| Summary: | "In this study T.J. Hochstrasser analyses and explains the development of natural law theories in Germany between Grotius and Kant. Particular attention is paid to Samuel Pufendorf and his followers, who incorporated many of the key theoretical insights of Thomas Hobbes into German political theory, and evolved a natural law theory based on human sociability and a self-sufficient concept of human reason. In so doing, they fostered a new methodology in German philosophy, eclecticism, which remained a major creative force in intellectual life down to the emergence of Kantian idealism.
This intellectual tradition is recovered through a detailed analysis of the so-called 'histories of morality', which assessed contemporary innovations in ethics and political philosophy by describing the progress of the discipline since ancient times, and thus constitute the first serious histories of political thought. Equal consideration is also given to rationalist attempts by Leibniz and Wolff to defend traditional scholastic natural law against Hobbes and the followers of Pufendorf, and thus the work offers a detailed account of the range and importance of natural law theories within Germany in the era of enlightened absolutism, up to and including the onset of the Kantian revolution in moral philosophy."--Jacket.
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