Wolffian natural law: A contested identity?

Information from the organisers

Further information on the programme can be found on the research centre's website.

Venue: MWK, University of Erfurt
Time: 5.3-6.3. 2025
Organisers: Mads Langballe Jensen, Martin Kühnel, Mikkel Munthe Jensen
Funding: DFG and Fritz Wiedemann-Stiftung

“Wolffianism” is commonly recognised as the dominant school of philosophy in much of the eighteenth century, and hence as a significant episode in the general history of philosophy. “Wolffianism” was not least a phenomenon in the history of natural law. Christian Wolff produced an extensive body of works on the law of nature and nations in the 1740s and 1750s as part of his philosophical system and intended to replace the works of Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf as the standard literature in the discipline. For the Wolffians themselves, and other contemporary and later observers, Wolff’s works constituted a new and distinct form of natural law.[1]

“Wolffian natural law”, however, predated Christian Wolff’s own works by several decades. The natural law presented in his early German Ethics and German Politics was at best rudimentary, although he did set out a fuller conception of natural law already in his lectures in Marburg. So – as later with Kant – his followers started developing philosophical insights from these and his metaphysical works and applied them in their own works of natural law. Already in 1736, for instance, the decidedly non-Wolffian Danish professor of natural law, Andreas Hojer, listed works of natural law by scholars explicitly identified as “followers of Wolff”, including the Jena professor Heinrich Koehler. Hojer identified the doctrine of moral goodness and obligation independent of the divine as characteristic of Wolff, but he noted also that not all “the doctors or lovers of Wolffian philosophy” subscribe to this.[2]

Neither was Wolff himself perhaps the greatest populariser of Wolffian natural law. Several of his students’ works on natural law seem to have been just as great, or greater, vehicles for the transmission of “Wolffian natural law”, including Wolff’s protégé Ludwig Philipp Thümmig’s Institutiones Philosophiae Wolffianae (1725-1726) and Joachim Georg Darjes’ Observationes iuris naturalis socialis et gentium (1751-1754). Such works informed independent lectures on natural law or became the subject of detailed lectures themselves.

This leads to the key question of what principles and attitudes might be taken to define “Wolffian natural law”: an invocation of Wolff’s works and authority; perfection as the fundamental principle of natural law; a mathematical method and the primacy of the discipline and method of philosophy over other disciplines; the principle of sufficient reason; optimism about the human will and intellect; a distinct idea of the civic or educational role of Wolffianism (also for women); or something else entirely? All or only some of these? Such ideas are open to differing interpretations, and thinkers might adopt one or more of these ideas. But what was significant for natural lawyers in the eighteenth century to see themselves or others as Wolffians? And what is significant for modern scholarship to classify a natural lawyer as “Wolffian”?

Such considerations indicate that also in the domain of natural law, “Wolffianism” in the eighteenth century was a less unitary phenomenon, and that its relationship to other intellectual currents, such as “Pietism” or other, rival forms of natural law was less clear cut.[3]

To what extent, then, can there be said to have been a coherent school of “Wolffian natural law” in the eighteenth century and how was it distinguished from and how did it interact with other “schools” of natural law and the law of nations? Can distinct centres of teaching and modes of propagation be identified? What was the significance of Wolffianism for the disciplinary and institutional history of natural law? This conference invites contributions that address such questions by looking at the teaching of natural law at specific times and locales across eighteenth-century Europe (and beyond).