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4Law and Politics in British Colonial Thought: Transpositions of Empire (edited book)Palgrave MacMillan. 2010.A collection that focuses on the role of European law in colonial contexts and engages with recent treatments of this theme in known works written largely from within the framework of postcolonial studies, which implicitly discuss colonial deployments of European law and politics via the concept of ideology.
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15Arguments over obligation: Teaching time and place in moral philosophyIn Teaching the New Histories of Philosophy: A Conference, University Center For Human Values, Princeton University. pp. 131-168. 2003.The paper concentrates on two questions: first, the problem of how to introduce students to philosophical argument in a contextualised and pluralist manner; and, second, the question of what kind of texts such a pedagogy requires at its disposal. The two questions are of course intimately related, as the dominance of the single-aim present-centred approach brings with it a highly selective publication of the archive, in editions typically suited to the aims of rational reconstruction rather than…Read more
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15Introduction: The Persona of the Philosopher in the Eighteenth CenturyIntellectual History Review 18 (3): 315-317. 2008.
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16The invention of human nature: the intention and reception of Pufendorf’s entia moralia doctrineHistory of European Ideas 45 (7): 933-952. 2019.In treating human nature as a ‘moral entity’, imposed by God for reasons into which man could have no direct insight, Samuel Pufendorf reconfigured the architecture of natural law thought in a fundamental way. For this meant that rather than deducing norms from a nature in which they had been embedded by God and could be discerned by self-reflective reason, man had to derive them by observing the requirements of the exigent condition in which he happened to find himself; and it further meant tha…Read more
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18The paper examines how the Religious Edict, seen as a public-law instrument for the management of religious peace, might provide a new context for Kant's theology, now seen as an unsettling public intervention in a concrete religious and political culture. I shall begin by outlining a revisionist account of the Religious Edict as a representative instance of Prussian 'enlightened absolutist' Religionspolitik ; then move on to a sketch of Kant's philosophical theology as a rational religious inte…Read more
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8The passions of the prince: Moral philosophy and Staatskirchenrecht in Thomasius's conception of sovereigntyCultural and Social History: Official Journal of the Social History Society 2. 2005.
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25Giorgio Agamben's Form of lifePolitics, Religion and Ideology 18 (2): 135-156. 2017.Giorgio Agamben’s discourse on Franciscan monasticism is generally received in accordance with his presentation of it: as a genealogy or archaeology of the way in which the Franciscans were the first to embody an exemplary form of life. This paper offers a different view, arguing that Agamben’s account of the Franciscans is actually an allegory whose underlying structure and meaning is supplied by Heideggerian metaphysics. One of the striking features of Agamben’s discourse is that it treats act…Read more
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Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern GermanyCambridge University Press. 2001.Rival Enlightenments, first published in 2001, is a major reinterpretation of early modern German intellectual history. Ian Hunter approaches philosophical doctrines as ways of fashioning personae for envisaged historical circumstances, here of confessional conflict and political desacralization. He treats the civil philosophy of Pufendorf and Thomasius and the metaphysical philosophy of Leibniz and Kant as rival intellectual cultures or paideiai, thereby challenging all histories premised on Ka…Read more
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37The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral PhilosophyPhilosophical Review 109 (3): 444. 2000.With this work J. B. Schneewind has provided the most comprehensive history of modern moral philosophy available in English. Beginning with the moral theology of the Reformation and ending with Kant, Schneewind’s book offers a panorama of moral philosophy that includes the early modern natural lawyers and their metaphysical critics, the British sentimentalists and their rationalist opponents, and a whole series of eighteenth-century attempts to develop a secular moral philosophy grounded in auto…Read more
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48The invention of autonomy: A history of modern moral philosophyPhilosophical Review 109 (3): 444-447. 2000.With this work J. B. Schneewind has provided the most comprehensive history of modern moral philosophy available in English. Beginning with the moral theology of the Reformation and ending with Kant, Schneewind’s book offers a panorama of moral philosophy that includes the early modern natural lawyers and their metaphysical critics, the British sentimentalists and their rationalist opponents, and a whole series of eighteenth-century attempts to develop a secular moral philosophy grounded in auto…Read more
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36The philosopher in early modern Europe: the nature of a contested identity (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2006.In this groundbreaking collection of essays the history of philosophy appears in a new light, not as reason's progressive discovery of its universal conditions, but as a series of unreconciled disputes over the proper way to conduct oneself as a philosopher. By shifting focus from the philosopher as proxy for the universal subject of reason to the philosopher as a special persona arising from rival forms of self-cultivation, philosophy is approached in terms of the social office and intellectual…Read more
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15Introduction: The Persona of the Philosopher in the Eighteenth CenturyIntellectual History Review 18 (3): 315-317. 2008.No abstract
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37Lessons from the 'Literatory': How to Historicise AuthorshipCritical Inquiry 17 (3): 479-509. 1991.Authorship has proven a magnetic topic for literary studies and is now identified as an index of the current state of literary history and theory. The significance of this topic stems from a characteristic that literary criticism shared with the other human sciences: its drive to adopt a reflexive and self-critical posture towards its own central objects and concepts. By reflecting on authorship, criticism aspires not just to describe a literary phenomenon; it also wishes to bring to light the c…Read more
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30Walks of Life: Mauss on the Human GymnasiumBody and Society 1 (2): 65-81. 1995.This paper discusses Marcel Mauss's paper on body techniques. It argues that Mauss's account of the acquisition of bodily capacities and deportments makes it unnecessary to think of the body as any kind of unity, for example, by opposing it to 'mind' or 'spirit', which have their own techniques.
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19Secularisation: process, program, and historiographyIntellectual History Review 27 (1): 7-29. 2017.
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19Public Law and the Limits of Philosophy: German Idealism and the Religious ConstitutionCritical Inquiry 44 (3): 528-553. 2018.
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32The Figure of Man and the Territorialisation of Justice in 'Enlightenment' Natural Law: Pufendorf and VattelIntellectual History Review 23 (3): 289-307. 2013.Discussions of early modern philosophical anthropology in postcolonial studies often treat it as tied to Eurocentric conceptions of civilisational supremacism and to the ideologies of imperialism and colonialism served by these conceptions. In discussing the conceptions of man contained in two key early modern doctrines of the law of nature and nations ? those of Samuel Pufendorf and Emer de Vattel ? this paper casts a sceptical eye on the postcolonial accounts. The anthropologies deployed by Pu…Read more
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50The Morals of Metaphysics: Kant’s Groundwork as Intellectual PaideiaCritical Inquiry 28 (4): 908-929. 2002.To approach philosophy as a way of working on the self means to begin not with the experience it clarifies and the subject it discovers, but with the acts of self‐transformation it requires and the subjectivity it seeks to fashion. Commenting on the variety of spiritual exercises to be found in the ancient schools, Pierre Hadot remarks that: Some, like Plutarch’s ethismoi, designed to curb curiosity, anger or gossip, were only practices intended to ensure good moral habits. Others, particularly …Read more
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42Natural Law as Political PhilosophyIn Desmond M. Clarke & Catherine Wilson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy in Early Modern Europe, Oxford University Press. pp. 475-499. 2011.Rather than a history of seventeenth-century natural law, then, this chapter offers an outline of several different contextual uses of the language of natural law, as it was used in formulating the intellectual architecture for rival constructions of political and religious authority.
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42Conflicting obligations: Pufendorf, Leibniz and Barbeyrac on civil authorityHistory of Political Thought 25 (4): 670-699. 2004.Barbeyrac's republication of and commentary on Leibniz' attack on Pufendorf's natural-law doctrine is often seen as symptomatic of the failure of all three early moderns to solve a particular moral-philosophical problem: that of the relationship between civil authority and morality. Making use of the first English translation of Barbeyrac's work, this article departs from the usual view by arguing that here we are confronted by three conflicting constructions of civil obligation, arising not fro…Read more
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550The history of theoryCritical Inquiry 33 (1): 78-112. 2006.Do you see now why it feels so good to be a critical mind? Why critique, this most ambiguous pharmakon, has become such a potent euphoric drug? You are always right! When naïve believers are clinging forcefully to their objects... you can turn all of those attachments into so many fetishes and humiliate all the believers by showing that it is nothing but their own projection, that you, yes you alone, can see. But as soon as naïve believers are thus inflated by some belief in their own importance…Read more
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69Kant and Vattel in Context: Cosmopolitan Philosophy and Diplomatic CasuistryHistory of European Ideas 39 (4): 477-502. 2013.Summary A good deal of the late-twentieth-century commentary on Kant's ‘Perpetual Peace’ essay accepted its author's view that his conception of cosmopolitan justice had superseded the law of nations, some of whose leading exponents—Grotius, Pufendorf, and Vattel—Kant characterised as ‘miserable comforters’. Focusing on the case of Vattel, in this paper I begin to subject Kant's claim to an historical investigation, asking whether his ‘Perpetual Peace’ did indeed supersede Vattel's Law of Nation…Read more
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35Vattel's Law of Nations: Diplomatic Casuistry for the Protestant NationGrotiana 31 (1): 108-140. 2010.This paper argues that Vattel's Droit des gens cannot be adequately interpreted as based on a philosophical principle, whether of universal justice or of raison d'état. Rather, Vattel unfolds his law of nations within a casuistical discourse where inconsistent principles are deployed strategically. This forms an ethical space in which universal justice can be continuously adapted to the exigencies of national self-interest as interpreted by the diplomat of a Protestant republican nation
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