Over his long and illustrious career, Knud Haakonssen has explored the role of natural law in formulating doctrines of obligation and rights in accordance with the interests of early modern polities and churches. The essays collected in this volume range across this exciting and contested field. These 13 new essays acknowledge Haakonssen's immense academic achievement and give us new insights into the cultural and political role of law and rights in a variety of historical contexts and circumstances. --.

• Introduction
• Part I Rights, Religion and Morality
  • 1 Calvinists, Arminians, Socinians: Popular Sovereignty and Natural Rights in Early Modern Political Thought
  • 2 Truth and Toleration in Early Modern Thought
  • 3 The History of the History of Ethics and Emblematic Passages
  • 4 Natural Law and Natural Rights in Early Enlightenment Copenhagen
• Part II Natural Law and the Philosophers
  • 5 Natural Equality and Natural Law in Locke’s Two Treatises
  • 6 Dignity and Equality in Pufendorf’s Natural Law Theory
  • 7 Theory and Practice in the Natural Law of Christian Thomasius
  • 8 The ‘Iura Connata’ in the Natural Law of Christian Wolff
  • 9 Hume’s Peculiar Definition of Justice
• Part III Rights and Reform
  • 10 Economising Natural Law: Pufendorf on Moral Quantities and Sumptuary Legislation
  • 11 The Legacy of Smith’s Jurisprudence in Late Eighteenth-Century Edinburgh
  • 12 Declaring Rights: Bentham and the Rights of Man
  • 13 Rights After the Revolutions
• Index