex marriage, and the death penalty, showing how this new account of morality can open up a more fruitful debate.

Daniel Chernilo offers an original reconstruction of the history of universalism in modern social thought from Hobbes to Habermas.

Foundations of Public Law offers an account of the formation of the discipline of public law with a view to identifying its essential character, explaining its particular modes of operation, and specifying its unique task. Building on the framework first outlined in The Idea of Public Law (OUP, 2003), the book conceives public law broadly as a type of law that comes into existence as a consequence of the secularization, rationalization and positivization of the medieval idea of fundamental law. Formed as a result of the changes that give birth to the modern state, public law establishes the authority and legitimacy of modern governmental ordering. Public law today is a universal phenomenon, but its origins are European. Part I of the book examines the conditions of its formation, showing how much the concept borrowed from the refined debates of medieval jurists. Part II then examines the nature of public law. Drawing on a line of juristic inquiry that developed from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries-extending from Bodin, Althusius, Lipsius, Grotius, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke and Pufendorf to the later works of Montesquieu, Rousseau, Kant, Fichte, Smith and Hegel-it presents an account of public law as a special type of political reason. The remaining three Parts unpack the core elements of this concept: state, constitution, and government. By taking this broad approach to the subject, Professor Loughlin shows how, rather than being viewed as a limitation on power, law is better conceived as a means by which public power is generated. And by explaining the way that these core elements of state, constitution, and government were shaped respectively by the technological, bourgeois, and disciplinary revolutions of the sixteenth century through to the nineteenth century, he reveals a concept of public law of considerable ambiguity, complexity and resilience.

The trust is a highly popular mode of property-holding and one of the most important innovations in the law of equity. It presents the jurist with numerous conceptual, doctrinal, and ethical challenges. In addition to being used towards the pursuit of good, trusts have also been used for ill, and the interaction of trust law with other laws agitates received principles of justice, efficiency, and coherence in the law. Trust law remains, nevertheless, under-theorized. While its technical and doctrinal aspects have been studied intensively, the foundational questions to which they give rise have remained largely unexamined. This volume takes an important step towards filling this gap. The chapters in this book explore some of these quandaries with a view to initiating and encouraging further engagement and learning. They identify different challenges and adopt a variety of methodological approaches and perspectives towards their resolution, ranging from conceptual questions about what is 'the trust' and 'trusts law', chapters analysing the legal and/or moral statuses of each of the settlor, trustee, and beneficiary, to chapters questioning the moral foundations of different trusts and range of pursuits towards which parties have deployed them.