Sovereignty Contested Vattel’s Use of Leibniz, Hobbes, and Pufendorf

Holland, Ben

Abstract

In this chapter, I draw out some implications of Vattel’s description of sovereign states as moral persons. The first section outlines the state-personality tradition from Thomas Hobbes through Samuel Pufendorf, with whom the moral person locution originates, to Vattel. In the second, I argue that we can learn more about the kind of freedom that Vattel considers to be characteristic of states as moral persons from the writings of one of his chief influences, G. W. Leibniz. Leibniz had an entirely different account of what it means to be a free agent than, for instance, Hobbes and Pufendorf. Real freedom, for Leibniz, requires the achievement of self-consciousness in thinking and enabling the mind’s ability to attend to the world – both of which capacities are heightened through the publicity of ourselves to others and acting together with them. In the third section, I show how these contexts bear on Vattel’s sense that the internal and external sovereignty of states are amplified by their association with one another in accordance with rules that they have mutually established.

Citation

Holland, B. (2021). Sovereignty Contested Vattel’s Use of Leibniz, Hobbes, and Pufendorf. In P. Schröder (Ed.), Concepts and Contexts of Vattel's Political and Legal Thought (45-63). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108784009.004

• Online Publication Date: Jun 11, 2021
• Publication Date: 2021-06
• Deposit Date: Feb 15, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 16, 2023
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Pages: 45-63
• Book Title: Concepts and Contexts of Vattel's Political and Legal Thought
• Chapter Number: 2
• ISBN: 9781108489447
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108784009.004
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/5417187
• Publisher URL: cambridge.org/core/books/abs/concepts-and-contexts-of-vattels-political-and-legal-thought/sovereignty-contested/49CF56BE98395713FECC049F9042529C