La publication de l' "Emile" et du "Contrat social" a dressé les autorités de l'Europe entière contre Rousseau. A Genève, les deux ouvrages sont condamnés et brûlés le 18 juin 1762.

This volume sheds new light on modern theories of natural law through the lens of the fragmented political contexts of Italy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the dramatic changes of the times. From the age of reforms, through revolution and the 'Risorgimento', the unification movement which ended with the creation of the unified Kingdom of Italy in 1861, we see a move from natural law and the law of nations to international law, whose teaching was introduced in Italian (...) universities of the newly created Kingdom. The essays collected here show that natural law was not only the subject of a highly codified academic teaching, but also provided a broader conceptual and philosophical framework for the 'science of man'. Natural law was also a language in which reform programmes of education and politics were formulated and were acted upon. (shrink)

This article discusses the well-known verdict of Vattel's legal positivism in relation to concepts of modernity and the European State System and aims at a re-interpretation of Vattel's understanding of the modern state, just war and the international order. It wants to show that even though States and individuals do not obey the same logic and reason, Vattel was neiter a Hobbesian thinker nor, as Kant claimed, a 'sorry comforter'. The main reason for this is that Vattel's doctrine of the (...) war en forme does not imply a break with the tradition of just war. Instead, it should be read as a reformulation of the inegalitarian notion of the enemy as proposed by just war doctrines. Pointing out to the persistance of a jusnaturalistic framework, the article shows that Vattel's concept of justus hostis is built on the same conceptual framework as the concept of the enemy of the human race. (shrink)

Nombreuses interprétations contextualistes de la pensée politique de Rousseau ont cherché à en faire l’expression des croyances politiques, religieuses et sociales de la bourgeoisie de Genève. Cet article se propose de réaffirmer l’importance du contexte genevois pour comprendre le républicanisme de Rousseau, tout en soulignant les limites d’une démarche contextualiste sans nuance.— Many scholars practising following a contextualist approach have explained Rousseau’s political thought as the expression of religious, political and social beliefs of the Genevan bourgeoisie. In this article the (...) author focuses on the importance of the Genevan context in order to understand Rousseau’s republicanism and stresses at the same time the limits of a too narrow contextualist perspective. (shrink)

S’interrogeant sur le statut de la profession de foi du Vicaire savoyard, cet article veut mettre en lumière l’articulation entre religion naturelle, droit naturel et droit politique qui se trouve à la base du « système » de Rousseau. Cette articulation permet également de montrer que cette doctrine de la tolérance ne lie pas la tolérance théologique universelle à l’égard des croyances individuelles à l’idée d’un culte national uniforme au niveau politique, à savoir un seul modèle de religion civile . (...) Au contraire, les circonstances historiques imposent une pluralité de solutions au niveau politique. Cette vision universelle de la tolérance procède du refus de tout universalisme dogmatique.The author discusses the meaning of the Savoyard vicar’s profession of faith in order to explain the peculiar relationship between natural religion, natural law and political right which lays at the basis of Rousseau’s system. Beginning from this relationship, it is possible to show that Rousseau’s theory of toleration is not characterized by the problematic alliance between a private liberty of conscience and a public national religion in the political realm. On the contrary, in order to solve the problem of political toleration Rousseau envisages a plurality of solutions to suit different historical circumstances. He thus endorses a universal doctrine of toleration that is built on the refusal to universalise any single model of toleration. (shrink)

The relationship between the political theory of Rousseau and modern natural law continues to be the subject of debate, both with regard to Rousseau's faithfulness to the idea of natural law itself and regarding the precise extent of the debt he owed to his predecessors. In this article the author re-examines this relationship by focusing attention on what has been defined as the protestant tradition of natural law. In particular she concentrates on the political and theoretical exercise that Jean Barbeyrac (...) had sought to perform by constructing a particular version of this tradition, namely that of using the science of natural law to promote a policy of tolerance between protestants and to justify the right of citizens to resist catholic sovereigns who denied them religious freedom, as well as the right of protestant countries to come to the aid of persecuted fellow believers. The thesis asserts that Rousseau was fully aware of this exercise, just as he was aware that some of Barbeyrac's ideas had been adopted and reworked by another illustrious Genevan, Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui, a member of the Small Council, to support anti-populist and antidemocratic politics in Geneva. Viewed in this way it is possible to perceive in Rousseau's political thought not so much a “first crisis” of natural law as an intention to reformulate this science from a republican perspective in order to derive rigorous principles of political law from it. And in developing his republican political theory Rousseau took up and overturned the analysis of democratic sovereignty carried out by Pufendorf, who in opposing the “pro-monarchist” excesses of authors such as Hobbes and Horn had unhesitatingly demonstrated the complete validity of democratic sovereignty. ☆ I would like to thank Matthew Armistead for his excellent English translation. The article is a revised version of ‘Rousseau, Pufendorf e la tradizione giusnaturalistica settecentesca’, in M. Ferronato (ed.), Dal “De Jure naturae et gentium” di Samuel Pufendorf alla codificazione prussiana del 1794, Padova, Cedam, 2005, pp. 115–185. (shrink)