Natur als Argument in juridischen Diskursen und literarischen Imaginationen von der Frühen Neuzeit bis zur Aufklärung

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This project combines legal and literary history in an exploration of new epistemic approaches regarding the developments in natural law from the early 17th century on. After reconstructing the early modern interdependencies between the innovative potential of professional jurisprudence and literary imaginations during the first period of the programm, the second period will focus on the correlation between the natural law discourse and social ethics from the early 18th century to 1790. Historical accounts have usually treated these two strands separately, the developments of positive law having been rarely correlated with the new paradigm in natural law that emerged around 1600. Our joint project undertakes to overcome this divide, which the period itself did not draw but which is the product of later disciplinary distinctions and their particular narratives of progress. We aim to develop descriptive categories that will enable us to consider the two fields together both in their dependence on older, mainly legal traditions and in their discontinuities with these traditions. In doing so, we will relate ideas connected with natural law and, especially, conceptions of the status naturalis to narrative experiments in which juridical propositions are tested under utopian conditions literary texts that depict the lives of consummately virtuous people in an ideal commonwealth. The developments which are to be explored are interdependent: the invention of the state founded on an idea of 'natural' origin has its counterpart in an anthropology that defines man as dependent on a network of social relations generating fundamental norms and obligations.