Rousseau took up the challenge of explaining the origin of social inequality. Primitive humans lived simply and independently. Their natural amour de soi – self-love – was tempered by natural pity. As families connected into tribes, and nomads settled into stationary dwellings, a new sentiment arose: amour propre, or self-esteem. People began to compare themselves to one another and to seek attention. Natural pity was eclipsed by the urge to be admired and to dominate. The introduction of agriculture brought with it private property and competitive accumulation. Human society magnified modest natural inequalities, and immiserated itself in the process. Rousseau’s thought showed a sunnier side in his Du Contrat Sociale: the social contract. He professed not to know how humanity had come to be “everywhere” in chains, but proceeded to show how that condition was legitimate. The device was the social contract, to which individuals bring their possessions in order to secure them as property.

Humans seek not happiness but “power after power,” says Hobbes, and so we are perpetually at odds. We are equals in cunning and therefore equally insecure and equally error-prone. Our language contains “words of inconstant signification,” which means we must ever disagree about right and justice. Reason requires us to submit our disagreements to an arbiter – a “Common Power” – lacking whom we must be perpetually at war or on the verge of war with one another over things that matter.

Christian Wolff develops a theory of Enlightened absolutism and a paternalistic interventionist state on broadly Leibnizian promises, assigning to the state the role of promoting happiness amongst its subjects as material, intellectual, and spiritual thriving. He posits a state of nature characterised not by conflict but by stagnation. The duty of self-perfection impels individuals to leave the state of nature and to surrender their natural rights, and the state assumes the duty of co-ordination and steering of individual efforts, consistently with cameralist political economy. Herder reads Leibnizian monads as collective or national subjects, each contributing to the progressive realisation of species-capacities, and in principle harmoniously integrated with all others. He gives rise to expressive Romanticism, where self and world correspond, in contrast to ironic Romanticism, where such accord is in principle impossible, and to idealism, where the accord is a practical task.

The state of nature in social contract theories tells us two stories, one about who the main political actors are, and another one about the supra-juridical normativity and principles those actors use to judge and act politically once they are in the civil state. In my chapter I focus on the latter matter by contrasting Kant’s approach to the state of nature and its role in his social contract theory as given in the Feyerabend lectures with the conceptions of the state of nature in Hobbes, Locke, Achenwall, and Rousseau. Following the thesis that pre-juridical normativity functions as supra-juridical normativity once in the state, my main question is: how is "natural", in the sense of "pre-political", normativity generated? With this I am referring not only to the source of normativity, but mainly to how pretensions of normativity arise when people interact in the state of nature, and if these are or are not regulated by a moral-legal order independent from that interaction.

Chapter 7 begins with the reaction that followed from Price and Paine’s defence of the colonial cause. They agreed with the colonists that to live in dependence on the arbitrary will of someone else is what it means to be a slave, and consequently agreed that the colonists must have a natural right to free themselves from their servitude, if necessary by force. This was the moment when a large number of pro-imperial spokesmen came forward to claim that the colonists and their supporters were failing to understand what it means to speak of possessing or losing one’s liberty. They objected that we are not rendered unfree if we are merely subject to someone else’s will; we are only rendered unfree if we are restrained from acting in some particular way. Generally this definition of liberty has been seen as an invention of the late eighteenth century. But as this chapter shows, it arose out of a long tradition of legal and political argument that originated with Hobbes, Pufendorf and their followers. We already find it present in England in the early eighteenth century, and the pro-imperialist writers now brought it to the forefront of debate.

This chapter explains how international society emerged and was globalised. Its main purpose is to explore how the European sovereign states-system expanded across the globe to become the truly international order of sovereign states that we see today. The first part of the chapter examines how the expansion of the states-system came about and how it has been analysed. The second part provides a critical discussion of how the spread of the states-system has been understood in IR. It aims provoke thinking about the enduring Eurocentrism that continues to bedevil our theorising of international politics.

In this chapter, I examine whether punishment is morally permissible. Criminal prosecution and punishment are the main functions of international criminal justice and lie at the heart of what institutions of international criminal justice – such as the International Criminal Court – do. To begin, I reconstruct Locke’s argument for the permissibility of punishment. Locke argues that we have a moral duty to ‘preserve humanity’ and we can discharge that duty by exercising our ‘natural executive right’ – that is, a right to punish – in the state of nature. Punishments are effective in enforcing rights because they deter crimes. I discuss several objections against the consequentialist structure of Locke’s argument. To counter these objections, I argue for a mixed theory that distinguishes between justifying the practice of punishment and justifying the distribution of punishment within that practice. To explain the latter, we must take into account considerations of normative individualism, egalitarianism, and pragmatic considerations. Taken together, these arguments imply that coercive punishment is permissible for natural rights enforcement.

This chapter argues that looking at how Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler approached the state of nature brings to the fore where the two political leaders converge and where they diverge. Sharing a belief in the existence of a quasi-Hobbesian state of nature, they disagree how to respond politically to that state of nature. Whereas Hitler thought that domestically the state of nature could be overcome through a strong state and through strong communitarian bonds holding people together, and whereas internationally he believed peoples simply had to live with the continued existence of an unregulated state of nature, Trump’s conclusions are different. He puts little faith in the existence of the state. Yet he believes that both domestically and internationally the state of nature can be tamed through an intricate web of power relationships within groups as well as between groups that creates a relatively stable system. Trump is part of two quintessential American traditions rather than of fascism: the Mafia subculture of New York City and the extreme individualism of Ayn Rand. The concept of fascism thus ultimately distorts our understanding of today’s America.

In Chapter 8 I explore key moments of the reception of Plutarch in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. I look at key aspects of the resonance of Plutarch in the work of Francis Bacon (1561–1626). I also discuss the significance of Philemon Holland’s (1552–1637) translation of Plutarch’s essay “How to Profit from your Enemies.” I show how this essay (which Hobbes read in the original Greek and Latin translations but also consulted in Holland’s version) can shed new light on Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651).

The Philosophy of History’s search for a renewed sense wholeness originated in the paradoxes of Rousseau. He detested modern liberalism for producing the materialistic “bourgeois.” He wanted to restore the ancient concern with civic virtue and happiness to counteract this spiritual debasement. But because Rousseau accepted the modern account of nature as matter in motion, yielding appetitive individualism and identifying reason with utility, he could only promote the nobler dimension of human life as the freedom of will to oppose oneself to nature and reason altogether. This created a contradiction between nature and freedom, and undermined political authority by suggesting that no form of government could return us to our original natural happiness in a lost Golden Age, corrupted as we are by the progress of civilization. The Jacobins took this as a call to collectivist revolution and the return to “the Year One.” Alternatively, Rousseau extolled the Romantic notion of the solitary artist who seeks his happiness outside of civil society. These explosive tensions between natural happiness and political authority were grappled with by Rousseau’s successors, who sought ways of healing the division in man between his natural self and his free self.

Like Hobbes, Spinoza portrays the social order as arising out of a state of nature in which people aren’t constrained by laws, in which we may do whatever we can do, and in which our natural egoism makes life insecure and wretched. Unlike Hobbes, Spinoza thinks right is coextensive with power even in civil society, not only in the state of nature. Spinoza’s best argument for this arguably relies on two assumptions: if there were a natural law constraining our behavior, it would have to be based on a divine command; but God cannot be a lawgiver; prescriptive laws assume that the commanded can disobey; and no one can disobey an omnipotent being. Although Spinoza takes right to be based on power, he denies that sovereigns have a right to rule just as they please. Like Machiavelli and Hobbes, he is conscious of the fragility of political power. Even if the sovereign’s right is theoretically absolute, individuals are roughly equal in power; so any sovereign must depend on having at his command a group of people who will obey his enforcement commands without being coerced. Like Machiavelli, he prefers forms of government in which this de facto constraint is institutionalized.

The third chapter presents selections from Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Montesquieu, and David Hume, and explains the central theoretical assumptions of classical liberalism. Switching the emphasis from the people apprehended as an organic whole to the people as a collection of individuals, social contract theory presupposes that the state is an artificial entity created by human will and consent. The liberal perspective emphasizes the original equality and freedom of all individuals, often overlooking the unicity of each person, and values the private good over the common good. Excerpts from Hobbes and Locke illustrate the idea of the social contract. Although neither Montesquieu nor Hume embraced the social contract theory, their thought exemplifies the liberal ideas that the state should protect, as much as possible, the right of individuals to pursue their lives as they see fit.

This chapter critically examines Hobbes’s and Leibniz’s positions in relation to the concept of law and its role in regulating life of human communities. In line with his materialist stance and the controllability of space and discourse, Hobbes postulates the idea of the state and sovereign as central controlling devices able to create universality within a limited terriotry through control. Hobbes’s view of the state of nature and transition to the commonwealth are examined anew form this perspective. Leibniz’s concept of law is determined by the centrality of the concept of justice to his philosophy. Precepts of justice as eternal and universal truths discoverable by human beings shall inform accrding to Leibniz positive law within individuals human communities. However, he does not posit a particular form of life in common as determining but accepts diversity of political forms. Normativity of law in Leibniz derives not from its character of a command, like in Hobbes, but from a particular internal disposition of human beings, which in turn is determined by the internalisation of eternal truths as items constituting that logical grounding against which the human existence unfolds.

This introductory chapter presents the Valladolid junta in imperial Spain (1550-1551) as an alternative starting point for the history of international legal thought instead of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. Unlike Westphalia’s myth of equal states recognizing independence from the emperor and papacy within Europe, the Valladolid debate addressed the controversial question of legitimate infidel polities outside Europe. By focusing on native peoples on the colonial margins of transatlantic Christendom, the chapter reframes international relations from the periphery rather than strictly Europe. A more interesting story emerges, revealing that Christian-infidel relations and its discourse of infidel rights was an ambivalent predecessor to a modern international relations marked by recognition of independent sovereign states and colonial subjugation of less civilized ones. Accordingly, the chapter accomplishes two tasks: it reconsiders the Westphalian myth by examining the international politics of Thomas Hobbes attentive to his influential idea of the state of nature; it also treats significance of theology and the Church for affirming world order - the normative basis of international society - especially among sixteenth-century Spanish Dominicans associated with Valladolid critical of papal and imperial tyranny.

How did European thinking about interactions with peoples of the Indies move from Christian-infidel relations to an identifiably modern form of international relations? This chapter explores the preceding question by looking at the emergence of Protestant empires during the seventeenth-century and the ascendant neo-Stoic Christian legal humanism structuring new ideas of world order and providential commerce. It considers the growing ideological displacement of the legal category of the infidel, and the associated crime of idolatry, in the political context of the Indies, East but especially West. This chapter also addresses normative ideas about the savage that developed in the infidel’s wake. Although there were important differences between the Iberian empires and the new English and Dutch empires, there were also continuities. This chapter considers those similarities between Spanish religious thinkers and representative international thinkers on natural law and the law of nations such as Alberico Gentili, Hugo Grotius, Samuel Purchas, New England Puritans, and John Locke. What does the colonization of North America look like in light of Valladolid’s legacy from a century earlier?

Kant holds that the origin of our propensity to evil arises in connection with our unsociable sociability. The effective response to it, therefore, must also be social. We must leave the ethical state of nature and join with others in voluntary ethical community, where our shared ends, conceived as the highest good, under the legislation of a divine lawgiver will promote moral progress among human beings. The existing communities of this kind are churches and ecclesiastical faiths, which fall short of their religious vocation but can and should be reformed so as to live up to it. The relation of rational religion to revealed religion is therefore intended by Kant to be dynamic, with the interpretation of revealed religion enriching rational religion and the reform of revealed religion bringing rational and revealed religion into closer harmony, leading gradually toward the founding of the Kingdom of God on earth.

The Bible’s Primary History – the great history of the Israelite people extending from Genesis to Second Kings – contains within it a remarkable set of ideas about government and law. The work touches on nearly all of the great themes of political theory in the modern era – the necessity of government, the problem of anarchy, the moral basis of obligation, the distinguishing features of good and bad leaders, and the analysis of optimal government structure and design. Associated with these political ideas is a remarkably insightful exploration of the basic problems of jurisprudence: the nature of law, the justifications for constitutions, and the articulation of specific legal norms in legislations and principles of customary law.