Natural Rights and Politics in Early Modern Europe
Description
This edited collection examines the political use of natural rights in the early modern period, deepening our understanding of how these forerunners of contemporary human rights developed throughout Europe and its colonies. Despite the ubiquity of the idea of human rights in our political culture as well as scholarship, interest in natural rights remains sporadic and fragmentary, often taking a purely theoretical approach. By interrogating the relationship between natural rights and politics, this volume provides a new perspective, one that posits that the nature and evolution of subjective natural rights are best understood by studying the uses to which they were put. This understanding allows us to explore the implications of applying natural rights language within the political and socio-cultural landscapes of the early modern period. The authors analyse the various ways in which concepts drawn from natural rights were deployed in specific political contexts, from studies of sixteenth-century humanist jurisprudence to examinations of the French Ideologues' rejection of natural rights, and their role in the debates of the Cisalpine Republic at the end of the eighteenth century. In doing so, the collection reveals the diverse political projects that natural rights served, their relationship with republicanism, and the emergence and evolution of particular rights.
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Persons
Marc Belissa is Emeritus Maître de Conférences and Research Director at Paris Nanterre University, France. He has written numerous books and articles on the eighteenth century and the French Revolution.
Yannick Bosc is Maître de Conférences at the University of Rouen Normandy in France. He is Researcher at the laboratory GRHis, in Rouen, and also at the laboratory GREECS, in Spain.
Suzanne Levin is Post-doctoral Research Fellow in the Turin Humanities Programme (Fondazione 1563) in Italy, where she specialises in the socio-cultural history of politics in the eighteenth century. Interested in the complex relationship between ideas and politics, she has studied the role of republicanism and natural rights in the French Revolution.
Content
Chapter 1: The Arbitrary Nature of Authority: The Case of Pietrino Belli.- Chapter 2: Between Natural Law and Human Rights? The Transliteration of Jus Gentium in Renaissance Jurisprudence.- Chapter 3: Rediscovering the Talmud's Legal Tradition: Jewish Sources in the Natural Law Discourse of John Selden and Hugo Grotius.- Chapter 4: 'La defensa es permitida según derecho natural y humano': Natural Rights, or the Jesuits' Best Assets in their Armed Defense of the Province of Paraguay (1609-1641).- Chapter 5: Natural Limitations to the Rights of Kings. The Case of Denmark-Norway (1648-1670).- Chapter 6: Property: A Natural Right of Resistance.- Chapter 7: When Liberty of Conscience was Not Yet a Particular Natural Right: An Instance with Pierre Bayle's Toleration.- Chapter 8: The Missing Revolution: The Claim for Women's Rights in the Eighteenth Century.- Chapter 9: Natural Human Rights against the Ideologues' Republicanism?.- Chapter 10: Human Rights and Political Struggle: The Cisalpine Republic (1796-1799).- Chapter 11: Conclusion - Yannick Bosc & Marc Belissa.