Full Description
Swiss-born Emer de Vattel (1714-1767) was one of the last eminent thinkers of natural law. He shaped the later part of early-modern natural jurisprudence. At the time, the subject had become a fashionable academic sub-discipline in both jurisprudence and philosophy. Vattel's considerable impact on statesmen, political thinkers, diplomats and lawyers during his lifetime and after rested primarily on the fact that his The Law of Nations (1758) transformed natural law into the basis of a more comprehensive and practicable theory of interstate relations. His ideas served to promote reform programmes whose comprehensive natures spanned the domains of economic reform, constitutionalism and international diplomacy and foreign trade policy. Vattel's conception centred round the principle that defined all sovereign states as nations composed of societies of free men and profoundly influenced legal and political debates in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Contents
Concepts and contexts of Vattel's political and legal thought - an introduction Peter Schröder; Part I. Historical and Intellectual Contexts: 1. In search of a nation: Vattel, Neuchâtel and the Swiss confederacy Nadir Weber; 2. Sovereignty contested: Vattel's use of Leibniz, Hobbes and Pufendorf Ben Holland; 3. The development of the law of nations: Wolff and Vattel Ere Nokkala; 4. Vattel and the Abbe de Choisy: French historiography, piety and law of nations Francesca Iurlaro; 5. Vattel and the seven years' war Koen Stapelbroek; Part II. Concepts: 6. Vattel, the balance of power, and the moral justification of war Camilla Boisen; 7. Regular war, irregulars, and savages Pablo Kalmanovitz; 8. Constitutionalism Antonio Trampus; 9. Vattel's theory of the social contract Gabriella Silvestrini; Part III. Receptions: 10. Vattel's reception in British America, 1761-1775 Mark Somos; 11. Tradition and revolution: eighteenth century German and French contexts and Vattel's law of nations Nathaniel Boyd; 12. Vattel's law of nations in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Greece and Italy Elisabetta Fiocchi Malaspina; 13. Reception of Vattel in 18th and early 19th century England and Scotland Marco Barducci; 14. Receptions of Vattel in 19th- and 20th-century international law Theodore Christov; 15. Vattel's reception in international relations Richard Devetak.
