Research Unit for Early-Modern Natural Law

The research unit was created in 2016 and since 2019 has been jointly run by the Max Weber Centre and the Gotha Research Centre. Its purpose is to foster new work and coordinate current scholarship on natural law in the early modern period, which we take to stretch from the Reformation to the early nineteenth century. Within this framework, the focus is on the flowering of natural law in the period after Hugo Grotius and especially the shaping of the subject as an academic institution across Europe. This is reflected in the main project, "Natural Law 1625–1850", which we are conducting in collaboration with the Interdisciplinary Centre for European Enlightenment Studies (IZEA) of the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg. The major publication project “Natural Law and Enlightenment Classics” is edited by the research unit, and a series on “Natural Law 1625–1850” is being launched by Brill under the general editorship of the directors of this project. In addition to IZEA, we have close links with The Institute of Intellectual History at the University of St. Andrews. The research unit welcomes doctoral researchers and visiting fellows at the Max Weber Centre and the Gotha Research Centre who are interested in early modern natural law to become affiliated with the research unit.

Dr. Mikkel Munthe Jensen introduces the research centre
Research Centre for Early-Modern Natural Law

Main Project

Natural Law 1625-1850. An International Research Project (Halle/Erfurt)

The project is focussed on natural law as an academic institution in the period from 1625 to 1850. The ambition is to combine traditional approaches to natural law as a set of ideas with a comprehensive history of academic reception, transmission, and uses that takes into account institutional, political, and legal contexts. This ambition can only be realised by supplementing the published record of natural law – its textbooks and treatises – with a much wider range of sources. Accordingly the heart of the project is a large digitization programme of natural-law texts, commentaries, and pedagogical programs, supplemented by a bibliography and a data base

A project of such magnitude has to be organised at a European level, with the ambition of eventually including also teaching in the colonial institutions in North and South America. We see it as a 'federal' project of participating institutions, but working to a coherent plan. Most of the institutions will want to deal with their own natural-law record, and their local web sites are or will be linked to the present site that functions as a portal for the project as a whole, including the bibliography and data bases.

The project is being directed by Frank Grunert, Knud Haakonssen, and Louis Pahlow and rests on a group of about twenty collaborators, representing the participating universities and libraries across Europe. The project has a large and growing body of members, who are scholars of natural law wanting to make use of the materials provided by the project.

Research projects

The project is about the history of the teaching of natural law at the three north German universities in Kiel, Greifswald and Rostock during the period 1648-1806. It is concerned with why, how and to what extent this academic discipline developed in three different political settings along the Baltic coast. The project is based on the general presumption that natural law was of great significance for the period's intellectual development and state building endeavours. The general aim of the project is to show that "modern" natural law, even at smaller north German universities, was playing an important role in this matter.

Principal Investigator: Dr. Mikkel Munthe Jensen (Halle)

Funding: German Research Foundation (DFG) € 350,000

Period: 1 July 2022 - 30 June 2026

Collaboration projects

Academic natural law in absolutist Denmark c. 1690-1773: Professionalisation and politics
Project Director: Dr. Mads Langballe-Jensen, University of Halle-Wittenberg
Funding: German Research Foundation (DFG) € 340,000

The teaching and formation of natural law at the University of Halle. The first period: 1694-1740
Project Director: Dr Martin Kühnel, University of Halle-Wittenberg
Funding: German Research Foundation (DFG) € 330,000

Staff

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Members

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Cooperation partners