Peter Schröder

The Constitution of the Holy Roman Empire after 1648: Samuel Pufendorf's Assessment in his 'Monzambano'

The examination of Pufendorfs Monzambano shows that he was strongly interested in the question of sovereignty, and that the complex reality of the Holy Roman Empire demanded a completely new approach to the question of where sovereignty within the Empire lay. Pufendorf developed his account of the Empire as an irregular political system by using essential aspects of Hobbess theory and thus departed from all previous writers on the forma imperii. But Pufendorfs writing on the Empire has not only to be linked with political and philosophical discussion about sovereignty within the Empire but also with his own main writings where he developed a more detailed theory regarding the issue of sovereignty in general. The peace of Westphalia was not only an international settlement but it also shaped the constitution of the Empire to a considerable degree, and this is of crucial significance for the history of political thought during the seventeenth century.

Thomas Hobbes, Christian Thomasius and the seventeenth century debate on the church and state

Along the entire course of that seventeenth century, the great principles of representative government and the rights of conscience were passing through the anguish of conflict and fiery trial (De Quincey).

Natural Law, Sovereignty and International Law: a comparative perspective

Current political affairs quite clearly demonstrate that the whole notion of international law still finds its limits in the assumption of state sovereignty.1 Hobbes’ theory of the state of nature provides a crucial starting point for looking into these puzzling issues since he himself had claimed ‘concerning the Offices of one Souveraign to another, which are comprehended in that Law, which is commonly called the Law of Nations, I need not say any thing in this place; because the Law of Nations, and the Law of Nature, is the same thing’.2 It is too easy to dismiss this assertion as proof that Hobbes was not really bothered by the question of international law.3 I will approach this issue in two distinct stages.