Institutes of Divine Jurisprudence, with Selections from Foundations of the Law of Nature and Nations (Natural Law and Enlightenment Classics).

Christian Thomasius’s natural jurisprudence is essential to understanding the origins of the Enlightenment in Germany, where his importance was comparable to that of John Locke’s in England.

First published in 1688, Thomasius’s Institutiones jurisprudentiae divinae (Institutes of Divine Jurisprudence) attempted to draw a clear distinction between natural and revealed law and to emphasize that human reason was able to know the precepts of natural law without the aid of Scripture. Thomasius also argued that his orthodox Lutheran opponents had failed to understand this distinction and thereby had confused reason and Scripture.

This volume also contains significant selections from his Fundamenta juris naturae et gentium(Foundations of the Law of Nature and Nations), published in 1705. In Foundations Thomasius significantly revised the theory he had put forward in the Institutes, and much of the Foundations therefore is a paragraph-by-paragraph commentary on his earlier ideas.

Christian Thomasius (1655–1728) was a German philosopher and legal theorist.

Thomas Ahnert is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Edinburgh.

The Midwest Book Review
February 2012

There are laws that are laws just beyond the state saying so. Institutes of Divine Jurisprudence with Selections from Foundations of the Law of Nature and Nations is a republication of famed jurist and philosopher Christian Thomasius who throughout the seventeenth century contributed greatly to the discussion of law and its meaning and purpose. A major force in the enlightenment, Thomasius's thoughts on natural law remain important reading, and Liberty Fund presents it for the first time in English, expertly done by Thomas Ahnert. Institutes of Divine Jurisprudence is a strongly recommended addition to any law or philosophy collection.