SUMMARY

This study broadly aims to investigate the influence exercised by the theories of natural law developed by Grotius, Hobbes and Pufendorf on the early stages of the Enlightenment in Germany. When the notion of ‘influence’ is applied to a long span of time and to a large number of writers it can easily deteriorate into nothing more than the correlation of supercially similar doctrines, unless there also exists a range of contemporary sources which discuss self-consciously the relation of contemporary practice to past achievement. Such sources exist for this topic in the form of a series of ‘histories of morality’, published between approximately 1680 and 1750 in both France and Germany. These were written either as separate works or as introductions to editions of the works of recent writers on natural law theory. Their stated purpose was to provide an account of how the seventeenth-century achievement in natural law was progressively refined and revised, pre-eminently so by Pufendorf, and to relate that achievement to previous discussion of natural law by Christian and Classical writers. By studying these histories we are able to expose to view the fierce theoretical disagreements between the exponents of natural law theories in Baroque German culture and thus recover the parameters of the debate contextually in a way that is not possible from the main texts viewed in isolation.