Patrick Thomas Riley

It is well-known that Leibniz ends and crowns the 1714 “Monadologie” with a version of his notion of jurisprudence universelle or “justice as the charity [love] of the wise:” for sections 83-90 of the Vienna manuscript claim that “the totality of all spirits must compose the City of God . . . this perfect government . . . the most perfect state that is possible . . . this truly universal monarchy [which is] a moral world in the natural world”—a moral world of iustitia in which “no good action would be unrewarded” for those “citizens” who “find pleasure . . . in the contemplation of [God’s] perfections, as is the way of genuine ‘pure love.’” But the opening four-fifths of the work offer Leibniz’ theory of “substance” viewed as the necessary pre-condition of justice: for “on the knowledge of substance, and in the consequence of the soul, depends the knowledge of virtue and of justice” . Thus without a complete and correct notion of substance/monad, no complete and correct notion commune de la justice would be conceivable. Hence the entire “Monadologie” can be understood as a theory of justice underpinned by a Grundlegung of moral “monads” or justice-loving rational “substances.” In this connection it is revelatory that Leibniz cites the relevant sections of the 1710 Théodicée in most of the 90 articles of the “Monadologie” : for Théodicée is “the justice of God,” and Leibniz makes that justice “appear” in the opening lines of the “Monadologie” by referring the reader immediately to Théodicée #10 —which relates “im­mortal spirits” to a just God who is cherished through “genuine pure love.” This means that “the justice of God” as “higher love” colors the “Monadologie” instantly. Thus one need not “wait” for sections 83-90 to arrive in order for the “Monadologie” to be a “theory of justice:” it is such ab initio

Michael Oakeshott as a Critic of Hobbes's Theory of the Will - ABSTRACT: Patrick Riley asks why the post-War Oakeshott stopped speaking of the incoherence of Hobbes’s philosophy of volition, as he had in his Hobbes studies before the War. One answer is that he became more and more sensitive to the necessity of counterbalancing the determinist reading of Hobbes, which tended to be dominant in the 1970s’ Hobbes studies. He cites the example of Thomas Spragens’s The Politics of Motion , according to which the human will appears only as a natural movement in a material universe. Although Jürgen Overhoff’s Theory of the Will advances the view that there is complete coherence in Hobbes’s conception of volition, Riley finds his arguments unconvincing. In the end, Riley declares himself favorable to Oakeshott’s "less satisfactory" interpretation of Hobbes, given the incoherence between the Hobbesian critique of free will, fully developed in The Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance, and the requirements of a political theory of contract in terms of a theory of rational will

To mark the 300th anniversary of the composition of Leibniz’ most important mature writing on justice, the Méditation sur la notion commune de la justice, I published an interpretation of this work in The Leibniz Review. But Dr. Andreas Blank, dissatisfied with my Platonizing “reading” of the Méditation, published his own commentary in the same Review —treating not just my 2003 article but also my Leibniz’ Universal Jurisprudence: Justice as the Charity of the Wise and several smaller writings from the period 1972-2002. Since Andreas Blank is a good Leibniz-scholar who deserves a reply, I want to attempt an answer; and to avoid any possible misrepresentation, I want to quote the beginning of his article, word-for-word.

To mark the 300th anniversary of the composition of Leibniz’ most important mature writing on justice, the Méditation sur la notion commune de la justice, I published an interpretation of this work in The Leibniz Review. But Dr. Andreas Blank, dissatisfied with my Platonizing “reading” of the Méditation, published his own commentary in the same Review —treating not just my 2003 article but also my Leibniz’ Universal Jurisprudence: Justice as the Charity of the Wise and several smaller writings from the period 1972-2002. Since Andreas Blank is a good Leibniz-scholar who deserves a reply, I want to attempt an answer; and to avoid any possible misrepresentation, I want to quote the beginning of his article, word-for-word.