Leibniz's Logic of Law: Demand and Domination

Author: Stephen Connelly
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 9781474418072

Published In: November 2022
Format: Paperback
Jurisdiction: Scotland ? Disclaimer:
Countri(es) stated herein are used as reference only
Hardback Edition ISBN: 9781474418065

HKD 327.48

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Description
Contents

Details

A critical reading of Leibniz’s legal theory, linking law, space and power.

Critically links Leibniz to legal theory and situates him with respect to thinkers such as Spinoza, Hobbes, Husserl, Deleuze, Foucault and Badiou
Builds on the French archaeology of power research programme of Agamben collaborator Gwenaëlle Aubry
Excavates a theory of law and space
Provides an account of key tenets of medieval philosophy, such as power, reality, subjective activity, being-in-common, that inform the thought of continental philosophers

The concept of power has been a major feature of natural law theories. It evolved over the course of several centuries and was arguably the defining notion in both Hobbes’ and Spinoza’s doctrines of natural right. Yet Leibniz appears to effect a reversal in this millennium-long trajectory and demotes power to a derivative term of his philosophy.

What was the rationale behind this radical change? And what does this reversal mean for the philosophy that follows?

Connelly demonstrates how Leibniz’s rearticulation of power and its associated concepts is motivated at least in part by the struggles that marked the terrain in which his ideas were rooted – the struggle between Reformed and Scholastic theology, between natural law and natural right, and between mechanistic natural philosophy and human freedom. He locates Leibniz within power’s wider evolution, and shows how the universal jurisprudence which Leibniz developed between the 1660s and 1690s can be considered as a transformative encounter between power, activity and modality.

Drawing on thinkers as diverse as Aristotle, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Grotius, Husserl and Deleuze, Connelly traces Leibniz’s conceptualisation of power through its applications in his legal texts, revealing that Leibniz in fact reconceptualises power under a new name: the state space. The move amounts to an internalisation of power as a moral world within each individual, submitting each practical agent to a universal set of obligations and prohibitions defined by that world. What though is at stake in bringing the objective world within each individual and submitting it to a public legal order? And what is the significance of this surgical intervention for any archaeology of power?

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. From Trinity to Mind: The Intensional Basis of the Law

2. Potency and Supposita

3. Will: The Scholastic heritage

4. Will, power, and pretensionality

5. Ars combinatoria as Urdoxa

6. A New Method of Teaching Law

7. Power and obligation in the 1660s

8. Power and obligation in the Elementa Iuris Naturalis: the state space

Conclusion

Bibliography