RIVAL

ENLIGHTENMENTS:
Civil and Metaphysical
Philosophy in Early
Modern Germany

IAN HUNTER

Cambridge University Press

 R I VA L ENL I GH TEN MENT S
Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany

Rival Enlightenments is a major reinterpretaton of early modern

German intellectual history. Ian Hunter approaches philosophical
doctrines as ways of fashioning personae for envisaged historical
circumstances, here of confessional conflict and political desacral-
isation. He treats the civil philosophy of Pufendorf and Thomasius
and the metaphysical philosophy of Leibniz and Kant as rival intel-
lectual cultures or paideia, thereby challenging all histories premised
on Kant’s supposed reconciliation and transcendence of the field.
This landmark study reveals for the first time in English the extra-
ordinary historical self-consciousness of the civil philosophers, who
repudiated university metaphysics as inimical to the intellectual for-
mation of those administering desacralised territorial states. The
book argues that the marginalisation of civil philosophy in post-
Kantian philosophical history may itself be seen as a continuation
of the struggle between the rival enlightenments. Combining
careful and well-documented scholarship with vivid polemic,
Hunter presents penetrating insights for philosophers and histori-
ans alike.

  is Professor of Humanities and Founding Director of

the Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at Griffith
University, Queensland, Australia. He is the author of Culture and
Government: The Emergence of Literary Education () and Rethinking the
School (), as well as numerous articles dealing with the historical
conditions and roles of moral and political thought.
This Page Intentionally Left Blank
    
Edited by Q S (General Editor),
L  D , D  R,
and J T 

The books in this series will discuss the emergence of intellectual traditions and
of related new disciplines. The procedures, aims, and vocabularies that were
generated will be set in the context of the alternatives available within the con-
temporary frameworks of ideas and institutions. Through detailed studies of
the evolution of such traditions, and their modification by different audiences,
it is hoped that a new picture will form of the development of ideas in their
concrete contexts. By this means, artificial distinctions between the history of
philosophy, of the various sciences, of society and politics, and of literature
may be seen to dissolve.
The series is published with the support of the Exxon Foundation.
A list of books in the series will be found at the end of the volume.
This Page Intentionally Left Blank
RIVAL ENLIGHTENMENTS
Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany

IAN HUNTER
PUBLISHED BY CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS (VIRTUAL PUBLISHING)
FOR AND ON BEHALF OF THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 IRP
40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA
477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia

http://www.cambridge.org

© Ian Hunter 2001

This edition © Ian Hunter 2003

First published in printed format 2001

A catalogue record for the original printed book is available

from the British Library and from the Library of Congress
Original ISBN 0 521 79265 7 hardback

ISBN 0 511 01358 2 virtual (netLibrary Edition)

 Contents

Preface page ix
Acknowledgements xiv
List of abbreviations and texts used xvi
Note on conventions xix

Introduction 

      

 University metaphysics 
. Introduction 
. Metaphysics as the philosophical subsumption of theology 
. The return of metaphysics to the Protestant academy 
. The metaphysical ethos 
. Political metaphysics 

 Civil philosophy 
. Introduction 
. Reductions of the civil: society and reason 
. Sources of the civil: politics and law 
. Civil philosophy and profane natural law 

                  

 Leibniz’s political metaphysics 
. Introduction 
. From Protestant Schulmetaphysik to rationalist metaphysics 
. The subject of metaphysics 
. Philosophical theology 
. The metaphysics of law 

vii
viii Contents
 Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy 
. Introduction 
. Moral philosophy and political obligation 
. From moral personality to civil personae 
. From transcendent reflection to chastened observation 
. Political subjecthood and civil sovereignty 

 Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics 

. Introduction 
. Thomasius and the history of moral philosophy 
. The attack on metaphysical scholasticism 
. Detranscendentalising ethics 
. Natural law 
. From moral philosophy to political jurisprudence 
Afterword: Thomasius, Wolff, and the Pietists 

 Kant and the preservation of metaphysics 

. Introduction 
. The morals of metaphysics 
. Kant’s metaphysical ethos 
. Moral philosophy as metaphysical paideia 
. The metaphysics of law 
. The pure religion of reason 

Postscript: The kingdom of truth and the civil kingdom 

List of references 

Index 
 Preface

The prime objective of this work is to reinstate a marginalised intellec-

tual culture to its proper place in the intellectual history of early modern
Germany. Although the civil philosophy of Samuel Pufendorf and
Christian Thomasius is not unknown in the modern humanities
academy, sympathetic treatment of their work is largely confined to the
history of political philosophy, jurisprudence, and theology. To the
extent that they feature in intellectual history and the history of philos-
ophy more broadly, however, they appear as superseded figures, destined
to be absorbed by the great oscillations between rationalism and volun-
tarism, idealism and empiricism which would reach their culminating
reconciliation in the epochal philosophy of Immanuel Kant. We shall see
that this reigning dialectical historiography is itself the offshoot of a
second, rival intellectual movement, centred in the culture of university
metaphysics. In order to recover early modern civil philosophy, there-
fore, it has proved necessary to criticise and reject a dialectical historiog-
raphy designed to erase its historical existence and political significance.
In place of this reconciliatory history, this book offers an account of two
independent intellectual cultures – the ‘rival enlightenments’ of civil and
metaphysical philosophy – which remain unreconciled today.
Retrieving civil philosophy from the all-assimilating, all-unifying mill
of dialectical philosophical history is no straightforward task. For, by
drawing its impetus from the arranged mutual deficiencies of opposed
viewpoints, this historiography gives shape not just to history but also to
the historian. It treats history as the medium in which the unreconciled
dimensions of human subjectivity move towards their harmonisation, in
the final recovery of the a priori conditions of experience and morality
– the moment of Kant’s critical philosophy. Under these intellectual con-
ditions, the historian views the past in terms of the unreconciled opposi-
tions – between rationalism and voluntarism, intellectualism and
empiricism – and finds his or her own ethical impulse in the need to
ix
x Preface
repeat the moment of their Kantian reconciliation. This is the moment
in which human subjectivity’s imagined journey towards self-knowledge
terminates, with the recovery of the cognitive and moral laws responsi-
ble for the organisation of subjectivity itself. Considering that it was Kant
himself who first viewed the history of philosophy in these terms, dialec-
tical philosophical history is uniquely suited to demonstrating the
epochal significance of Kantian philosophy, and may indeed be regarded
as a sub-species of that philosophy.
By showing that Pufendorfian and Thomasian civil philosophy did
not in fact undergo this dialectical assimilation – by uncovering its inde-
pendent cultural basis and autonomous political viewpoint – this book
departs fundamentally from the post-Kantian intelligibility of early
modern intellectual history. Many readers will no doubt find the intel-
lectual terrain to be traversed unfamiliar and potentially hostile. The
moral world in which Pufendorf and Thomasius lived was not the one
whose laws Kant recovered. Further, the forms of personhood they cul-
tivated were not ones governed by the norms of ‘pure practical reason’.
Their world had its own moral cosmology, unlike the quasi-Platonic one
that organised Kant’s cosmos, yet one whose ‘Epicurean’ bleakness was
suited to a Europe still dealing with the aftermath of a period of pro-
tracted religious warfare. Similarly, their sense of self was shaped by a
‘pessimistic’ moral anthropology far removed from Christian–Platonic
pursuit of pure rational being that drove metaphysical philosophy from
Leibniz through Wolff to Kant and beyond. In sketching the relation
between civil and metaphysical philosophy in these terms – in treating
the worlds they envisaged and the persons they posited as grounded in
free-standing rival anthropologies and cosmologies – we begin to
measure the distance to be travelled from post-Kantian conceptions of
a unified ‘humanity’ or ‘reason’.
In recasting the landscape of early modern intellectual history into
these unreconciled and unfamiliar shapes, I have drawn on two main
intellectual instruments. Firstly, and fundamentally, I have drawn on a
particular approach to the history of philosophy. This is one which
focuses on the ‘ascetic’ or self-transformative work that certain philoso-
phies require their adherents to perform on themselves, only then
addressing the objects of knowledge to which they promise access. This
approach holds the key to retrieving civil philosophy from its dialectical
assimilation, and to placing civil and metaphysical philosophy on the
same historical footing – as rival alternative modes of philosophical cul-
tivation. It does so principally by treating their different anthropologies
 Preface xi
and cosmologies not in terms of the self they uncover or the cosmos they
reveal, but in terms of the self they seek to shape for a world they envis-
age. The objective of this approach is not to explain the philosophies by
reducing them to a different order of reality – to the structures of society
or the forms of subjectivity – but to redescribe the operations of the
philosophical discourses themselves, treating them as autonomous and
irreducible ‘spiritual exercises’.
Secondly, I have made use of a particular view of the political and
religious history of early modern Germany. This is a view that focuses
on the role of confessionalisation in precipitating the Thirty Years War
(–); the role of the ‘deconfessionalising’ or ‘desacralising’ of pol-
itics in ending this war; and the central role of ‘political law’ (Staatsrecht,
jus publicum) and its jurisprudence in this process of deconfessionalisa-
tion. I argue that the post-Westphalian ‘intellectual civil war’ between
metaphysical and civil philosophy – first encountered in Leibniz’s unre-
strained attack on Pufendorf ’s natural law doctrine – is properly under-
stood as a clash between rival ways of responding to this profound
historical process. Responding positively to the uncoupling of civil and
religious governance, Pufendorf developed a doctrine of natural law in
which the exercise of political power (the ‘civil kingdom’) was segregated
from the sphere of life in which the pursuit of moral perfection took
place (the ‘kingdom of truth’). He thus sought to reconstruct moral phi-
losophy by replacing the unified moral personality with a plurality of
personae suited to the diverse ‘offices’ – religious and civil, private and
public, ecclesiastical and political – of citizens in desacralised states.
Leibniz, however, responded to the post-Westphalian separation of pol-
itics and religious morality by seeking their reconciliation at a higher
level, through metaphysics. Here it was envisaged that law and politics
could once again be grounded in the sacralising pursuit of moral per-
fection, with all of life’s offices finding their point of unity in the meta-
physical recovery of their transcendent intellection.
If these rival intellectual cultures were not destined for reconciliation
in Kant’s discovery of ‘the subject’ – or in a ‘history’ tracing the dialec-
tical patterns of such a discovery – then we must look elsewhere for the
terrain on which they clashed. We find this in a cluster of religious, polit-
ical, legal, and cultural institutions housed in the early modern German
Empire and the territorial sovereign states which were emerging from its
shell. For our immediate concerns, the early modern university plays the
key role here. It was responsible for articulating the rival cultures to the
religious, juridical and political institutions of Empire and state, through
xii Preface
the manner in which it formed particular intellectual elites. At the very
centre of this nexus, we find the competing anthropologies and cos-
mologies of civil and metaphysical philosophy; for the personae they
cultivated were those suited to the moral callings of a particular institu-
tional array, even as the profound differences between their modes of
cultivation bear witness to the deeply divergent ways in which they envis-
aged this institutional world.
Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy thus sought to complete the desacralisa-
tion of civil governance by transforming the pedagogies through which
young Protestant intellectuals – jurists in particular – acquired their
sense of self and relation to the world. His Epicurean anthropology was
designed to form civil intellectuals who would confine the pursuit of
moral truth to a private domain, while placing their political rights and
expertise at the disposal of a sovereign who governed without regard for
such truth. Conversely, Leibniz’s (Platonic) metaphysical anthropology
envisaged a person whose self-perfecting ascent to the domain of tran-
scendent concepts (‘perfections’) qualified them to exercise an integral
moral–civil authority, in the persona of the sage–prince. In other words,
if early modern civil and metaphysical philosophy were not conflicting
theories destined to be reconciled and superseded in Kant’s discovery of
the transcendental conditions of subjectivity, that is because they were
independent rival intellectual cultures. Each represented a programme
for reconfiguring the relations between religious and civil governance in
its own way, through the ‘ascetic’ fashioning of the personages it deemed
suited to the world it envisaged. Rather than reconciling and supersed-
ing these conflicting cultures, Kantian philosophy may be regarded as
an extension of the metaphysical one – offering its own ‘critical’ version
of the ascent to the domain of transcendent perfections.
In recasting the topography of early modern German intellectual
history in this way, this book does not of course pretend completeness.
It is rather a sketch of an alternative kind of historical intelligibility for
the period, an essay in reinterpretation and redescription. The
Introduction offers further clarification of our points of departure from
existing accounts, while the two chapters of Part  provide overviews of
the available ways of approaching Schulmetaphysik and civil philosophy.
In Part  we offer detailed reconstructions of the major civil philoso-
phers, Pufendorf and Thomasius, and their metaphysical rivals, Leibniz
and Kant. Here of course we are not referring to personal rivalry
between the philosophers – although that perspective partially applies to
the relationship between Pufendorf and Leibniz – but to the cultural
 Preface xiii
rivalry between the philosophical styles they personified. In exploring
this rivalry through the work of some of its central protagonists, our
essay takes an interdisciplinary form, centred in intellectual and philo-
sophical history, but drawing on the history of politics, jurisprudence,
and theology, with excursions into the history of religion and church law.
Although this essayistic strategy might bring discomfort to specialists in
these fields, no disrespect for their work is intended. On the contrary, in
bringing their several domains together, in order to refashion a part of
intellectual history too long under the domination of a particular view-
point, I pay homage to them. Should this book be regarded as seeing any
further than those it challenges, that would be due to the stature of the
works on whose shoulders it stands.
 Acknowledgements

Thanks to the award of a Queen Elizabeth II research fellowship, I have

been able to devote four years’ undistracted labour to the research and
writing of this book. I therefore gratefully acknowledge the generous
support of the Australian Research Council, without which such a long,
intensive, and single-minded project would have been difficult to con-
template and impossible to complete in a reasonable period of time. I
am also pleased to acknowledge the continuing support of Griffith
University’s School of Humanities, where I have worked for so long and
so happily, and to thank the staff of the University’s Inter-Library Loan
service for their tireless searching after obscure volumes. My final insti-
tutional appreciation is for the hospitality of the English Department of
Johns Hopkins University, where I spent an enjoyable and productive
semester in the spring of .
During the writing of this work many colleagues were interested
or kind enough to discuss its contents and read sections for me. I have
probably not mentioned all of them if I offer my thanks in this regard
to Tony Bennett, Natalie Brender, John Frow, Stephen Gaukroger,
Wayne Hudson, Jeff Malpas, Thomas Mautner, Alec McHoul, Douglas
Magendanz, David Owen, and Dugald Williamson. I am also indebted
to Dieter Freundlieb, who offered me both philosophical conversation
and linguistic expertise, when my grasp of seventeenth-century German
reached its limits. During my visit to Johns Hopkins I was fortunate
enough to share the company and conversation of William Connolly
and Jane Bennett, enjoying their hospitality and insights in equal
measure. At that time I was also fortunate in meeting John Pocock,
enjoying one of his seminars on Edward Gibbon and later a conversa-
tion on the ‘varieties of Enlightenment’, both memorable occasions for
me. Among the colleagues with whom I have worked closely, I owe
special thanks to Denise Meredyth and to Jeffrey Minson and Barry
Hindess, both of whom have read several chapters, responding with
xiv
 Acknowledgements xv
unfailingly helpful commentary and advice. Finally in this regard I take
special pleasure in tallying the debt of gratitude owed to my colleague
and friend of many years, David Saunders. He has been a constant dis-
cussant throughout the development of this project, providing unerring
guidance on everything from basic intellectual premises to the transla-
tion of early modern academic Latin.
In addition to these friends and colleagues, I owe thanks to several
scholars whom I first encountered through their published works, but
who were kind enough to offer advice and encouragement to an acade-
mic stranger. In addition to all I have learned from their writings, James
Tully and Knud Haakonssen have been very helpful in allowing me to
see the project from the perspective of the international community of
scholars working on similar issues. I owe a similar debt of thanks to
Horst Dreitzel, who went out of his way to provide me with extensive
and bracing commentary on the Thomasius and Kant chapters, and to
Jerome Schneewind, with whom I had several memorable discussions in
the northern spring of , even if these resulted in both of us realis-
ing how differently we approached the question of Kant. Finally, during
, I was fortunate in meeting several scholars who have recently com-
pleted doctorates or books on topics closely associated with the subject
of this book. Although the revision process has not permitted me to take
full advantage of it, I should nonetheless like to record my appreciation
for the work of Thomas Ahnert, Robert von Friedeburg, Frank Grunert,
Timothy Hochstrasser, Michael Seidler, and Peter Schröder.
Needless to say, few, if any, of these colleagues and friends agreed with
everything they encountered in my arguments, and none of them is
responsible for the errors that remain in this book, which are all my own
doing.
 Abbreviations and texts used

KANT
Except for the Critique of Pure Reason, for which I use the standard A and B pag-
ination of the first and second editions, all references to Kant are to Kants
Gesammelte Schriften, edited by the German (formerly the Royal Prussian)
Academy of Sciences in twenty-nine volumes (Walter de Gruyter, –). In
referencing Kant’s texts I have adopted the convention of first citing the rel-
evant passage in the Akademie edition, by volume and page number, pairing
this with the relevant reference to the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel
Kant. I have adjusted the Cambridge translations wherever this seemed nec-
essary. Abbreviations of the relevant volume titles from the Cambridge Edition
follow.

CPR Critique of Pure Reason, ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, .
LE Lectures on Ethics, ed. Peter Heath and J. B. Schneewind. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, .
LM Lectures on Metaphysics, ed. Karl Ameriks and Steve Naragon.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, .
PP Practical Philosophy, ed. Mary J. Gregor and Allen Wood. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, .
RRT Religion and Rational Theology, ed. Allen W. Wood and George Di
Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, .
TP Theoretical Philosophy –, ed. David Walford and Ralf Meerbote.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, .

LEIBNIZ
CP Confessio Philosophi/Das Glaubensbekenntnis des Philosophen. (Kritische
Ausgabe mit Einleitung, Ubersetzung, Kommentar von Otto Saame.)
nd edn. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, .
DM Discourse on Metaphysics, in Lm, pp. –.
Ge C. I. Gerhardt (ed.) Die philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm
Leibniz.  vols. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, .

xvi
 List of abbreviations and texts used xvii
Gr Gaston Grua (ed.) G. W. Leibniz: Textes Inédits.  vols. Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, .
Gu G. E. Guhrauer (ed.) Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Deutsche Schriften. 
edn,  vols. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, .
Lm Leroy E. Loemker (ed.) Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Philosophical Papers and
Letters. nd edn. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, .
Mo The Monadology, in Lm, pp. –.
PW Political Writings, ed. Patrick Riley. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, .
Th Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and the Origin of
Evil, ed. Austin Farrer. La Salle: Open Court, .
TS Theologisches System/Systema Theologicum, ed. C. Haas. Hildesheim:
Georg Olms, 

PUFENDORF
DJN De Jure Naturae et Gentium Libri Octo/On The Law of Nature and of Nations
in Eight Books. Trans. C. H. Oldfather and W. A. Oldfather. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, .
DOH De Officio Hominis et Civis juxta Legem Naturalem Libri Duo/On the Duty of
Man and Citizen According to Natural Law. Trans. Michael Silverthorne,
ed. James Tully. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, .
DHR De Habitu Religionis Christianae ad Vitam Civilem/Of the Nature and
Qualification of Religion in Reference to Civil Society. London: Roper and
Bosvile, .
DSH De Statu Hominum Naturali/Samuel Pufendorf ’s On the Natural State of Men,
the  Latin Edition and English Translation, ed. Michael Seidler.
Lewiston N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, .
GW Gesammelte Werke, ed. Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann. Berlin: Akademie
Verlag, –.

THOMASIUS
ADS Auserlesene deutsche Schriften (Selected German Writings,  vols.). AW, vols.
‒.
ASL Ausübung der Sittenlehre (Practice of Ethics). Hildesheim: Georg Olms, .
AW Ausgewählte Werke, ed. Werner Schneiders. Hildesheim: Georg Olms,
–
EHP Einleitung zur Hof-Philosophie (Introduction to Court Philosophy). AW, vol. .
ESL Einleitung zur Sittenlehre (Introduction to Ethics). AW, vol. .
FJN Fundamenta juris naturae et gentium ex sensu communi deducta, /
Grundlehren des Natur- und Völker-Rechts, nach dem sinnlichen Begriff aller
Menschen vorgestellet (Foundations of the Law of Nature and Nations, Deduced
from Common Sense). Halle: Rengerischer Buchhandlung, .
IJD Institutiones jurisprudentiae divinae, / Drey Bücher der Göttlichen
xviii List of abbreviations and texts used
Rechtsgelahrtheit (Institutes of Divine Jurisprudence). Halle: Rengerischer
Buchhandlung, .
KPK Kurzer Entwurf der politischen Klugheit, sich selbst und andern in allen men-
schlichen Gesellschaften wohl zu Raten und zu einer gescheiten Conduite zu gelan-
gen (Brief Outline of Political Prudence, for the good counsel and sensible conduct
of oneself and others in all human societies, ). Frankfurt am Main:
Athenäum, .
KTS Kleine Teutsche Schriften (Shorter German Writings). AW, vol. .
PD Preliminary Dissertation (to the Institutiones jurisprudentiae divinae), in IJD,
pp. –.
RFM Vom Recht evangelischer Fürsten in Mitteldingen oder Kirchenzeremonien (Of the
Right of Protestant Princes in Middle-Things/Adiaphora or Religious Ceremonies,
), in ADS, AW, vol. , pp. –.
RFS Das Recht evangelischer Fürsten in theologischen Streitigkeiten (The Right of
Protestant Princes in Theological Controversies). Halle: Christoph Salfeld
Verlag, .
SEG Summarischer Entwurf der Grundlehren, die einem Studioso Iuris zu wissen und
auf Universitäten zu Lernen nötig sind (Summary Outline of the Basic Doctrines
Necessary for a Student of Law to Know and Learn in the Universities, ).
Aalen: Scientia Verlag, .
VG Vorrede (Foreword to Grotius), in Hugo Grotius: De Jure Belli ac Pacis Libri
Tres/Drei Bücher vom Recht des Krieges und des Friedens Paris , ed. Walter
Schätzel. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, , pp. –.
VKR Vollständige Erläuterung der Kirchenrechts-Gelahrtheit oder Gründliche
Abhandlung vom Verhältniß der Religion gegen den Staat (Complete Explanation
of the Jurisprudence of Church Law or Fundamental Treatise on the Relation of
Religion to the State), nd edn. . Aalen: Scientia Verlag, .

WOLFF
GE Vernünftige Gedanken von der Menschen Tun und Lassen, zu Beförderung ihrer
Glückseeligkeit (German Ethics ), ed. H. W. Arndt. Reprint,
Hildesheim: Georg Olms, .
GL Vernünftige Gedanken von den Kräften des menschlichen Verstandes (German Logic
), ed. H. W Arndt. Reprint, Hildesheim: Georg Olms, .
GM Vernünftige Gedanken von Gott, der Welt und der Seele des Menschen, auch allen
Dingen überhaupt (German Metaphysics ), ed. C. A. Corr. Reprint,
Hildesheim: Georg Olms, .
GP Vernünftige Gedanken von dem gesellschaftlichen Leben der Menschen und inson-
derheit dem gemeinen Wesen (German Politics ), ed. H. W. Arndt. Reprint,
Hildesheim: Georg Olms, .
VRW Von den Regenten die sich der Weltweisheit befleistigen, und von den Weltweisen die
das Regiment führen (On Princes who Cultivate Philosophy, and Philosophers who
Direct Government), in Gesammelte Kleine Philosophische Schriften .
Hildesheim: Georg Olms, , pp. –.
 Note on conventions

The word economics is spelled in two different ways: ‘oeconomics’ indi-

cates the early modern discipline concerned with household manage-
ment, while the standard spelling ‘economics’ is used for more general
reference.
Where bracketed interpolations occur in quoted text, round brackets
indicate the original author’s or translator’s interpolations, square brack-
ets indicate mine.

xix
This Page Intentionally Left Blank
 Introduction

I now believe that it would be right to begin my book with some

remarks on metaphysics as a kind of magic . . .
For, when once I began to speak of the ‘world’ (and not of this
tree or table), what did I wish if not to conjure something of the
higher order into my words . . .
Of course, here the elimination of magic itself has the character
of magic.

Work in philosophy – like work in architecture in many respects –

is really more work on oneself. On one’s own conception. On one’s
way of seeing things. (And what one asks of it.)
Ludwig Wittgenstein

Despite the recognition of different national, cultural, and religious

enlightenments, and regardless of recurrent doubts about the utility of
the concept itself, a dominant form of intellectual history remains com-
mitted to the reality of a single process or project of Enlightenment,
even if this is something that has to be synthesised from diverse intellec-
tual expressions, institutional settings, and historical locales. Horst Stuke
offers a classic instance of this historiography in his Begriffsgeschichte of
Aufklärung, written for that great encyclopedia of German conceptual
history, the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Stuke ). Despite his illuminat-
ing sketch of a variety of different forms of enlightenment – ranging
from the Pietists’ doctrine of spiritual rebirth to the Wolffian conception
of conceptual self-clarification – Stuke’s history is one of the progressive
unification and conceptualisation of these ‘programmatic’ enlighten-
ments. The key stages on the way are Kant’s ‘formalisation’ of the
concept of Aufklärung – which treats it as human reason’s recovery of its
own intellectual and moral laws – and Hegel’s dialectical historicisation
of the concept, which allows reason’s self-clarification to occur in time,

 Introduction
as the transcending reconciliation of a series of fundamental historical
oppositions.
Not the least remarkable aspect of Stuke’s discussion is the manner in
which it transforms the retrospective unification of early modern
enlightenments into a methodological and theoretical imperative. For
Begriffsgeschichte regards dialectical reconciliation and conceptual formal-
isation as the condition of human reason’s own historical self-
clarification – the latest episode of which is in fact Stuke’s article. If,
however, we wished to recover the early modern enlightenments in their
full programmatic diversity – and were we to contend that two of the
most important forms of enlightenment remain as unreconciled today
as they did in early modernity – then our discussion would have to move
in the opposite direction to Stuke’s. We would have to strip the Kantian
formalisation and Hegelian reconciliation of Aufklärung from our histor-
ical imaginations, and plunge into the turbulence of bitterly opposed
programmes for the cultivation of human reason.

Norbert Hinske also presumes the existence of a single Enlightenment,

arguing that the German Aufklärung was unified by a small number of
‘fundamental ideas’. According to Hinske, the fundamental character of
these ideas means that they arose not from an historical ethos or mythos,
an ideology or faith – and not from the theological, pedagogical, juris-
prudential, and political disciplines in which they occasionally found
expression – but from the ‘work of thought’ itself: philosophy (Hinske
, ). This philosophical Aufklärung, Hinske argues, is characterised
by three programmatic ideas. First is the idea of Aufklärung itself which,
despite its varied formulations, is rooted in the doctrine of intellectual
clarification – the recovery of the concepts underlying historical experi-
ence. This doctrine was formulated by Descartes and Leibniz, systemat-
ised by Wolff, and then given its definitive ‘critical’ form by Kant. Next
comes a group of concepts – eclecticism, thinking for oneself, and
maturity (Eklektik, Selbstdenken, Mündigkeit) – which finds its unity in the
fact that those possessing enlightened intellects make their own judg-
ments, thereby restricting the tutelage of the state to the provision of
external security. Finally, there is the notion of perfectibility which,
despite its several uses in various reform agendas, found its original
expression in the Leibniz–Wolff doctrine of intellectual and moral per-
fection, and its final form in Kant’s conception of the never-ending
pursuit of intellectual and moral purity. Hinske concludes his explica-
tion of a philosophically unified Aufklärung by arguing that its basic ideas
 Introduction 
‘are not simply a result of the great technical discoveries and improve-
ments of modernity, or a mere consequence of the economic, social,
political or religious changes, even if presumably the division of the con-
fessions in Germany, with their irreconcilable controversies, contributed
not a little to their articulation’ (Hinske , ). Instead, all of the
programmatic ideas are grounded in a single basic idea, the idea of a
universal anthropology – the end or destiny of man (Bestimmung des
Menschen) – which, in its turn, is identified with a universal human
reason. From this notion of human being as rational being – the notion
of a reason that is self-grounding and self-acting in all spheres of life –
Hinske derives what he regards as the fundamental rights and duties of
a rational society: the right to publish one’s thoughts (Öffentlichkeit, press-
freedom), and the duty to respect the judgments of others (liberality,
tolerance).
Hinske’s conception of a philosophical Aufklärung certainly finds an
historical correlate in the s’ debate over ‘What is Enlightenment?’,
which had been sparked by articles in the Berlinische Monatsschrift, and
selections from which have been republished by Hinske and James
Schmidt (Hinske ; J. Schmidt a). But this correlation arises
because only the philosophical contributions to this debate are now
treated as significant, allowing the contributions of jurists and statesmen
to drop from historical sight. The central doctrine of F. H. Jacobi’s inter-
vention – that political and moral freedom have a common grounding
in man’s spontaneous intellectual being – is typical of the philosophical
essays, especially those by Kant, Reinhold, Tieftrunk, and Bergk. The
conclusions that Jacobi draws from this doctrine are also broadly repre-
sentative: ‘Where there is a high degree of political freedom in fact, not
just in appearance, there must be no less a degree of moral freedom
present. Both are grounded exclusively in the rational nature of man,
and their power and effect is thus to make men ever more human, ever
more capable of self-government, of ruling their passions, of being
happy and without fear’ (Jacobi , ). No less significant in this
regard is Jacobi’s Kantian affirmation that human reason and morality
are realised through freely self-imposed laws. His adherence to Kantian
autonomy means that Jacobi regards ‘externally’ prescribed laws – laws
formulated by jurists and statesmen – as intrinsically corrupting of
humanity. Displaying an uncanny gift for rewriting history in accor-
dance with the Kantian spirit of his times, he asserts that it was not law
and the state that put an end to the destructive wars of religion but ‘the
ceaseless striving of reason’ (). Finally, in concluding his defence of
 Introduction
society as a self-regulating organism of individual rights and duties,
Jacobi pays a back-handed compliment to the monstrous mechanical
states designed by Machiavelli and Hobbes; for they at least honestly
show the political consequences of viewing man as a creature of pas-
sions requiring external juridical and political governance.
The success of this rewriting of history can be measured not just in
Hinske’s assumption of an anti-statist philosophical Aufklärung, but also
in James Schmidt’s comment that Jacobi’s essay should be interpreted as
part of a ‘liberal’ critique of enlightened absolutism ( J. Schmidt b,
). So well had the Kantian philosophers of the s done their work
– burying all signs of the role of law and state in achieving a liberal set-
tlement to the religious civil wars – that their descendants of the s
no longer have to bother with any other enlightenment. It is, however,
just this success of the philosophical Aufklärung in rewriting history in its
own image that makes it unsuited to understanding a different concep-
tion of enlightenment, one which had emerged a century earlier and
had never gone away.
Christian Thomasius’ Institutiones Jurisprudentiae Divinae had been pub-
lished in , with the German translation appearing in  under the
title Drey Bücher der Göttlichen Rechtsgelahrtheit (Three Books of Divine
Jurisprudence), which is the edition I have used. In his Foreword to this
translation, ‘On the Obstacles to the Spread of Natural Jurisprudence’,
Ephraim Gerhard was also convinced that he stood on the threshold of
a new enlightened epoch; yet his conception of the source and direction
of enlightenment differs markedly from that of the philosophers of the
s and their modern descendants: ‘We live in a time when, over the
last several years, things in the empire of scholarship have so altered, that
from now onwards those who served in it a hundred years earlier would
scarcely find their right way – so different is the shape that the sciences
have assumed since then . . . I believe, though, that this kind of transfor-
mation is to be remarked not just in the zones of philosophy, as some like
to imagine, but also and in fact principally in our jurisprudence’ (IJD,
Fwd, § ). For Gerhard it is not philosophy – in the line that would run
from Leibniz through Wolff to Kant – that is responsible for enlighten-
ment, but the rebirth of jurisprudence and natural law, which he
ascribes to a different intellectual trio: ‘Certainly those possessing a
somewhat enlightened understanding [aufgeklährtern Verstand] could only
take pleasure in the lights which Grotius, Pufendorf, Thomasius and
others have displayed for us through their industry; because through this
the true ground of all laws has been revealed to us much more clearly
 Introduction 
than before’ (§ ). In fact, Gerhard regards philosophy as impeding the
spread of the new jurisprudence through the universities and court-
rooms of Germany; for the academic moral philosophers teach the dis-
cipline of natural law in such a subtle and abstract manner that it
becomes all but useless for the affairs of the state and the needs of daily
life (§§ –). This problem, Gerhard argues, is compounded by the uni-
versity’s curricular and faculty structure. In compelling law students to
study moral philosophy before beginning their legal studies, this struc-
ture leads many to misunderstand the specific nature of the law, bring-
ing forth instead ‘either mere philosophical and abstractive chimeras or
a mish-mash of moral philosophy, decorum, and even theological prin-
ciples’ (§ ).
Gerhard’s Foreword belongs to the genre of ‘histories of morality’. As
Timothy Hochstrasser has shown, this genre was intended to support the
spread of the new doctrines of natural law – those of Grotius, Pufendorf,
and Thomasius – by making them central to overturning Protestant neo-
scholasticism (Hochstrasser ). In his own Preliminary Dissertation to
the Institutiones – another instance of this genre – Thomasius spells out
the enlightening role of jurisprudence and natural law in more detail
than Gerhard and with greater élan. Treating his own enlightenment as
symptomatic of the new path, Thomasius recalls that during his student
years at the University of Leipzig his theology and philosophy professors
– Valentin Alberti in particular – had attempted to keep him in the dark,
teaching their own metaphysical version of natural law, and warning
him off the works of Samuel Pufendorf, whom they branded an innova-
tor and heretic. Thomasius read Pufendorf anyway, and his account of
the effect this had on him is worth quoting in full:
At that time I began to dispel some of the dark clouds which had previously
obscured my understanding. Before then I had imagined that all things com-
monly defended by the theologians were purely and simply good theological
matters, which an honorable man must by all means hold in respect, so that no-
one would brand him as a heretic or innovator, honorifics which then amounted
to the same thing. After I had rightly considered how theology differs from phi-
losophy though, and also read with greater care that which was written about
politics and political law [Fürsten Recht] ( jus publicum), I learned to recognise that
commonly all kinds of things were unanimously defended by the theologians
which have nothing to do with theology, but belong in ethics or jurisprudence.
But these things were commonly passed off as theology because the philosophers
make do with the number of their eleven Aristotelian virtues and the jurists with
their glossing. And the theologians – first in fact the Catholics and then our
[Lutheran] ones – gave cause and opportunity [for this], because no-one took
 Introduction
responsibility for claiming this noble area of wisdom, just as if a thing had no
owner. [I also recognised] that the power and right of someone to declare
another a heretic belonged to no private person – even if they were great and
famous – but only to the prince. Finally [I saw] that an innovator is no heretic,
and that this title, like the name heretic, had suffered great misuse. And I saw
that through these propositions Pufendorf convinced his opponents, who had
not the slightest hope of basing their victory on their false principles.
I therefore began to hesitate and to hold the moral philosophy of the aca-
demics [Sittenlehre der Schul-lehrer] in contempt. (PD, §§ –, –)

Thomasius’ sketch of his ‘civil’ enlightenment makes two points

which are in fact symptomatic of a fundamental parting of the ways in
the academic culture of early modern Germany. In the first place,
Thomasius records that through his reading of politics and political
jurisprudence (Fürstenrecht, Staatsrecht, jus publicum) he discovered that
theologians and Christian natural jurists were guilty of mixing theology
and ‘philosophy’ – that is, revealed and natural knowledge. In mixing
revealed biblical truths and the naturally known truths of jurisprudence,
ethics, and politics, they obscured the autonomy of jurisprudence and
intruded on intellectual domains that were none of their business. We
shall see that Thomasius laid this miscegenation of revealed and natural
knowledge squarely at the door of university metaphysics – a discipline
offering philosophical explication of religious doctrine and transcendent
foundations for philosophical concepts, to the detriment of both faith
and knowledge. Next, says Thomasius, he realised that, in laying the
charge of heresy, university theologians like Alberti were claiming to
exercise civil power on the basis of their religious capacity. This was com-
pletely unacceptable to Pufendorfian natural law and Staatskirchenrecht
(the political jurisprudence of church law). For Pufendorf holds that all
civil power and right belong solely to the prince – that is, to the secular
state – and may on no account be shared with or exercised on behalf of
the church.
In Thomasius’ case, therefore, the divergence between Schulphilosophie
and the civil sciences was marked not just by intellectual differences, but
by his sense of their mutually opposed roles in the cultural politics of
early modern Germany. Through his reading of Pufendorf ’s natural law
and political jurisprudence, Thomasius had come to a conclusion that
would prove decisive for his whole intellectual outlook: namely, that the
mixing of theology and philosophy in university metaphysics was com-
plicit with the disastrous mixing of religious and civil authority in the
confessional state (Döring b, ). For such neoscholastic opponents
 Introduction 
as Alberti, the synthesis of theology and the civil sciences (ethics, politics,
jurisprudence) in university metaphysics provided the institutional–intel-
lectual basis for the church’s participation in civil authority. For this made
it possible to argue that political power should be exercised to defend the
purity of the moral community as well as to guard the security of the
civil community. Conversely, the radical separation of moral theology
from politics and law in Pufendorfian natural law was premised on the
intellectual and institutional destruction of Schulmetaphysik. Nothing less
was required if religion was to be denied all competence in the civil
domain – to be transformed into a matter of private faith rather than
public knowledge – thereby allowing the state to emerge as a desacral-
ised exercise of sovereign power, concerned exclusively with the security
of the citizen.
The jurisprudential or civil enlightenment of the s thus differs in
almost every regard from the (Kantian) philosophical enlightenment of
the s which, in the s, Hinske characterises in terms of its phil-
osophical basis; its subjection of politics, law, and theology to universal
reason; and its absorption of mythos and ethos into the universal anthro-
pology of rational being. In the first place – once we have set aside the
question-begging claim that all knowledge is philosophical in the sense
of being based on transcendental concepts – it is clear that Thomasius’
enlightenment is not grounded in a new form of philosophy (Leibniz–
Wolff–Kant) but in a new ‘civil science’. This science is Pufendorf ’s
natural law, with its component sciences of political jurisprudence
(Staatsrecht), political history, and statist sovereignty doctrine. As we shall
see (.), Thomasius was familiar with the new rationalist metaphysics,
particularly in its Cartesian and Wolffian forms. But he regarded the
notion of intellectual enlightenment – through recovery of the pure
forms of thought – as committing the same cardinal error as scholastic
metaphysics: the mixing of theology and philosophy. For Thomasius,
synthetic metaphysical reflection on the intellectual forms had been dis-
credited by its use in the defence of rival confessional theologies. It had
to be replaced by the differentiated (‘eclectic’) mastery of specific civil
sciences.
Next we can observe that while Thomasius may be regarded as an
eclectic and Selbstdenker, his conception of intellectual independence is
not based on a notion of the primacy of the individual’s universal reason
over the specific ‘reasons of state’. On the contrary, Thomasius’
Epicurean anthropology and statist (Bodinian–Pufendorfian) concep-
tion of sovereignty mean that he regards individuals as incapable of
 Introduction
rational self-governance and sees the state as governing on the basis of
reasons irreducible to those held by private individuals. For Thomasius,
the state finds its limits not in the absolute moral and intellectual judg-
ments of free rational beings – judgments whose democratic expression
it might one day become – but in the fact that it cultivates a systematic
neutrality with regard to such judgments. Despite Jacobi’s claim that it
was not law and state but ‘the ceaseless striving of reason’ that had
created a sphere of religious toleration and moral freedom, Thomasius
was acutely aware that this domain had indeed been constructed by the
state. Moreover, he knew that the state had secured this domain only by
declaring itself indifferent to the private moral strivings of its citizens,
thereby expelling religion from the political sphere. This transformation
of political culture demanded intellectual independence in the sense
that it required jurists and politici to detach themselves from all those ‘sec-
tarian’ philosophies that insisted on unifying morality and politics,
church and state, within a single moral philosophy.
Despite Hinske’s claims to the contrary, it thus becomes clear that
Thomasius’ civil enlightenment was indeed wedded to a particular ethos
– the ethos of a caste of confessionally neutral political jurists – and,
moreover, that he was developing this ethos precisely to cope with the
circumstances of confessional division and religious civil war. For
Thomasius and Pufendorf, the period of confessional conflict was some-
thing quite other than a theatre of the intellect in which reason could
display its transcendence of historical conditions and passions. It was
instead a theatre of social warfare, fuelled in part by a reason whose
passion for transcendence made its claims non-negotiable (Koselleck
). This meant that the forms of reasoning themselves had to be
modified in order to meet the catastrophic historical circumstances in
which they participated. This is what animated Pufendorf ’s and
Thomasius’ attack on university metaphysics and drove their elabora-
tion of a new intellectual ethos for jurists and statesmen.
Finally, for this reason, Thomasius’ jurisprudential enlightenment is
not based in a universal anthropology assimilable to a universal human
reason – the notion of man as a rational being (Vernunftwesen). On the
contrary, Thomasius vehemently rejects the doctrine that human being
is rational or intelligible being, correctly identifying this doctrine as a
scholastic improvisation on Aristotelian and Platonic metaphysics, and
regarding it as wholly unsuited to modelling the intellectual deportment
of jurists and statesmen. For many of today’s intellectual historians, the
metaphysical doctrine of man as a free rational being – refurbished in
 Introduction 
Leibniz’s monadology, systematised in Wolff’s metaphysics, and passed
on to us in the form of Kant’s conception of autonomous reason – lies
close to the process and goal of history as such. They therefore overlook
the degree to which this doctrine was both highly polemical and itself
the object of historical contestation. So conscious was Thomasius,
though, of the intellectualist ethos contained in this doctrine, that he
made it the central focus of his attack on ‘sectarian philosophy’ or
Schulmetaphysik. In fact a curricular programme-statement of  – the
Summarischer Entwurf der Grundlehren, die einem Studioso Iuris zu wissen und auf
Universitäten zu lernen nötig sind (Summary Outline of the Basic Doctrines
Necessary for a Student of Law to Know and Learn in the Universities) – he expli-
citly warns his students against the intellectualist anthropology, itemis-
ing its central doctrines for elimination:
Regarding the first principles of all or most sectarian philosophy: () That God
and matter were two co-equal principles. () That God’s nature consists in think-
ing. () That man’s nature consists in thinking and that the welfare and happi-
ness of the whole human race depends on the correct arrangement of thought.
() That man is a single species and that what is good for one [person] is good
for another. () That the will is improved through the understanding. () That it
is within human capacity to live virtuously and happily. (SEG, –)
In other words, far from pointing towards a single German philosoph-
ical Aufklärung that would eventually subsume Thomasius himself, the
intellectualist anthropology of early modern metaphysics was something
that Thomasius targeted for elimination, as inimical to the civil enlight-
enment that he sought to bring to his students. This enlightenment
required a quite different anthropology, the Epicurean image of man as
a dangerous creature of his uncontrollable passions. This is the anthro-
pology that Thomasius deemed necessary to model the self-restrained
intellectual deportment of those charged with clearing the confessional
minefields.

In seeking to comprehend the historical autonomy and ethical dignity of

civil philosophy – in proposing to treat it as the unreconciled cultural
rival and alternative to an anti-political and anti-juridical metaphysical
philosophy – this book must find its place in a complex field of works
moving in a broadly similar direction. In the world of Anglophone schol-
arship, Richard Tuck was one of the first to call for a renewed attention
to the ‘modern theory of natural law’ – Grotius, Hobbes, Pufendorf –
in order to overcome its marginalisation and assimilation in post-
Kantian philosophical history (Tuck ; Tuck a; Tuck b).
 Introduction
This call has in part been answered by important surveys undertaken by
Knud Haakonssen and J. B. Schneewind, and by the work of a new gen-
eration of scholars, including Timothy Hochstrasser, Thomas Ahnert,
and Peter Schröder (Ahnert ; Haakonssen ; Hochstrasser ;
Schneewind ; Schröder ). It has also been answered by some
revealing specialist studies, such as Steven Lestition’s account of the
teaching of jurisprudence and natural law at Königsberg during the
eighteenth century. Lestition’s study is particularly germane to this book
as it reaches for a broad heuristic concept capable of capturing the cul-
tural and political significance of early modern natural and political
jurisprudence, finding this in the notion of a ‘juristic civic conscious-
ness’. This term, says Lestition, ‘will be understood to refer to the way
in which important elements of the educated and governing classes of
th and th century Germany were able to derive a highly developed
intellectual orientation, professional or corporate identity, and set of
norms for their social and political behaviour, self-representation and
self-understanding from their training or work as learned “jurisconsu-
lates”’ (Lestition , ). We have already glimpsed the broad outlines
of this orientation and identity, in Thomasius’ demand for an intellec-
tual ethos suited to the jurists and politici of the desacralised state.
Lestition sources this notion to J. G. A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner.
Closely identified with the ‘Cambridge-school’ history of political
thought, their work provides the context for Tuck’s reinstatement of
‘modern’ natural law, although Pocock and Skinner typically tie early
modern civic consciousness to a non-juristic ‘political’ tradition of civic
republicanism and civic virtue, rather than to ‘continental’ natural law
(Pocock , –; Skinner ). Hence, while Skinner’s studies of
Hobbes treat his natural law as developing a ‘civil science’ in opposition
to incendiary confessional political theologies, they derive the secular–
pacificatory character of this science from humanistic–rhetorical
sources rather than political–jurisprudential ones (Skinner ; Skinner
). In this regard, Donald Kelley’s jurisprudential genealogy of an
early modern civil philosophy – which focuses on the non-theological
construction of civil life offered by Roman or civil law – may be regarded
as a counterbalance to Skinner and Pocock’s stress on non-juristic civic
humanism (Kelley ; Kelley ; Kelley ).
Nonetheless, Pocock’s recent work on Edward Gibbon is suggestive of
the ways in which the present work intersects with the Cambridge
school’s approach. For Pocock treats Gibbon’s anti-Platonic, anti-
enthusiast civil history of religion as indicative of a distinctively English-
 Introduction 
Protestant variant among the ‘diversities of Enlightenment’. This was a
variant whose moderate Arminian theology grounded a strategy for lim-
iting the civil power of the clergy in order to avert the catastrophe of
religious civil war (Pocock ). Even closer to our present concerns is
an earlier essay on the conditions of early modern religious toleration;
for here Pocock sees the ‘desacralisation of politics’ arising from an alli-
ance between ‘latitudinarian’ Protestantism and ‘Erastian’ politics, held
together by their common rejection of political ‘enthusiasm’ and sacer-
dotalism (Pocock ). Finally in this vein, we may mention James
Tully’s important introduction to his new edition of Pufendorf ’s De
Officio and Richard Tuck’s study Philosophy and Government –,
whose discussion of Grotius and Hobbes integrates the perspectives of
civic humanism and natural law (Tuck a; Tully ). These works
may be seen as signs of the degree to which the Cambridge school’s
initial focus on the civic republican sources of a ‘civic consciousness’ is
being expanded through attention to the role of jurisprudence and
natural law.
This book, however, is also indebted to a distinctively German recov-
ery of an early modern civil philosophy and political thought, one in
which the disciplines of natural and political law (Naturrecht, Staatsrecht)
play a central role. Perhaps the leading and certainly the most contro-
versial representative of this school is Carl Schmitt, whose work is
significant for our present concerns in a number of regards. First
Schmitt provides an important account of the historical significance of
political or ‘public’ law – ‘European jus publicum’ – whose restriction of
sovereignty to the purely worldly domination of a territory he regards as
effecting a fundamental ‘detheologisation’ of politics (Schmitt ,
–). Next, his discussion of the ‘autonomising of politics’ under-
taken by the early modern political jurists – their separation of the
‘security state’ from the spheres of morality and economy – offers a
further pointer to the central difference between the civil and metaphys-
ical enlightenments (Schmitt ). Finally, Schmitt’s work is also symp-
tomatically significant, for the way in which it continues the ‘intellectual
civil war’ between civil and metaphysical philosophy. Here, Schmitt
deliberately targets post-Kantian ‘political Romanticism’ for its treat-
ment of historical politics as the manifestation of transcendental–sub-
jective categories, thereby reducing the contestation between political
enemies to an a-political debate over the good life (Schmitt ). Similar
themes reappear in the work of Schmitt’s former student, Reinhart
Koselleck. Koselleck argues that the detheologisation of politics brought
 Introduction
about by early modern natural law and political jurisprudence meant
that the state developed a ‘reason’ for its existence – the preservation of
social peace – that floated free of the moral reason of its theological and
philosophical elite. He thus treats the advent of the Aufklärung as indica-
tive of cultural and political ‘crisis’. This is a crisis in which the state’s
focus on worldly security renders it incapable of claiming a broadly
acceptable moral legitimacy, and in which the Enlightenment intelli-
gentsia’s pursuit of moral perfection pushes it beyond the detheologised
political sphere. From here arises the anti-political enclave politics of the
Aufklärung, dedicated to the moral delegitimation of the state (Koselleck
). In its treatment of early modern ‘statist’ jurisprudence as an
autonomous and indispensable cultural response to the catastrophe of
religious civil war, and in its uncompromising rejection of all post-
Kantian attempts to ‘resacralise’ politics by turning it into rational
debate over the good, Schmitt’s and Koselleck’s work is an important
precondition of the present book.
Adding a distinctively French perspective to the history of natural and
political law, Blandine Kriegel has argued the need to renew political
history through a recovery of early modern doctrines of law and sove-
reignty, as the only ones capable of dealing with the reality of the state
(Kriegel ). Drawing on French work on the history of political
thought, including studies by Michel Foucault, François Furet, and Alain
Besançon, Kriegel’s work contains a timely polemic. She argues against
social theories of the political – theories whose sociological character is
a thin disguise for their moral zeal – and in favour of grounding politi-
cal thought in the history of political institutions: the institutions of
administration, law, and sovereignty. Despite her apparent antipathy to
Schmitt, Kriegel’s work intersects with his on several axes: first, in her
insistence that the political-juristic (Bodinian) concept of territorial sov-
ereignty is a modern doctrine, developed as a weapon against the
church, the Empire, and the estates; next, in her argument that this
concept can only be understood through early modern political jurispru-
dence itself, which permitted power to be juridified (secularised and his-
toricised) and the law to be turned into the key form in which sovereign
power was exercised; and finally in her vivid polemic against the
German Romantics. Like Schmitt, Kriegel regards the Romantics’ anti-
political and anti-juridical conceptions of society – as united by love not
law, and governed by the people not the state – as secularisations of relig-
ious mysticism and eschatology, leading to a divinisation and totalisation
of the state. We have already glimpsed these proto-Romantic views in
 Introduction 
Jacobi’s claim that it was the ‘ceaseless striving of reason’ – rather than
law and state – that put an end to religious civil war.
Finally I should mention the work of a group of German historians
of political, juridical, philosophical, and religious thought which, while
not officially dedicated to the recovery of an early modern civil philos-
ophy or civic consciousness, has nonetheless proved helpful to my own
efforts in this regard. While I presume this group to be assembled more
by the needs of this book than by any objective affiliation, their special-
ist studies can be brought into a productive relation to the more general
theses of Schmitt, Koselleck, and Kriegel. Like Blandine Kriegel, Horst
Dreitzel stresses the (early) modernity of seventeenth-century theories of
‘absolute sovereignty’. Far from being throwbacks to feudalism or the
ancien régime, these theories, Dreitzel argues, responded to a distinctively
early modern set of circumstances: the need to defend the emergence of
the ‘princely territorial state’ against the Empire above and the estates
below. Dreitzel’s emphasis however falls more on the politicisation of law
than the juridification of politics, particularly in his ground-breaking
study of neo-Aristotelian political science (Henning Arnisaeus) (Dreitzel
). Here, it is the ‘scientific’ objectification of politics that plays the
key role in the desacralising and instrumentalising of sovereign power.
Despite his tendency to understate the role of natural and political law
in this process, Dreitzel’s essays on this theme represent a decisive chal-
lenge to Habermasian attempts to locate a socio-moral basis for politics,
in the debating contests of middle-class Öffentlichkeit (Dreitzel ;
Dreitzel ; Dreitzel ; Dreitzel ; Dreitzel b).
There is no understatement of the juridical in the work of Martin
Heckel, the leading historian of that particularly German discipline,
Staatskirchenrecht, or the political jurisprudence of church law. In a series
of indispensable studies, Heckel has argued that the secularisation of
politics in early modern Germany was not the reflex expression of an
epochal philosophical breakthrough or general rationalisation of society.
Rather, it arose when, under the circumstances of religious civil war,
Protestant jurists, working within the framework of the Imperial legal
apparatus, developed a series of crucial political–legal doctrines. The
most important of these were civil parity between the three main con-
fessions; primacy of the secular prince in religious affairs; and
indifference to religious and moral truth in political settlements to con-
fessional conflicts (Heckel ; Heckel ). These doctrines – embod-
ied in the Peace of Augsburg in  and reiterated more successfully in
the Treaty of Westphalia in  – made worldly political power
 Introduction
supreme in all matters pertaining to social peace. They nonetheless pre-
served a free space for transcendent religions and philosophies inside the
envelope of civil security, which now lay beyond their moral and theo-
retical reach (Heckel ; Heckel ; Heckel ). Although he does
not speak of a jurisprudential or civil enlightenment, Heckel’s work
clearly suggests that the core ‘liberal’ rights of religious freedom and tol-
eration did not arise from a rationalist philosophy of intellectual self-
clarification and self-governance. They emerged instead from the
juridical desacralisation of politics, carried out in the domain of positive
Staatsrecht and subsequently surfacing in practical philosophy as the
‘modern theory of natural law’ – Grotius, Pufendorf, Thomasius.
Something like this view seems to inform Christoph Link’s treatment
of the right to religious freedom as a right created by the state’s politi-
cal–jurisprudential pacification of society in the seventeenth century.
According to Link, it was not until the end of the eighteenth century –
when its origins had been actively repressed by Kantian theories of ina-
lienable subjective rights – that religious freedom came to be seen as a
right of ‘society’ or the individual against the state (Link ). In this
light, Jacobi, Kant, and the other philosophers of the s appear less
like intellectual architects of the desacralised liberal state and more like
belated political theologians seeking this state’s resacralisation. Writing
in a similar vein, Diethelm Klippel takes us back to our point of depar-
ture, arguing that the eighteenth century witnessed the overlapping of
two kinds of natural law and two conceptions of enlightenment: one
associated with Pufendorf and Thomasius which operated through the
enlightenment (juridifying and secularising) of the prince or state; and
the other associated with Kant which came to see state power itself as
the problem, relocating enlightenment in individual reason and freedom
(Klippel ). Significantly, and unusually, Klippel argues that both of
these conceptions of enlightenment passed into the nineteenth century,
which means that if we are to avoid suppressing one or the other of them
we must give up the idea of a single German Aufklärung (Klippel ).
Our initial sketch of a ‘civil enlightenment’ – pre-dating the philo-
sophical Aufklärung by a century or more, and arising from sources quite
other than the ‘work of thought’ – would therefore seem to find its moor-
ings in a substantial body of historical work. Here, there is a significant
consensus that a civil enlightenment – that is, the first moves to establish
religious toleration, detheologise politics, separate civil society from
religious community – emerged as a response to the devastation of relig-
ious civil war. Further, despite significant disagreement over the primacy
 Introduction 
of law or politics in the process, and notwithstanding some unresolved
questions regarding the contribution of ‘moderate’ Protestantism, there
is broad agreement that the desacralisation of politics was formulated
through an ensemble of ‘civil sciences’ – ‘modern’ natural law, political
law, neo-Aristotelian and neo-Stoic political sciences, civic republican-
ism – rather than through university metaphysics or moral philosophy.
Finally, although we might lose some members of the Cambridge school
at this point, there is some agreement that this civil enlightenment, with
its ‘juristic civic consciousness’, was grounded in something quite other
than the self-governing individual or the moral community: namely, in
the measures by which early modern political jurists sought to put an end
to religious civil war, by restricting the ends of the state to security.
From this broad body of works and themes this book thus draws
important pointers to the historical autonomy of early modern civil phi-
losophy. From here we learn that the pacification of the war-torn
German states, and the appearance of the first liberal freedoms, were
not the result of a politics grounded in the ‘ceaseless striving of reason’
or the sheer ‘work of thought’. The state envisaged by Pufendorf and
Thomasius was one that pursued external security through diplomacy
and war, and internal security through the development of a novel and
powerful double strategy. This strategy required the state’s indifference
to the transcendent values of its constituent moral communities – an
indifference they would experience as civil freedom – and its readiness
to suppress all conduct threatening social peace, no matter what its
source. In proposing to return the civil enlightenment to the centre of
our historical concerns and civic imaginations – and in treating it as a
culture autonomous of and rival to the metaphysical Aufklärung – this
book will thus be centrally concerned with Pufendorf and Thomasius as
inheritors of the political-juristic desacralisation of politics.

Given the prima facie existence of such a civil enlightenment, docu-

mented and discussed in a sizeable and diverse secondary literature, we
must now confront the striking fact that it either remains largely invis-
ible in post-Kantian intellectual historiography, or else appears there in
a scarcely recognisable form. This historiography remains transfixed by
the image of a single philosophical Aufklärung whose unity is secured
through Kant’s philosophy of the subject, and whose central character-
istic is the normative extension of rationally self-governing subjecthood
into all areas of ‘society’ – religious, moral, political. Clearly, a self-gov-
erning society grounded in reason would have little need for a political
 Introduction
state grounded in security, which, according to post-Kantian anti-
politics, should be left to ‘wither away’. There can be little doubt that this
image of the progressive social expansion of philosophical reason dom-
inates arguments for and against ‘the Enlightenment’ in the humanities
academies of Europe and America, forming one of the chief reasons
why, in Kriegel’s words, ‘the history of political institutions must contin-
ually fight uphill battles against hostile attitudes’ (Kriegel , ).
In the Anglophone scholarly world this conception of a philosophical
or metaphysical enlightenment has provided the framing principle for
such standard works as Henry Allison’s Lessing and the Enlightenment and
Lewis White Beck’s Early German Philosophy – aptly subtitled Kant and His
Predecessors (Allison ; Beck ). It continues to inform recent work
composed in the register of American Kantianism, such as J. B.
Schneewind’s The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral
Philosophy (Schneewind ). In Germany, the immediate context for
Hinske’s conception of a philosophical Aufklärung is provided by such
scholars as Michael Albrecht, Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, Werner
Schneiders, and others now grouped around the journal Aufklärung
(Albrecht ; Schmidt-Biggemann a; Schmidt-Biggemann ;
Schneiders ; Schneiders ). But this work leads back, via such
early-twentieth-century neo-Kantians as Heinz Heimsoeth and Max
Wundt, to their nineteenth-century predecessors Kuno Fischer and
Karl Rosenkranz (Fischer –; Heimsoeth ; Heimsoeth a;
Rosenkranz ; Wundt ; Wundt ; Wundt ). From here it
is a short step to the philosophical histories of Kant’s contemporaries –
J. G. Buhle, W. G. Tennemann, and C. F. Stäudlin – which, as Hoch-
strasser has argued, were the first to erase civil philosophy from the
historical map, replacing it with the Leibniz–Wolff–Kant canon
(Hochstrasser , –).
This is the line through which today’s post-Kantian intellectual
history has inherited its characteristic conception of a philosophical
Aufklärung: the notion of enlightenment as the transcendental self-
clarification of an intellectual being whose recovery of spontaneous
rational self-governance forms the basis of a free society under moral
laws (Ritzel ). Given the evident conflict between this conception
and the prima facie existence of a very different civil enlightenment –
grounded in juridical pacification rather than metaphysical self-
clarification, and in the sovereignty of a morally indifferent state rather
than that of a morally self-governing people – post-Kantian intellectual
history has adopted two strategies, those of exclusion and assimilation.
 Introduction 
In seeking to exclude civil philosophy from their story of ‘Enlighten-
ment philosophy’, post-Kantian intellectual historians have argued that
it belongs to the history of law and politics. Wundt thus classifies
Pufendorf ’s work as ‘jurisprudence’ while Beck treats it as ‘politics’, both
writers admitting the great natural jurist to their work only fleetingly, as
the precursor of Thomasius, whose work they can more easily treat as
philosophy (Wundt , –; Beck , –). The effect of this, of
course, is retrospectively to transform the history of philosophy into the
history of metaphysics. ‘Philosophy’ comes to signify the particular line
of metaphysical philosophy that runs from Leibniz through Wolff to
Kant, and from Kant through the Romantics and Hegel into modern
metaphysics, dialectics, and ‘critical theory’. The problem with this strat-
egy is that in early modern German universities what was to count as phil-
osophia – typically translated as Weltweisheit – was itself a matter of explicit
and bitter contestation. We have already seen Thomasius warning his
students off the intellectualist anthropology of university metaphysics, on
the grounds that its pursuit of transcendent rationality is wholly unsuited
to the formation of those destined for legal and political careers.
Conversely, we shall see that in defending the metaphysical conception
of natural law – as the transcendent recovery of the pure concept of
justice – Leibniz’s ‘philosophy of law’ is no less a polemical attempt to
capture the terrain of philosophy than Thomasius’. For modern histo-
rians to describe the civil sciences and their enlightenment as non-philo-
sophical – in order to preserve the unity of a philosophical Aufklärung – is
thus itself both anachronistic and polemical, symptomatic in fact of the
continuing struggle to capture and configure the terrain of philosophy.
It is, however, the tactics of assimilation employed by post-Kantian
intellectual and philosophical history that are of more immediate
concern to us. There are three of these, the first and most important of
which is the dialectical method itself. By positioning metaphysical and
civil philosophy as mutually opposed and mutually deficient ‘theories’ –
intellectualism versus empiricism, rationalism versus voluntarism – this
method uproots the conflicting intellectual cultures from their historical
circumstances, transforming them into subjective ‘ideas’, and preparing
them for absorption into Kant’s discovery of the transcendental grounds
of subjectivity. If this method is definitive of the classic studies by Wundt
and Beck, then it remains powerfully present in the most recent
historiography of the Aufklärung, particularly in the work of Werner
Schneiders, Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, and many of the writers
associated with the journal Aufklärung.
 Introduction
For Schneiders, it is Thomasius and Wolff who are the bearers of the
opposed styles of philosophy. Treating him as the harbinger of German
Bürgerphilosophie, Schneiders characterises Thomasius as developing an
ethical and existential style of philosophy, by limiting philosophy to
knowledge beneficial to man’s civil life, and by grounding it in a practi-
cal knowledge of the good rather than a speculative knowledge of the
truth (Schneiders b, –; Schneiders , –). Wolff, on the
other hand, is (not inaccurately) treated as renewing the scholastic meta-
physical conception of philosophy – as the recovery of the intelligible
forms underlying empirical things – which he modernises using
Leibniz’s ‘Scotist’ construction of possibility in terms of non-contradic-
tory concepts. Wolff thus treats merely ‘historical’ (empirical) knowledge
as vulgar, while regarding philosophy as a rational science of ‘the pos-
sible as possible’ (Schneiders b, –; Schneiders , –).
Again, the mutually deficient philosophies are destined for reconcilia-
tion, at first in the Popularphilosophen – who mix Thomasian civics and
Wolffian metaphysics without transcending them – and then in Kant,
who transcends the oppositions by turning history itself into the ground
of rational possibility (Schneiders b, –). At first sight, Schmidt-
Biggemann’s version of this history would seem closer to our own; for
he treats the metaphysics of Leibniz and Wolff and the Bürgerphilosophie
of Thomasius as indicative of rival conceptions of Aufklärung, the one
oriented to intellectual self-clarification, the other to social improvement
(Schmidt-Biggemann a, –). Such is the power of the dialectical
method, however, that Schmidt-Biggemann is forced to treat these phi-
losophies as mutually deficient – the former failing to ground reason in
history, the latter failing to ground historical reform in reason – pointing
towards Kant’s reconciliatory conception of history as the arena for
reason’s unfolding in time.
If the first tactic of assimilation thus involves converting civil philos-
ophy into a subjective theory destined for absorption by the Kantian
dialectic, then the second involves the deployment of an epochal peri-
odisation based on this supersession. This periodisation identifies the
leading figures of civil philosophy, Pufendorf and Thomasius, as repre-
sentatives of the ‘early’ Enlightenment (Frühaufklärung) – rather than of
a rival enlightenment – hence as destined to be eclipsed by or folded
into an evolving mature, high, or late Enlightenment, identified with
the advent of Kantian philosophy. In Schneiders’ standard version, the
supposed dominance of Thomasian voluntarism in the first two
decades of the eighteenth century characterises the Frühaufklärung. The
 Introduction 
eclipse of Thomasius’ Bürgerphilosophie by Wolffian rationalism in the
s marks the onset of a middle Enlightenment, which peters out into
the melding of Thomasian and Wolffian perspectives in mid-century
Popularphilosophie. Finally, the ‘high’ or late Enlightenment emerges with
Kant’s definitive reconciliation and transcendence of all prior opposed
philosophies in the s (Schneiders b). Schmidt-Biggemann has
recently improvised on this dialectical periodisation in order to provide
a schema for the evolution of knowledge in the early modern German
university, treating the sixteenth-century university as dominated by
theology and the seventeenth by political jurisprudence (Schmidt-
Biggemann ). Following the standard dialectical schema, however,
Schmidt-Biggemann treats the reciprocal deficiencies of these disci-
plines – theological dogmatism on one side, political utilitarianism on
the other – as destining them for eclipse by the philosophical university
of the eighteenth-century Aufklärung.
The post-Kantian assimilation of civil philosophy is completed by a
third tactic: the doctrine that in recovering the transcendental conditions
of experience, Kantian philosophy floats free of historical conditions
altogether, and represents in fact the transcendental conditions of his-
torical reality. For, if Kantian philosophy has indeed recovered the forms
of experience prior to the manifestation of experience as history, then
we must accept Hinske’s claims that this philosophy depends on no his-
torical mythos or ethos; that, as the pure ‘work of thought itself ’, it is the
only true vehicle of enlightenment; and that the theological and civil sci-
ences are themselves only empirical outworkings of Kantian philosoph-
ical concepts.
It would of course be foolhardy to doubt the assimilative power of
post-Kantian dialectical historiography, backed as it is by the widely held
belief that Kant actually uncovered the transcendental conditions of
subjectivity, or at least prepared the way for Hegel’s historicised version
of them. Yet Thomasius’ attack on the intellectualist image of man con-
tained in early modern metaphysics – his stigmatisation of the doctrine
that ‘man’s nature consists in thinking and that the welfare and happi-
ness of the whole human race depends on the correct arrangement of
thought’ – already provides us with an historical anchor-point from
which to preserve civil philosophy against its dialectical assimilation. For
Thomasius’ polemical rejection of it enables us to formulate a funda-
mental conjecture regarding this intellectualist anthropology: namely,
that this anthropology is central not just to early modern university
metaphysics, but also to post-Kantian dialectical historiography. After
 Introduction
all, in purporting to pre-empt pre-Kantian civil philosophy by positing
Kant’s recovery of the conditions of subjectivity as such, it would seem
that this historiography is also committed to the metaphysical image of
man – as an intelligible being capable of pre-empting empirical history
through transcendental self-reflection.
We will return to this conjecture below. For the moment, we can use
it to shed some light on the three tactics of assimilation just outlined.
First, its indebtedness to this anthropology helps to explain the dialecti-
cal character of post-Kantian philosophical history. For in the funda-
mental oppositions required and imposed by this historiography, it is
possible to discern a projection of the divided lineaments of the meta-
physician’s homo duplex. Through its fundamental positing of man as a
being of pure reason temporarily mortgaged to the experiences and
inclinations of his sensible nature, university metaphysics sought to pro-
gramme an ethos of intellectual self-purification and clarification. It is
the normative lineaments of homo duplex that show through in the dialec-
tical historians’ exemplary oppositions: between a pure intellectualism
cut off from empirical experience, and a brute empiricism lacking insight
into its transcendental conditions; between a pure rationalism incapable
of providing sensible man with motivating norms, and an impure vol-
untarism incapable of providing such norms with a rational basis. Not
only does this clarify why dialectical historiography is driven to treat
metaphysical and civil philosophy as reciprocally deficient theories, it
also illuminates the ‘subjectivising’ tendency of this historiography. For,
in making the rival academic cultures go proxy for the intellectual and
sensible natures of homo duplex, this method treats them as open to rec-
onciliation ‘in thought’ – in fact in Kant’s thinking of the transcenden-
tal conditions of the empirical. We may propose, then, that in treating
civil and metaphysical philosophy as reciprocally deficient theories, des-
tined for reconciliation in the Kantian moment, post-Kantian dialecti-
cal historiography is less an account of the history of the rival cultures
and more a practice of metaphysics by other means.
There is thus good reason to suspend our commitment to the epochal
periodisation based on this historiography. If civil and metaphysical phi-
losophy are related not as reciprocally deficient ‘ideas’ but as indepen-
dent cultural movements, then their history will not be a series of stages
on the way to Kantianism. This applies no less to Schneiders’ division of
eighteenth-century ‘enlightenment philosophy’ into an early, middle,
and late Aufklärung, than it does to Schmidt-Biggemann’s allocation of
theology, jurisprudence, and philosophy to the sixteenth, seventeenth,
 Introduction 
and eighteenth centuries, respectively. For, despite Schmidt-Biggemann’s
attempt to confine natural and political law to the seventeenth century,
and despite Schneiders’ claim that Thomasian Bürgerphilosophie under-
went metaphysical eclipse during the s, Steven Lestition has shown
that Pufendorfian–Thomasian natural law continued to function as a key
academic discipline well into the second half of the eighteenth century.
Moreover, he has shown that it maintained this role in the law faculty of
Kant’s own university (Lestition ). It may indeed be that, with the
Kantian capture of German philosophical faculties from the s, the
teaching of civil philosophy was increasingly confined to the faculties of
law and politics. But the fact that the civil sciences of natural and polit-
ical law continued to play a key role in forming the ‘juristic civic con-
sciousness’ suggests that the alleged eclipsing of these sciences reflects
only the viewpoint of their metaphysical rival, now safely in possession
of the Kantianised arts faculties.
Lastly, this indicates that we should give up the view that in reconcil-
ing the oppositions between idealism and empiricism, rationalism and
voluntarism, Kant’s philosophy broke the bonds of mythos and ethos
tying thought to history, recovering the conditions of subjectivity itself.
This will enable us to look for the mythos and ethos of Kantian philos-
ophy itself, to investigate its anthropological commitments and its ethical
demands. In this way we can begin to redescribe Kantianism, as a par-
ticular historical culture of the self, neither more nor less fundamental
than the cultures of civil and metaphysical philosophy.

It is in redescribing early modern civil and metaphysical philosophy as

autonomous intellectual cultures that this book makes its own contribu-
tion to the body of works on whose shoulders it stands. For, in the course
of this study I augment those political and juridical histories of the civil
sciences with a particular approach to the history of philosophy. This
approach investigates philosophies in terms of the ‘ascetic’ relation to
the self they impose, and the ‘spiritual exercises’ that they require. In
drawing sources for this kind of investigation one may range quite
widely, from Wittgenstein’s remark that ‘work in philosophy . . . is really
more work on oneself ’, to Foucault’s more historically oriented
comment that philosophy may be regarded as ‘an “ascesis”, askesis, an
exercise of oneself in the activity of thought’ (Foucault , ;
Wittgenstein , ). Here, rather than being restricted to the narrow
meaning of self-denial, the term ascetic qualifies all those intellectual
practices or ‘spiritual exercises’ whose special role is to permit attention
 Introduction
to and transformation of the self. Characteristically, histories of philos-
ophy in this manner focus on the anthropologies, psychologies, and cos-
mologies through which the members of specific intellectual elites
acquire the capacity to take up a particular relation to themselves and
their world. This is typically a relation that imbues such individuals with
a conviction of their deviation from an ideal way of thought or life – a
relation of self-problematisation. In this way they are inducted into a
particular intellectual regimen or practice of self-cultivation, through
which they may reshape themselves in the image of this ideal.
In a recently translated work, Pierre Hadot provides a pointer to the
investigation of philosophies in terms of the spiritual exercises they
impose:
We have seen that, at first glance, [the spiritual exercises] appear to vary widely.
Some, like Plutarch’s ethismoi, designed to curb curiosity, anger or gossip, were
only practices intended to ensure good moral habits. Others, particularly the
meditations of the Platonic tradition, demanded a high degree of mental con-
centration. Some, like the contemplation of nature as practiced in all philosoph-
ical schools, turned the soul toward the cosmos, while still others – rare and
exceptional – led to a transfiguration of the personality, as in the experiences of
Plotinus. We also saw that the emotional tone and notional content of these
exercises varied widely from one philosophical school to another: from the
mobilisation of energy and consent to destiny of the Stoics, to the relaxation
and detachment of the Epicureans, to the mental concentration and renuncia-
tion of the sensible world among the Platonists.
Despite this variety, Hadot continues, the different modes of self-culture
are joined by commonalities of form and function:
Beneath this apparent diversity . . . there is a profound unity, both in the means
employed and in the ends pursued. The means employed are the rhetorical and
dialectical techniques of persuasion, the attempts at mastering one’s inner dia-
logue, and mental concentration. In all philosophical schools, the goal pursued
in these exercises is self-realisation and improvement. (P. Hadot , )
While successfully applied to ancient philosophy (Annas ; Brown
a; Brown b; Nussbaum ; Rabbow ), this approach has
not been widely exploited in the broader history of philosophy. There is,
however, at least one study of late medieval university metaphysics in
these terms, which will constitute an important resource for us
(Thomassen ). There are also some important kindred discussions
of early modern Stoicism and Epicureanism (Kimmich ; Kimmich
; Osler ), and we might add Oestreich’s account of Lipsian neo-
Stoicism to the same series (Oestreich ). Until now, this approach
has not been applied to Kantian philosophy.
 Introduction 
Notwithstanding their disparate topics, and despite some significant
differences in method and emphasis, these studies are joined by a
common historiographic approach to the investigation of ‘school’ phi-
losophies. They treat the anthropologies, psychologies, and cosmologies
contained in such philosophies as reflexive ethical instruments – that is,
as means by which individuals are inducted into new existential relations
to themselves and their world – rather than as quasi-scientific theories of
the subject or the cosmos. In short, these studies investigate philosophies
as paideia rather than as theoria. As such, they open the door to a funda-
mentally non-Kantian approach to the self, treating this not in terms of
a subjectivity transcendentally presupposed by experience, but in terms
of one historically cultivated to meet the purposes of a particular way of
life.
As a-rational modes of fashioning persons for envisaged circum-
stances, philosophical anthropologies formed the link between academic
philosophies and the larger religious and political forces that converged
on the early modern university. In attacking his metaphysical rivals,
Thomasius thus focuses on their intellectualist anthropology. For he
regards it as implicated in the sacerdotalism of the confessional state,
and as inimical to the ‘juristic civic consciousness’ he sought to form via
his ‘Epicurean’ anthropology. In focusing on the uncontrollable passions
rather than a quasi-divine reason, Thomasius’ anthropology would
allow man to be seen as a dangerous creature in need of civil restraint
and political control. This cultural role of rival anthropologies is what
Schmitt has in mind when, in the course of discussing competing ‘opti-
mistic’ and ‘pessimistic’ political anthropologies, he remarks that: ‘phi-
losophy and anthropology, as specifically applicable to the totality of
knowledge, cannot, like any specialised discipline, be neutralised against
irrational life decisions’ (Schmitt , ). It is by attending to the self-
formative functions of the rival philosophies and anthropologies that we
shall thus come to understand the manner in which their rivalry was
informed by larger historical conflicts, in particular that over the desa-
cralisation and resacralisation of politics. This shifting of the methodo-
logical axis of the history of philosophy enables us to identify six themes
that will be central to our study of the conflict between civil and meta-
physical philosophy in early modern Germany.
First and foremost, it enables us to place the rival moral anthropolo-
gies in a single space of historical description, thereby acquiring the neu-
trality needed to treat them as objects of historical investigation. We
shall encounter several such anthropologies. In Pufendorf ’s natural law
we discover a political anthropology of man as a creature whose violent
 Introduction
passions threaten his capacity for sociality, thereby necessitating the
creation of a sovereign power capable of imposing the rules of sociabil-
ity as law. Leibniz’s practical philosophy, however, is grounded in his
Platonic ‘monadology’, treating man as an intellectual soul capable of
participating in the divine intellection of the substances, and thereby
perfecting himself through contemplation. Following in Pufendorf ’s
footsteps, Thomasius’ quasi-Epicurean anthropology of passional man
necessitates an ethics of self-restraint and a jurisprudence of sovereign
command. Finally, in Kant’s anthropology of man’s dual intelli-
gible–sensible natures, we encounter a further elaboration of the meta-
physical homo duplex, driving Kant to construct an ethics and politics in
terms of man’s self-purifying recovery of his self-governing rational
being. In none of these instances shall we be approaching the relevant
anthropology as a philosophical theory that might be true or false to the
moral nature of the human being. Rather, each anthropology will be
investigated as an ethical instrument capable of impelling individuals to
relate to themselves as beings possessing a particular nature – this being
the precondition of their fashioning selves suited to differently envisaged
worlds. By treating the various anthropologies as optional and equiva-
lent means through which certain individuals forge the relation to the
self – that is, as different forms in which individuals cross the threshold
of subjectivity and learn to deport themselves as subjects of particular
kinds – we suspend all normative commitment to them. Instead, we
regard them as instruments for the cultivation of particular intellectual
deportments, whose historical circumstances, purposes and distribution
are matters of historical investigation and description.
Second, by placing the notion of enlightenment in this methodologi-
cal context we can provide an appropriate grounding for the theme of
rival enlightenments. For this recontextualisation suggests that ‘enlight-
enment’ refers to a condition of the self attained and valorised through
the spiritual exercises of a particular ethos. In this regard the worldly
self-restraint and indifference to transcendence of the ‘Epicurean’ jurists
has just as much claim to be considered enlightened as the exalted par-
ticipation in divine intellection of the ‘Platonic’ metaphysicians. All
notions of ‘the Enlightenment’ may be regarded as nominalisations of
the adjective qualifying those who are deemed ‘enlightened’. In its turn,
‘enlightened’ is the self-valorising term that the members of a particu-
lar philosophical school apply to themselves – in honour of their attain-
ment of a particular comportment of the self, regarded as an ideal way
of thought or life. For this reason we must give up the post-Kantian
 Introduction 
notion of a true enlightenment, characterised by the ‘enlightenment of
enlightenment’, or the recovery of a basic set of philosophical ideas
absorbing and unifying the different forms of enlightenment (Hinske
; Schneiders ; Stuke ). In fact, this notion – which presumes
that ‘the Enlightenment’ consists in rational being’s recovery of its own
forms of intellection – may itself be regarded as a variant of the meta-
physical enlightenment. For it is designed to drive scholars to dissatisfac-
tion with diverse empirical-historical enlightenments, impelling them to
posit a unifying origin in the ‘work of thought’, and thereby participate
in a higher form of intellection. Since the s, having recognised that
their central period-concept was too indebted to the vision and ethos of
a particular group, the historians of religion have been relegating the
concept of ‘the Reformation’ in favour of a history of multiple waves of
‘confessionalisation’ (Schilling ; Schilling ; Zeeden ).
Perhaps it is time for intellectual historians to move in the same direc-
tion, to dissolve the monolithic Aufklärung into histories of the diverse
enlightenments sought within particular early modern intellectual
cultures.
Third, attending to the self-formative functions of the enlightenment
philosophies provides an appropriate setting for a theme long discussed
by historians of theology and, more recently, by cultural and intellectual
historians: namely, that there is no sharp break between these philoso-
phies and Christian theology, and no epochal shift from a religious age
to a secular ‘age of reason’ (Gründer and Rengstorf ). For a long
time it has been held that the Aufklärung witnessed the progressive eclips-
ing of theology by philosophy – a progressive secularisation of thought
and society – typically seen in Kantian terms as human reason’s recov-
ery of its capacity for autonomous self-legislation. More recently,
however, historians have begun to show how deeply enmeshed enlight-
enment thought remains in religion, both at the level of the problems it
was confronted by, and the intellectual instruments it used to solve them.
Challenging the view of Pufendorf and Thomasius as secular statists,
Detlef Döring has renewed attention to them as lay theologians, preoc-
cupied by the problems of confessional division, and deeply indebted to
a certain kind of Protestant ‘spiritualist’ theology for their solutions to
these problems (Döring ; Döring ). If the civil philosophers thus
reveal an unexpected debt to a certain kind of theology, then the depen-
dency of so-called early modern rationalism on a different kind of theol-
ogy is perhaps even more surprising. Yet a number of studies suggest that
metaphysical rationalism (Leibniz, Wolff, Kant) is inseparable from a
 Introduction
specific theological anthropology (Honnefelder ; Kondylis ;
Sparn ; Thomassen ). This is one that figures forth God as a
pure mind spontaneously intelligising the conceptual forms of things,
and man as the ‘sensibly affected’ rational being capable of partial par-
ticipation in this intellection, giving rise to the figure of homo duplex.
Rather than signifying an epochal break with religion and theology,
therefore, the rival enlightenments represented two divergent attempts
to reconfigure religion, using opposed theological means. In drawing on
voluntarist theology to place the divine mind beyond human reason –
hence beyond credal formulation and civil enforcement – the civil phi-
losophers sought to confine salvific religion to private life. For their part,
in offering ‘rational’ explications of the central Christian mysteries, the
metaphysical philosophers regarded their ‘natural theologies’ as new
moral theologies for public life, shifting the locus of salvation to meta-
physics itself. The divergent ways in which the two intellectual cultures
addressed the religious question were thus deeply informed by the
opposed anthropologies in which they were grounded.
Fourth, if, however, attending to the ‘ascetic’ grounding of the rival
enlightenments reveals their theological dimensions, then it simultane-
ously holds the key to understanding their secularising roles. This is par-
ticularly the case for civil philosophy. Through its voluntarist–theological
exclusion of transcendent intellection from the domains of ethics, poli-
tics, and jurisprudence, Pufendorfian natural law effected a profound
‘detranscendentalising’ of civil governance. For this allowed politics and
the state to be conceived solely in terms of the worldly preservation of a
being with man’s ‘empirical’ (social but vicious) nature, to the exclusion
of all concern with his morality and salvation (Tully ). We have
already indicated that in this profound reconstruction of practical
philosophy, the civil philosophers were the bearers not of a general phil-
osophical rationalisation of society, but of the specific kinds of secular-
isation effected by political science and political jurisprudence (Heckel
; Kriegel ). In this regard their kind of ‘secularisation’ differed
decisively from that of the metaphysical philosophers. For, rather than
restricting religion to the private sphere in order to effect the desacral-
isation of politics, Leibniz, Wolff, and Kant all attempted to provide a
secular equivalent for religion – in the form of their own natural theol-
ogies – through which they hoped to provide a moral basis for a resac-
ralised state. Shocked by the central political construct of the early
modern civil sciences – the secular security state – the metaphysicians
sought to preserve their conception of a world still governed by the
 Introduction 
transcendent justice of the heavenly city. They did so by refurbishing a
longstanding Christian conception of political order – the figure of the
church as the ‘kingdom of God on earth’ – thereby initiating a power-
ful anti-political, anti-juridical theory of ‘society’.
Fifth, we are now in a position to appreciate the key role played by the
discipline of natural law (Jus naturae, Naturrecht) in organising the conflict
between civil and metaphysical philosophy. As a sub-branch of theology
– treating of man’s natural knowledge of the moral laws inscribed in
human nature by the creator – natural law reached back to the great
scholastic systems, yet had been refurbished by the early modern Jesuits,
Vitoria and Suárez, as part of the ‘second scholasticism’ (Haakonssen
, –). In the neoscholastic form imposed on it by Suárez, natural
law retained most of its core Thomist features, in particular the concep-
tion of rights as arising from subjective moral capacities (man’s ‘rational
and social being’) whose teleological completion forms the purpose of
civil laws and the basis of political sovereignty (Tierney , –). In
thus treating civil rule as if it were grounded in a higher moral order,
neoscholastic natural law was perfectly suited to the political–theologi-
cal conception of society as church, providing the basis, for example, of
Suárez’s defence of the Pope’s power to determine the heretical status
of Protestant princes. It was precisely this political–theological role of
neoscholastic natural law that led Hobbes, Grotius, and Pufendorf to
transform it from within. By replacing the Aristotelian anthropology of
man’s rational and social being with an Epicurean conception of man
as a passion-driven self-destructive being, and by using a voluntarist
theology to exclude theo-rational conceptions of justice from the civil
domain, the civil philosophers literally (Hobbes) or in effect (Pufendorf)
identified natural law with the commands of the civil sovereign
(Wyduckel ). Moreover, they did so not just in order to immunise
Protestant princes against religious subversion by political Catholicism,
but, more importantly, to allow the state to float free of all religious
claims on its civil authority (Döring b). It was not only Catholic
political theologians who therefore attacked the natural law of
Pufendorf and his follower Thomasius. As we have seen, Pufendorf ’s
detranscendentalised natural law provoked heresy accusations from
Lutheran theologians such as Alberti, who continued to elaborate neo-
scholastic versions, not least to defend the civil powers of the church
against the fundamental attacks of Hobbes and Pufendorf (Palladini
). As a result, seventeenth-century German universities provided the
battle-ground for two ‘modern’ doctrines of natural law: the ‘civil’
 Introduction
natural law of Grotius, Hobbes, Pufendorf, and Thomasius; and the
‘Christian’ natural law of Althusius, Alberti, Prasch, Veltheim, Placcius,
Rachel, and, most famously (restrospectively), Leibniz, who attacked the
civil philosophers from the high ground of Protestant scholasticism
(Schneider ). This ‘intellectual civil war’ provides one of the central
instances of the conflict between the two enlightenments.
Finally, we are in a position to observe that if the rival enlightenments
were not competing theories evolving towards their Kantian Aufhebung,
that is because they were in fact competing ways of configuring the pow-
erful religious and political forces that converged on the early modern
university. Civil philosophy, we have noted, was not so much a philo-
sophical doctrine as a series of attempts to provide a small group of
civil sciences – political jurisprudence (Staatsrecht and Staatskirchenrecht),
‘Bodinian’ sovereignty doctrine, civil law – with a configuration suited to
the formation of a ‘juristic civic consciousness’. For its part, university
metaphysics may be regarded as a series of attempts to configure a
largely different group of academic disciplines – theology, Roman law,
logic, ethics – in accordance with the Christian metaphysical view of the
world as a unity arising from its (divine) intellection; that is, to provide a
configuration suited to the formation of a ‘metaphysical supra-civic con-
sciousness’. In each case the cultivation of a specific academic ethos was
central to the undertaking. Through the metaphysical anthropology of
homo duplex – that permitted them to explicate the Christian mysteries
and reveal the pure concepts of morality and justice underlying the civil
order – the university metaphysicians cultivated a particular intellectual
purity and prestige. On this basis, they claimed the authority to limit the
governance of the earthly city in accordance with the laws of its divine
archetype, thereby advancing the interests of the academic–clerical
estate. The civil philosophers cultivated a different ethos in accordance
with divergent ends. Through its anti-metaphysical voluntarism and
Epicurean anthropology, civil natural law enabled its bearers to separ-
ate their own deepest religious and moral convictions from the formula-
tion of laws aimed solely at civil security. It was thus instrumental in
grounding the new doctrines of territorial sovereignty and desacralised
politics in a specific intellectual deportment, one characterised by
private piety and public acceptance of the civil sovereign’s political
supremacy.
If, therefore, metaphysical and civil philosophy came into profound
conflict in early modern Germany – especially on the terrain of natural
law – this was not because they represented reciprocally deficient epis-
 Introduction 
temologies or ethics, soon to be reconciled and transcended in Kantian
critical philosophy. Rather, it was because they represented divergent
cultures for configuring the relations between religious and civil govern-
ance. Each was grounded in a powerful ascetic philosophy, and each was
dedicated to using this philosophy to place certain academic sciences at
the disposal of the state – but in very different ways and in accordance
with fundamentally different conceptions of politics.
The studies of Leibniz and Pufendorf, Thomasius and Kant in Part
 of our essay are not therefore intended as a narrative history of early
modern philosophy, governed by the theme of the progressive discovery
of the laws of human reason or the autonomy of the moral subject.
Rather, they are to be viewed as a series of profiles outlining the manner
in which these figures attempted to impose either a civil or a metaphys-
ical signature on a specific array of academic sciences, each in accor-
dance with a distinctive ethos, and as part of larger attempts to
reconfigure early modern Germany’s religious and political culture.
Before embarking on these particular studies, however, we require an
overview of the role of metaphysical and civil philosophy in the early
modern German university, which is the task of Part  of this book.
This Page Intentionally Left Blank
  
Rival enlightenments
This Page Intentionally Left Blank
    

University metaphysics

 .            
We have suggested that, rather than representing the path taken by
human reason’s recovery of its own transcendental conditions, German
university metaphysics was itself polemically enmeshed in the religious
and political conflicts of the early modern period. This chapter provides
an overview of this approach to the history of German university meta-
physics. We argue that in its anthropology and cosmology Schulmetaphysik
gave shape not to a universal rational being, but to a particular kind of
moral personage. Through his self-purifying recovery of the pure con-
cepts of things, this personage was groomed for the exercise of a quasi-
sacral power in the civil domain. This spiritual grooming, carried out in
the teaching of metaphysics itself, created the prestige and authority
required to judge civil affairs in accordance with transcendent concepts
– in particular, the concepts of man’s rational being and the natural laws
required for its realisation.
One of our central concerns will be to sketch a genealogy for the
prestige of enlightenment metaphysics by showing its indebtedness
to seventeenth-century Protestant Schulmetaphysik. The ‘enlightenment’
defence of the intelligible conditions of empirical experience, we argue,
may be regarded as an historical improvisation on the neoscholastic
defence of the divine intellection of the supersensible forms and sub-
stances. This lays the groundwork for our non-standard approach to the
metaphysical philosophy of Leibniz, Wolff, and Kant in Part . For here,
rather than viewing them as moving ever closer to the recovery of
human subjectivity’s transcendent(al) conditions, we treat the enlighten-
ment metaphysicians as exponents of a quasi-religious ethos in which
this recovery is the objective of a spiritual exercise.
Needless to say, while the relation between enlightenment metaphys-
ics and seventeenth-century Schulmetaphysik remains under-researched, it
has not gone unnoticed. With very few exceptions, however, this relation

 University metaphysics
is discussed in terms of metaphysics throwing off its theological past. This
view of enlightenment metaphysics as the rational subsumption of its
theological predecessor can take a negative or positive form. Beck, for
example, treats the neoscholastic theory of being as too scholastic and
dogmatic – as insufficiently ‘epistemological’ – to function as a vehicle for
autonomous human reason, hence as destined to be eclipsed by the
emergence of enlightenment epistemology (Beck , –). Petersen
and Wundt, however, regard seventeenth-century Schulmetaphysik as
playing a key role in the emergence of enlightenment metaphysics,
through the manner in which it preserved the doctrine of transcendent
rational being against the threats of English empiricism and German
Pietism (Petersen ; Wundt ; Wundt ). In both cases, however,
enlightenment metaphysics is viewed as the rational transcendence of its
theological predecessor – either as the emancipator of philosophy from
theology, or as the means of their harmonisation in a rational theory of
transcendent being. In other words, in both cases the history of meta-
physics is seen in terms of the progressive rationalisation of human
reason’s (initially theological) pursuit of its transcendent(al) conditions.
Before discussing this view in a little more detail, we may observe that
there are prima facie reasons for thinking that the history of metaphys-
ics is far more turbulent – far more deeply enmeshed in the history of
religious and political conflict – than such an account can allow. Here
the crucial thing to observe is that with the onset of Lutheran confes-
sionalisation (‘the Reformation’), university metaphysics was targeted for
elimination. Pointers to this anti-metaphysical campaign can be found
in Luther’s Disputation Against Scholastic Theology of , where we find his
wholesale rejection of the Aristotelian way:
It is false to state that the will can by nature conform to a correct precept. This
is said in opposition to Scotus and Gabriel . . .
Virtually the entire Ethics of Aristotle is the worst enemy of grace. This in
opposition to the scholastics . . .
It is an error to say that no man can become a theologian without Aristotle.
Indeed, no one can become a theologian unless he becomes one without
Aristotle.
In vain does one fashion a logic of faith, a substitution brought about without
regard for limit and measure. This in opposition to the new dialecticians.
(Luther , , )
Luther’s hostility was driven in part by the key role that Scotist–
Aristotelian university metaphysics had played in defining and defend-
ing Catholic orthodoxy against the first waves of reform (Shank ).
 Introduction 
But it was also driven by his Occamite repudiation of the ‘rationalist’
character of this metaphysics – that is, of its claims to provide natural
knowledge of the Christian mysteries via transcendent concepts
common to God and man. From Luther’s voluntarist perspective, the
Thomist and Scotist programmes – teaching that man could accede to
knowledge and love of God through cultivation of a quasi-divine (meta-
physical) reason – were completely inimical to the true grounding of
religion in a biblically based faith.
Taken to its conclusion, Luther’s rejection of the metaphysical recon-
ciliation of reason and faith, philosophy and theology, resulted in the
‘two truths’ doctrine. In elaborating this doctrine in his De Usu et
Applicatione Notionum Logicorum ad Res Theologicus (On the Use and Application
of Logical Concepts in Relation to Theological Matters, ), Daniel Hofmann
argues that philosophy and theology give rise to irreconcilably different
kinds of truth, on the basis of the difference between the ‘natural’
(corrupt) and ‘regenerate’ conditions of the intellect that accedes to
truth. This doctrine is so hostile to the metaphysical reconciliation of
philosophy and theology that even modern metaphysicians attack it on
sight: ‘Common to all the scholastic metaphysicians was the rejection of
a two-fold truth – in fact, the metaphysical movement arose to meet the
theological irrationalism enshrined in this ancient bugbear’ (Beck ,
). As soon, however, as we reinstate the specific anthropology under-
pinning Luther’s and Hofmann’s position – that is, the Occamite anthro-
pology of fallen man’s corrupted intellect and his consequent incapacity
for acceding to transcendent ideas – then the true character of the ‘two
truths’ doctrine becomes apparent. In restricting knowledge of theolog-
ical truth to an intellect regenerated through faith and grace, Hofmann
was not irrationally rejecting philosophy. Rather he was attempting to
exclude philosophers (university metaphysicians) from the role of medi-
ating the Christian mysteries, treating their rationalist pursuit of salva-
tion through ascent to transcendent knowledge as incompatible with the
mode of acceding to salvation through biblical faith (Schorn-Schütte
). In other words, the battle over the ‘two truths’ doctrine is symp-
tomatic not of the role of metaphysics in the emancipation of reason
from religion, but of the quasi-religious role of metaphysics itself; that
is, of its role as a mode of spiritual formation in competition with the
voluntarist and fideist one that was central to early Lutheran confession-
alism (Sparn ).
This is the historical light in which we should view the exclusion of
metaphysics from the curricula of Protestant universities in the first
 University metaphysics
decades of the sixteenth century. The University of Wittenberg ()
proved to be the model in this regard, with the old scholastic cur-
riculum grounded in logic and metaphysics being replaced by the
Melanchthonian curriculum centred on rhetoric, ethics, natural law,
biblical exegesis and the Aristotelian sciences (Kusukawa ). Far from
representing an irrational cul-de-sac, Wittenberg was indicative of a
new and far-reaching alliance between the state-building aspirations of
territorial princes and the confessionalising objectives of religious acti-
vists (Heinrich ). In fact, Wittenberg broke with the old form of the
university – that of an urban corporation under Imperial and Papal
patent. Instead, it drew its legal form and funding from the territorial
state, and its governance from a council of state officials and religious
reformers – including Luther, Jonas, Melanchthon, and Bugenhagen
(Scheible ). In this setting, Melanchthon’s model curriculum was
required to fulfil the same key functions as its scholastic predecessor – to
provide the religious and political elite with a suitably orthodox intellec-
tual comportment (Kaufmann , –). Melanchthon, however,
could not use the metaphysics of transcendent–rational being as his
means of harmonising the theological and philosophical sciences into a
single formative curriculum. Instead, as Kusukawa has shown, he har-
nessed the (Aristotelian) natural sciences themselves to this end, teach-
ing them as the key to reading the signs of God’s ordering presence in
nature, and thereby maintaining the normative unity of the Christian
academic curriculum (Kusukawa ).
It is all the more remarkable therefore that during the closing decade
of the sixteenth century and the opening one of the seventeenth, the
banished figure of the metaphysician suddenly reappeared in the philos-
ophy and theology faculties of the Protestant academy. In the Lutheran
universities we can mention Daniel Cramer (Wittenberg, ),
Cornelius Martini (Helmstedt, ), Henning Arnisaeus (Helmstedt,
), Jacob Martini (Wittenberg, ), Johann Gerhard (Jena, ),
Balthasar Meisner (Wittenberg, ), and Christoph Scheibler (Gießen,
). In the Calvinist world the most prominent of the new metaphysi-
cians were Rudolf Goclenius (Marburg, ), Bartholomaeus
Keckermann (Heidelberg, ), Johann Alsted (Herborn, ), and
Clemens Timpler (Heidelberg and Steinfurt, ) (Sparn , ;
Wundt ). Considering our larger concerns, the return of a full-
blooded metaphysics to Protestant universities from the final decade of
the sixteenth century presents us with an important historical–intellec-
tual problem. Given that the central tasks of philosophia Christiana could,
 Metaphysics as the subsumption of theology 
apparently, be fulfilled by a non-metaphysical scholasticism, what was
driving the return of metaphysics to the Protestant academy almost a
century after Luther and Melanchthon had shown it the door? As we
shall see, the answer to this question holds the key to understanding the
relation between seventeenth-century Schulmetaphysik and its enlighten-
ment successor.

.              

       
For a long time the standard answer to this question was Petersen’s
(Petersen ). Identifying metaphysics with ‘Aristotelianism’, Petersen
treats its expulsion from the Protestant academy as a religious aberration
that would be reversed through human reason’s natural desire to
uncover the transcendent–rational grounds of the empirical world. This
is the desire that Petersen sees behind the return of Protestant
Schulmetaphysik and as ultimately finding its full satisfaction in Leibniz’s
metaphysical rationalism. In short, in ignoring the religious and politi-
cal forces driving the banishment of metaphysics from the Protestant
curriculum, and in presuming that its return represents the resumption
of reason’s pursuit of its own transcendent conditions, Petersen’s
account is a typical instance of the history of metaphysics as the ratio-
nal subsumption of theology.
We can identify two versions of this history. According to the first,
metaphysics leads to the rational preservation of religious belief in the
form of Kant’s recovery of the transcendental conditions of human
experience and morality. Wundt and Beck offer classic histories of meta-
physics written in these terms. While they differ over whether it is
Lutheranism or Calvinism that contains the germs of a rational future,
and while they disagree over whether reason is best served by metaphys-
ics or epistemology, both of them treat Kant’s ‘critical’ metaphysics as
preserving man’s longing for the transcendent in a rational form (Beck
, –; Wundt , –). Similarly, Schmidt-Biggemann
identifies two forms in which seventeenth-century metaphysics (natural
theology) preserved man’s desire for the transcendent against theologi-
cal dogmatism and juridical positivism. The first of these is the neo-
Aristotelian metaphysics of Suárez, whose reduction of religious
statements to a common language of ‘being’ made it possible to treat
‘Christ’s presence in the sacrament or . . . the incarnation of Christ, as
problems of logic and metaphysics and in this way to show the scientific
 University metaphysics
character of theology and its convergence with nature and reason’
(Schmidt-Biggemann , ). The second is the Hermetic–Platonic
metaphysics of the neo-Platonists, which locates the intelligibility of
history in divinely intelligised ‘perfections’ (transcendent essences of
things). This, Schmidt-Biggemann argues, would eventually bear fruit in
Leibniz’s grounding of natural law in ‘trans-religious and trans-confes-
sional’ rational concepts of justice, and in Kant’s final recovery of ‘the
autonomy of reason as a legal principle’ (). In characterising the cul-
mination of seventeenth-century metaphysics in this manner, Schmidt-
Biggemann ignores both the polemical construction of Leibniz’s
transcendent conception of natural law – its vehement opposition to
Pufendorf ’s political conception – and the degree to which this construc-
tion depended on the explicitly confessional doctrines of the Lutheran
natural jurists and political theologians (Schneider ). We will return
to this set of issues in Chapter .
According to the second version of this historiography, Protestant
Schulmetaphysik is less the seed-bed of Kantian epistemology and more a
by-product of a truly fundamental reconciliation of theology and philos-
ophy: namely, that undertaken by the Jesuit metaphysician Francisco
Suárez (–) at the advent of the ‘second scholasticism’. Here,
Suárez’s metaphysics of ‘intelligible being’ – the sphere of timeless
logical substances existing prior to their materialisation as things – is
made central to the harmonisation of theology and philosophy, hence to
the self-development of human reason. Written under Catholic auspices,
this history of early modern metaphysics brings out the (de facto)
Protestant character of the Kantian one. In his early attempt to account
for the success of ‘Jesuit metaphysics’ in Protestant universities,
Eschweiler appeals to the centrality of Suárez’s ‘practical intellectual-
ism’, and to his conception of the intelligible ground of empirical being
in particular. Scarcely mentioning the facts of intra- and extra-Protestant
confessional conflict, Eschweiler sees Suárez’s doctrine as answering the
need of Protestant academics for a unifying foundation for the academic
sciences, so that the return of metaphysics is driven by a ‘need of the
time’ or Zeitgeist (Eschweiler , –). While paying more attention
than Eschweiler to the circumstances of intra-Protestant confessional
conflict, Ernst Lewalter also ascribes the return of metaphysics to a
purely intellectual dynamic, in fact arising from the tension between phi-
losophy and theology. Lewalter thus depicts Protestant metaphysics as
divided between a philological–humanist wing (Arnisaeus, Helmstedt)
and a formal onto-theological wing (Scheibler, Gießen), the latter being
 Metaphysics as the subsumption of theology 
grounded in Suárez’s onto-theology of divine being and dedicated to
reconstructing Aristotle for the purposes of confessional theology
(Lewalter , –, ). He then presents Cornelius Martini
(Helmstedt) as resolving this tension, by developing a metaphysics in
which God is treated as part of ontology (rather than as its foundation),
but in which natural theology is not allowed to replace revealed. The
ground of this reconciliation, however, remains the theory of intelligible
being, which Lewalter regards as driving German metaphysics from
Leibniz through Wolff to Kant and the idealists (–).
The most influential rendering of this version of the history of meta-
physics, however, is Charles Lohr’s. Lohr posits the existence of two
forms of metaphysics. On the one hand there is the neo-Platonic ‘science
of God’ – Lull, Nicholas of Cusa, the Florentine Platonists. This meta-
physics pursues the unity of philosophy and theology by treating divine
intellection of the forms as the goal of a practice of philosophical con-
templation in which even the unconsecrated may participate (Lohr ,
–). Opposed to this is the Thomistic, scholastic-Aristotelian
‘science of being’, whose subordination of philosophical to revealed
knowledge of God Lohr regards as dictated by clericalism and the hier-
archical nature of medieval church and society (, ). By presenting
both versions of metaphysics as under threat from a fideistic nominal-
ism and an empiricist (Averroistic) version of Aristotelianism, Lohr’s
account organises itself around the imperative of a fundamental recon-
ciliation of the philosophical science of God and the theological science
of being: ‘An approach was needed which avoided the fideism of the
nominalists, the secularism of the Averroists and the clericalism behind
the Christian Aristotelianism of the Thomists’ ().
Lohr regards Duns Scotus as taking the decisive step along this path,
by reconstructing the notion of ‘infinite immaterial being’ (God) in
terms of the non-contradictory intelligising of possible things. For, in
doing so, Scotus was able to free metaphysics from Aristotle’s physics
while simultaneously maintaining the subordination of the physical
world to the domain of transcendent being, which now appeared as this
world’s intelligible or rational grounds (–). Suárez is then described
as completing Scotus’ reconciliation of philosophy and theology, which
he does by superimposing the distinction between uncreated and created
being on Scotus’ pairing of infinite and finite being. This allowed Suárez
to distinguish ‘real’ being, as the pure concepts or intelligibilia intelligised
by God, from ‘actual’ being, as the empirical things whose existence was
wholly dependent on God’s decision to realise some of the intelligibles
 University metaphysics
(). Lohr thus regards Suárez as harmonising philosophy and theology
– and outflanking the disintegrative forces of empiricism and fideism –
through his new metaphysical construction of man and the world as
finite beings bearing infinite principles of intelligibility.
Placing it in this context, Lohr treats the return of metaphysics to
Germany’s Protestant universities as a theatre for a smaller version of
the same intellectual–historical drama. The main difference in the
German case is that Reformation voluntarism and fideism intensified
the threats to Christian metaphysics arising from secular ‘medical
empiricism’. These threats were nonetheless countered in the familiar
way, through the adaptation of Suárez’s new theory of intelligible being
to German circumstances:
Suárez’ work was well suited to the purposes of the Lutheran thinkers. He
understood metaphysics as a general science of being and rejected the idea of
an independent natural theology. He provided the philosophical basis for the
treatment of the Incarnation. Most importantly, he provided a foundation for
a refutation of the theory of double truth proposed by some extremist theolo-
gians. Suárez’ Disputationes describe a confessionally neutral, possible world to
which all those who accepted the doctrine of creation could subscribe. (Lohr
, –)
Despite several significant differences therefore – focused in the gap
between Jesuit metaphysics and Kantian epistemology – these two ver-
sions of the history of metaphysics share a common core. Above all, by
locating the reconciliation of theology and philosophy in the theory of
intelligible being, both versions equate metaphysics with human reason’s
recovery of its transcendent(al) foundations. It is on this basis that they
can treat the return of metaphysics to the Protestant academy as the
resumption of reason’s journey of self-discovery. This is the journey that
would culminate in the subsumption of theology within a philosophical
knowledge of the ‘rational’ (intelligible) grounds of the empirical world.
From here arose a ‘confessionally neutral’ language for addressing the
transcendent-rational intellect housed in the human subject, which
would be spoken – albeit in different dialects – by Leibniz, Wolff, and
Kant.

.             

      
We can indicate the limitations of this historiographic consensus, and
outline an alternative genealogy for university metaphysics, by making
 The return of metaphysics 
four observations. We can begin by observing that the return of meta-
physics was driven more by the needs of confessional religion than by
the destiny of reason. Salomon Geßner’s edition of Johann Versor’s
Epitome Metaphysicae Aristotelicae () – published at Wittenberg in 
– gives symptomatic expression to these needs. After complaining about
the rude and ignorant students emerging from Melanchthon’s curricu-
lum, Geßner approaches his central concerns by reminding his readers
that the ‘Calviniani’ have used the slogan finitum non est capax infiniti – the
finite cannot contain the infinite – in order to attack the Lutheran
account of the communication of properties (communicatio idiomata)
between Christ’s human and divine natures. If the Lutheran doctrine of
the union of finite and infinite being is to be clarified and defended, says
Geßner, then Lutheran universities must re-embrace the discipline of
metaphysics. He continues:
For how disgracefully today many stumble or falter when they have to speak
about principles, about causes, about the elements of something, about the
nature of something, about something such as unity, being and essence, iden-
tity and difference, opposition, ground and consequence, possibility and reality,
about completion, about the relation of whole and parts, about the truth and
error of something or about necessity and contingency and similar questions,
whether in theology or in other disciplines – this we experience daily, with pain.
(Geßner in Lewalter , )
Geßner’s complaint testifies to the central force that was driving the
return of metaphysics to the Protestant universities: namely, the manner
in which the conflict between the rival confessions was being played out
in the spiritual formation of their intellectual elites. After a period of rel-
atively peaceful coexistence in the first half of the sixteenth century, the
second half was marked by an intensification of the process of confes-
sionalisation in various German territories, principalities, and cities. By
the beginning of the seventeenth century the alliance of territorial
princes and confessional theologians had given rise to archipelagoes of
religiously opposed, mutually hostile states (Schilling ). The fact that
Geßner’s demand for the return of the theory of being was issued at the
height of the confessional period, from the academic headquarters of
Lutheran orthodoxy, leads us to suspect that the characteristic of meta-
physics most responsible for its second coming was the spiritual author-
ity that it bestowed on academic philosophers and theologians. If the
Calvinist attack on the union of human and divine being was to be
repulsed, and if the poorly formed ‘Melanchthonian’ students were to
be transformed into a philosophically literate religious intelligentsia
 University metaphysics
capable of mounting such defences, then they would have to be trained
in the only discipline that permitted them to accede to the exalted
domain where human and divine being overlapped: metaphysics.
This observation of the confessional–theological character of Protes-
tant Schulmetaphysik provides the appropriate context in which to intro-
duce Walter Sparn’s remarkable Wiederkehr der Metaphysik: Die ontologische
Frage in der lutherischen Theologie des frühen . Jahrhunderts (The Return of
Metaphysics: The Ontological Question in the Lutheran Theology of the Early th
Century), to which I am indebted throughout this section. Sparn’s over-
turning of all those histories of metaphysics written in terms of the phil-
osophical subsumption of theology hinges on a single fundamental
reorientation. Rather than accepting it as the goal of an emancipatory
history of philosophy, Sparn argues that the reconciliation of philoso-
phy and theology in university metaphysics was in fact a cultural task
imposed by academic theology itself, in accordance with theological
ends, and using theological means (Sparn , –).
Sparn shows that in early seventeenth-century universities the imper-
ative to reconcile philosophy and theology was formulated in theologi-
cal rather than philosophical terms (, –). Here it was argued that
the disciplines must agree because of the singularity of truth, which is
grounded in the self-identity of things created by a single God. This view
was also reflected in the ‘two books’ topos – the book of nature and the
holy book – whose interpretations must agree because they were written
by the same divine hand, which makes natural and revealed knowledge
into alternative ways of knowing God in his works. In fact, Sparn argues,
the very distinction between natural and revealed knowledge is a theo-
logical construct. For it was used to impose a highly abstract category of
‘philosophy’ on a wide range of academic sciences – that is, all the sci-
ences deemed grounded in the unaided or natural use of man’s faculties
– with a view to subordinating them to the one revealed science,
theology.
The consequences of formulating the imperative to reconcile ‘philos-
ophy’ and theology in theological terms can be seen in the doctrine
employed to handle any conflicts arising between them. Such conflicts
were to be treated as indicative of a personal failing in the philosopher
– as symptomatic in fact of the corruption and impairment of all post-
lapsarian uses of the natural faculties – hence as requiring correction
through revealed truths: ‘In this way, despite the principled separation
of its scientific domain from that of philosophy, theology charged the
philosopher – in the role of the Christian philosopher – with responsibil-
 The return of metaphysics 
ity for proving philosophically the non-contradictory character of the
limitation of philosophical principles demanded by theology’ (, ).
In short, as the academic discipline designed to maintain agreement
between philosophy and theology, the objective of early-seventeenth-
century metaphysics was not to rationalise theology but to keep poten-
tially secular (‘empiricist’) knowledges and their subjects within the orbit
of Christian academic culture. In continuing to see metaphysics as the
harmonisation of philosophy and theology, its modern historians may
remain more indebted to this objective than they realise.
Our second observation is that, as a para-theological discipline dedi-
cated to configuring academic sciences in accordance with Christian
culture, university metaphysics was itself subject to profound confes-
sional division. We can gain some insight into the character of this divi-
sion through a text of Christoph Scheibler. Scheibler belonged to the
Gießen school of Lutheran theology, characterised by the strong uptake
of Suárez’s theory of intelligible being – in fact he was tagged the
‘Protestant Suárez’. He should therefore be an exponent of Lohr’s ‘con-
fessionally neutral’ metaphysics. This is not, however, the face we
encounter in Scheibler’s Foreword to his Opus Metaphysicum of . In
the course of dedicating his work to count Ludwig of Hessen-
Darmstadt, Scheibler provides an epitome of his arguments for the
necessity of metaphysics, which is worth quoting in full:
In any case, it will be recalled that Boethius tells how at the Nicenian Council
everyone said that in Christ there are two natures and one person, but no-one
knew what this one ‘person’ was. And from this ignorance regarding the
concept of person it then came about that some said it was the three persons of
the divinity while others would not say this. Hence it is clearly very necessary
that metaphysics contain a doctrine in which it explained what a suppositum or
persona generally is.
Equally, the wise will have often inquired into the differentiation of the three
persons of the Godhead. Damascenus said they differed only in relation to our
[human] knowledge; others responded that they were really different. What
does it mean though: to differ ‘in relation to our knowledge’ (ratione) or ‘really’
(realiter)? Again, one can only discover this through metaphysics.
If, further, divine providence comes into consideration then often with it
come the expressions ‘necessity’ and ‘actuality’ (contingentia). If, though, the
meaning of these expressions is not correctly recognised, then not only the infal-
libility of divine foreknowledge, but also the freedom and actuality of human
decisions, can only be inadequately analysed.
In the doctrine of the sacraments ‘sign’ is spoken about often enough. From
whence though should one know what a ‘sign’ (signum) is, if not from metaphys-
ics? Once this is known though then all the stupidities of the Calvinists collapse
 University metaphysics
together; because the sacraments are not, as the Calvinists teach, ‘bare tokens’
(signa nuda) but have a signification (significant). Hence therefore when, in relation
to the eucharistic bread and body of the Lord, sign (signum) is spoken of, one is
to understand by this that the body of the Lord is present (while they think that
he is only in heaven).
In the conflicts with the Socinians (Photiniani) over the Trinity, arguments
must often be developed from the nature of such things as cause, infinity, indi-
vidual and universal, simple and composite. Only metaphysics though explains
what all these are.
Further, after Luther had restored the priesthood to its original condition, the
church was brought into grave tumult through the opinion of Flacius Illyricus,
who claimed that original sin is the substance of human nature and not just an
accidental attachment. The error arose from the fact that Flacius knew nothing
of the details comprehended in [the expression] ‘accidental attachment’ (accid-
ens). (Scheibler in Lewalter , –)

Despite the assurances of modern historians regarding the confes-

sional neutrality of Suárez’s doctrine of intelligible being, we find that
this doctrine was itself caught up in bitter and often bloody theological
conflict. Scheibler’s view is that a metaphysics of intelligible being is nec-
essary because only those possessing the true (Lutheran) version of it will
be able to destroy the false Calvinist doctrines regarding the union of
Christ’s two natures, the Trinity, predestination, the mode of Christ’s
presence in the eucharistic host, and the character of original sin.
Rather than emerging as a confessionally neutral way of addressing the
domain of intelligible being, it would appear that the language of meta-
physics was being forged in accordance with rival theological viewpoints.
In his discussion of the conflict between Lutheran and Calvinist meta-
physics, Sparn treats them as two opposed ways of configuring the rela-
tion between infinite intelligible being and finite human being,
representing in fact two opposed ways of relating theology and philoso-
phy. For Sparn, ‘Lutheran metaphysics’ – which he expounds largely
through the works of Balthasar Meisner and Jacob Martini of
Wittenberg – is characterised by a particular disposition of its ‘general’
and ‘special’ parts (Sparn , –). General metaphysics, which
Abraham Calov named Ontologia in , deals with being in general,
including divine being. Special metaphysics deals with the three kinds of
being – divine, cosmic, and human – eventually giving rise to the three
sub-disciplines of ‘rational’ theology, cosmology, and anthropology. The
distinctiveness of Meisner’s and Martini’s Lutheran construction of
general metaphysics lies in their stress on the unbridgeable gulf between
God’s radically autarkic infinite being and man’s radically dependent
 The return of metaphysics 
finite being. This is a gulf so great that it cannot even be spanned by
human concepts, which means that God can be understood as a ‘being’
or ‘substance’ only in an analogical sense (analogia entis). Here, in the ana-
logical application of philosophical concepts to God we find a charac-
teristic expression of the joining of philosophical and theological
perspectives, and Sparn comments that: ‘In consciousness of the conver-
gence of these perspectives, metaphysics assumed not only the terminol-
ogy of creation doctrine but also the attitude of pietas’ ().
The Lutheran construction of general metaphysics or ontology thus
meant that divine being could only be analogically included under
human concepts. But, conversely, it also meant that to the extent that
God was known in ontology then he appeared in a purely (Aristotelian)
‘scientific’ manner – as the physical cause of motion – his divine nature
remaining inscrutable to ‘natural’ philosophy. Meisner’s and Martini’s
refusal to allow natural knowledge of the divine nature in ontology or
general metaphysics is not, as Beck has argued, a symptom of Lutheran
anti-intellectualism (Beck , ). Rather, it indicates that they
reserved this knowledge for the domain of special metaphysics. Here it
would occur not through natural philosophical means, but via the medi-
ation of the gulf between the human and the divine that only Christian
theology may perform – in fact via the figure of Christ, whose two
natures form the nexus between divine and human being (Sparn ,
–). Sparn thus characterises Lutheran metaphysics as consisting of
a ‘dualist’ or ‘analogical’ general part – where the conflict between logic
and Christology could be treated as symptomatic of the gulf between
human and divine understanding – and a ‘mediational’ special part,
where this conflict would be overcome not in philosophy but via a meta-
physical theology and sacramental ‘actions’ (–).
Despite the fact that he discusses it largely as a foil, Sparn argues that
the ‘Calvinist metaphysics’ developed by Keckermann, Timpler, and
Alsted took a very different form to the Lutheran. According to Sparn,
by drawing on a ‘monistic’ Platonic conception of the intelligibility of
divine being, this metaphysics denied any absolute gulf between human
and divine being (, –). In treating creation in terms of the
divine being’s intellection of the essences, Calvinist metaphysics could
view humans as participating in the divine intellection of the universe in
a ‘natural’ or philosophical manner. This was made possible by their
residual possession of an uncorrupted spark of the divine intellect – their
‘rational being’ – which was regarded as the source of man’s imago Dei
or God-likeness (–). For Calvinist metaphysicians, therefore,
 University metaphysics
general metaphysics or ontology was also natural (philosophical) theol-
ogy – approximating in fact to the ‘rational’ theory of intelligible being
that modern historians identify with metaphysics as such. Hence, Sparn
argues, rather than reserving knowledge of the divine nature for
Christian theology, Calvinist metaphysics began to treat philosophy itself
as a kind of theology (–). It taught that the metaphysician himself
could rise to a quasi-sacral knowledge of God. This would take place
through such ‘Platonic’ practices as anamnesis – the contemplative
‘remembering’ of the divine mind’s continuous ‘sub-conscious’ thinking
of the forms of things; or via the contemplative ascent from empirical
appearances of things to the pure intellection of their forms or intelli-
gences. Through these practices ‘Calvinist metaphysics’ prepared the
ground for enlightenment ‘rationalism’.
Our third observation concerns the manner in which a philosophical
theology (or theological philosophy) emerged from the hybridising of
Christian mysteries and philosophical concepts in metaphysics. If the
way in which Schulmetaphysik formulated the relation between philosophy
and theology was determined by conflicting theologies and ecclesiolo-
gies, then this refurbished metaphysics simultaneously provided these
conflicting theologies and ecclesiologies with ‘philosophical’ articulation
and armoury. From this reciprocity between its theological and philo-
sophical organs, university metaphysics gave birth to a philosophical
theology. Here, the ‘rational’ explication of the Christian mysteries was
accompanied by a profound theological investment of philosophical
concepts and doctrines, such that philosophical theology was always
theological philosophy. This process took place through the continuous
elaboration of a series of conflicting theological–philosophical doctrines
– in the crucial areas of Christology and soteriology – as the rival con-
fessions battled to delineate Protestant orthodoxy and to groom its intel-
lectual bearers in the university. The crucial forms of these doctrines are
clearly visible in Scheibler’s list. What is not so clear is the degree to
which the early-seventeenth-century metaphysical explications of the
Christian mysteries would flow into the philosophical theologies of the
enlightenment rationalists. In order to prepare the ground for our sub-
sequent discussion of this question, we shall draw on Sparn for three key
instances.
We have already mentioned the first of these, the rival metaphysical
elaborations of the doctrine of Christ’s two natures and one person.
This doctrine was central to all the Christian confessions; for it was
through the sacramental union of Christ’s human and divine natures
 The return of metaphysics 
that the churches could offer mediation and redemption to the faithful,
making the figure of Christ into such an intense object of worship and
speculation (Baur ). University metaphysics entered the domain of
Christology in order to reconcile a conflict with ‘Paduan’ logic. This
arose because Christ’s saving office requires the transfer of essential
properties between his two natures (communicatio idiomata), which entails
the a-logical doctrine that a single supposite or ‘person’ could be the
bearer of two conflicting sets of defining properties or ‘natures’. Sparn’s
erudite discussion of this problem focuses on the conflicting solutions
proposed by Lutheran and Calvinist metaphysicians, in accordance with
their rival Christologies (Sparn , –). Briefly, Lutheran metaphy-
sicians such as Meisner insisted that Christ’s natures should be under-
stood as two distinct substances at the ‘philosophical’ level in order to
posit their ‘perichoretic’ union – involving the complete reciprocal
exchange of divine and human properties – in the ‘concrete’ perfor-
mances of the incarnation and eucharist. Conversely, Calvinist meta-
physicians taught that Christ’s true substance was his divine nature or
Logos. This meant that he assumed his human nature ‘accidentally’ for
the purposes of its regeneration – a solution more in keeping with the
standard logic of substances and defining properties.
For our present purposes, however, it is not the differences between
the rival metaphysical Christologies that matter, but the manner in
which they both give rise to a moral anthropology oriented to personal
unity. For, in tying moral regeneration to the unification of the person’s
divine and human natures, these Christologies gave rise to a redempti-
vist conception of personal unity that would flow directly into the meta-
physical ethics of Leibniz and Kant. Sparn has thus argued that the
central contours of Leibniz’s monadology – the relation between the
monad’s active rational soul and the passive corporeal body to which it
is attached – may be seen as a generalisation of the Lutheran metaphys-
ical conception of Christ’s two natures (Sparn ). Even more point-
edly, however, we shall see that Kant makes extensive use of the figure
of Christ’s two natures and one person in order to give shape to his con-
ception of moral regeneration (see .. below). In fact Kant superim-
poses the Christological doctrine of Christ’s divine and human natures
onto the metaphysical doctrine of man’s noumenal and phenomenal
natures, thereby conceiving of moral renewal as a kind of secular spiri-
tual rebirth taking place via philosophy within the person.
We find a similarly unsettling continuity between Christian and ‘ratio-
nalist’ metaphysics in our second instance of doctrinal elaboration – that
 University metaphysics
occasioned by conflicting theologies of Christ’s mode of presence in the
eucharistic host. Here a longstanding problem – that of accounting for
Christ’s simultaneous presence in a foreign substance at different times
and places – was exacerbated by the replacement of Aristotelian physics
with a new cosmology: the Galilean–Newtonian conception of the uni-
verse as a set of spatio-temporal relations between physical bodies. In his
discussion of this issue, Sparn concentrates on the manner in which
Lutheran metaphysicians defended their conception of Christ’s ‘real
presence’ in different places simultaneously – the so-called ‘ubiquity’
doctrine – against the Calvinist conception of a merely ‘symbolic’ pres-
ence in the host (, –). Meisner’s solution was to draw on pneu-
matological and eschatological doctrines, in particular those associated
with the ‘non-spatial’ presence of the body in the soul, and of glorified
bodies in space during the time of the apocalypse. This enabled him to
declare that the property of filling space (extension) was ‘accidental’ for
bodies rather than real, while simultaneously reconceiving ‘place’ in a
non-spatial manner, via the notion of relations within a spiritual com-
munity. He could thus defend the doctrines of real presence and ubiq-
uity by appealing to the capacity of Christ’s glorified body to suspend
the accident of filling physical space, thereby being present everywhere
in the community of immaterial beings.
For our present concerns, the striking feature of this defence is the
manner in which it gives rise to a doctrine that would be central to
enlightenment metaphysics: namely, the doctrine of the ‘subjectivity’ of
space and time (Beck , ). In order to maintain God’s real pres-
ence in the physical universe – thereby preserving it as the locale for
redemption – Meisner’s pneumatology and eschatology permitted him
to treat the spatio-temporal localisation of physical bodies as ‘imagi-
nary’. By this he meant that it arose from the manner in which their sub-
stantial (immaterial) relations appeared to beings possessing man’s
sensory apparatus. Leibniz’s metaphysical explication of trans-substan-
tiation in his (posthumously titled) Systema Theologicum () shows how
directly this conception passed into ‘rational’ philosophical theology. For
here Leibniz dedicates his ‘metaphysical physics’ – his doctrine of unex-
tended ‘point forces’ that give the appearance of occupying space due to
their impenetrability – to the same end as Meisner’s pneumatology and
eschatology. He seeks, that is, to treat Christ’s occupancy of the euchar-
ist host as the ‘accidental’ manifestation of his immaterial substance in
the spatio-temporal world (TS, –). Leibniz’s metaphysics of the
eucharist – through which he hoped to restore the divided confessions to
 The return of metaphysics 
rational unity – may thus be regarded as an updating of the initial
Christian–metaphysical attempts to preserve the redemptive potential of
the universe against its Newtonian spatialisation (Fouke ). We may
suggest that Kant’s doctrine of the subjective character of space and
time – his conception of the Newtonian universe as the form in which a
non-spatial community of intelligences appears to a creature with man’s
sensibility – constitutes a similar act of preservation, as Wundt has
argued in detail (Wundt , –, –, –). Here we witness the
sprouting of modern ‘anti-empiricist’ philosophies, dedicated to the
transcendent(al) conditions of experience, from their Christian–meta-
physical seed-bed.
Our third and final instance of the elaboration of philosophical–
theological doctrine takes place in the metaphysics of morality. Here the
problem confronting seventeenth-century Schulmetaphysik was not the
clash between logic and Christology, or physics and cosmology, but that
between pagan ethics and Christian moral theology. Sparn argues that
this problem was focused in discussions of sin and evil. If Aristotelian
ethics employed a purely negative conception of evil – as the ‘privative’
failure to realise the ‘good’ or perfection contained in the entelechy of
all things – then Christian theology regarded evil quite differently: as a
positive choice by originally sinful man to transgress God’s holy law
(Sparn , –). Through its conception of original sin as the
transcendent predisposition to break divine law, the Christian concep-
tion of ‘radical evil’ is opposed to all pagan (Stoic, Epicurean) concep-
tions of a morally indifferent human nature; for these treat ethical
attributes as ‘imposed’ in accordance with earthly interests or civil pur-
poses. According to Sparn, the Calvinist and Catholic metaphysics of
morality adopted the Platonic ‘ontological’ view of evil, in terms of the
corrupting effects of matter and flesh on man’s rational soul. From the
Lutheran perspective, this view not only threatened to reduce moral
theology to ethics – by deriving sin and redemption from man’s philo-
sophically accessible ethical substance – it also negated free will and
responsibility, mortgaging man’s moral fate to the predestined corrup-
tion of his moral being. Lutheran metaphysicians like Meisner sought to
avoid these consequences by treating the corruption of man’s sensible
nature as itself the product of a free choice to transgress God’s law, while
simultaneously treating this choice in a quasi-Aristotelian manner as the
failure to realise the perfection of man’s rational soul.
Once again, we are less concerned with the detail of these early-
seventeenth-century conflicts than with the fact that they gave rise to
 University metaphysics
doctrines that would remain central to the enlightenment metaphysics
of morals. This applies in particular to the Lutheran metaphysics of evil.
Lutheran metaphysicians treat evil not primarily in terms of man’s
corrupt sensible nature, but in terms of the transcendent choice that
brings this nature into being, through a ruinous ‘qualification’ of man’s
rational faculties. Setting aside the apparent circularity of this doctrine
– for why would the first humans choose evil unless their natures were
already corrupt? – we may observe that it remains central to the meta-
physical ethics developed by both Leibniz and Kant. As we shall see in
more detail below (..), Leibniz’s discussion of evil in his Theodicy
moves within precisely the same pattern of thought, attempting to show
how a rational being, predisposed to evil by its corporeal embodiment,
might nonetheless freely choose the corporeal nature that predisposes it
to evil (Riley , –). Similarly, we shall see that Kant’s metaphys-
ics of radical evil is an improvisation on the same figure of thought
(..). Significantly, both philosophers invoke man’s transcendent pre-
disposition to evil in order to attack the ‘indifferentist’ conception of
man’s moral nature contained in the ‘Epicurean’ anthropologies of the
civil philosophers. They do so not because of a more profound insight
into the nature of morality, but in order to defend the Christian meta-
physics of morality against an anthropology that would place the deter-
mination of good and evil at the disposal of civil purposes and powers.
In short, through its philosophical explication of Christian doctrine,
seventeenth-century Schulmetaphysik gave rise not to a ‘rational’ (desacral-
ised, detranscendentalised) philosophical theology, but to one that
pursued the sacralising ends of Christian metaphysics via other ‘enlight-
ened’ means. It did so by providing its enlightenment successor with a
Christological conception of homo duplex, as a morally self-redemptive
being; an ‘anti-empiricist’ and redemptivist conception of the subjective
character of the spatio-temporal world; and with a transcendent con-
ception of good and evil, designed to outflank the civil determination of
ethics in terms of man’s worldly need for peace and security. We shall
return to these issues in Part .
We are now in a position to signal our fourth and final observation
regarding the historiography of metaphysics as the rational subsump-
tion of theology. This concerns the quasi-religious intellectual deport-
ment of the metaphysician and the spiritual–social prestige attaching to
it. At this point however we must depart from Sparn’s remarkable history
of Protestant Schulmetaphysik. For despite his observation of the ‘attitude
of pietas’ attaching to metaphysics through its proximity to theology, and
 The return of metaphysics 
despite his comment that ‘Protestant scholasticism corresponds to a
determinate shaping of religious life’ (, ), Sparn can provide no
clear account of metaphysics as a quasi-sacral ethos. As a result of his
own commitment to Lutheran ‘dualist’ metaphysics – whose distinctive
feature is to reserve the crucial mediations of divine and human being
for Christian theology – Sparn can only regard self-sacralising philo-
sophical attempts at such mediation as indicative of the collapse of
‘Christian theology’ into an ersatz philosophical theology or ‘theoso-
phy’: ‘according to the Lutheran framework there is no Christian meta-
physics that mediates theology as philosophy’ (). This leads him to
treat the notion that metaphysics might itself perform a sacralising role
as indicative of a ‘crisis’ in Lutheran theology, one that it passed through
on its way towards a more universalistic and scientific conception of its
subject and object (Sparn ). Conversely, he regards the monis-
tic–Platonic character of ‘Calvinist metaphysics’ as predisposing it to
just such a self-sacralising conception of its role. For Sparn, it is this
quasi-Platonic character – typified in its treatment of the world as con-
taining the divine perfections in a form open to philosophical intellec-
tion – that transforms Calvinist rationalism into the progenitor of
enlightenment rationalism, signalling the end of ‘Christian metaphysics’
(Sparn , ).
A quasi-sacral understanding of its role is, however, far more deeply
and generally embedded in early modern university metaphysics than
Sparn’s account can allow for. In placing divine being beyond the reach
of the corrupted human faculties, all versions of metaphysics were a
means of giving shape to the personage who would overcome this cor-
ruption through self-clarifying, self-purifying spiritual exercises. Despite
manifold differences, the entire spectrum of metaphysics is indebted to
a single fundamental figure of thought: namely, that the gap between
divine and human being (or the intelligible and sensible worlds) can only
be closed by a person whose purification of his own human–sensible
nature qualifies him for participation in quasi-divine intellection.
Through this figure of thought we see the fundamental and ineradicable
dependence of metaphysical knowledge on the ‘ascetic’ formation of its
bearer. This formation, which merges intellectual and moral purity, is
dependent on the core metaphysical anthropology of homo duplex – the
figure of sensibly embodied intelligible being – whose role is to induce
the longing for transcendent intellection.
It was through this practice of intellectual self-culture – that is, by par-
ticipating in a rite of speculative self-purification deemed to qualify them
 University metaphysics
for quasi-divine intellection – that university metaphysicians acquired
the spiritual–social prestige needed to explicate Christian mysteries, and
to advise those seeking to govern Christian states. This, after all, is pre-
cisely why Thomasius identified university metaphysics with ‘sectarian
philosophy’, urging law students to repudiate its core anthropological
doctrines: ‘That God’s nature consists in thinking. That man’s nature
consists in thinking and that the welfare and happiness of the whole
human race depends on the correct arrangement of thought . . . That
the will is improved through the understanding. That it is within human
capacity to live virtuously and happily’ (SEG, –). In order to clarify
this role of metaphysics as the ethos of a quasi-sacral estate, and thereby
complete our fourth observation, we must turn to another source.

.        
Post-Kantian history of philosophy prides itself on accounting for the
transition from ‘metaphysical’ to ‘anthropological’ constructions of
reason, treating this as symptomatic of reason’s progress from its theo-
centric origins to the full recovery of its autonomous grounding in man.
In approaching it as an ethos, however, we discover that metaphysics is
itself deeply anthropological; for, no matter how theocentric its concep-
tion of rational being, metaphysics remains a discipline for grooming
man in the image of this conception. This shifting of the axis of histor-
ical analysis is, of course, the direct outcome of our approaching philos-
ophies via the anthropologies they presuppose and the spiritual exercises
they require. In this setting, what matters is not the content of the image
of rational being – whether this is restricted to God and the pure intel-
ligences, or extended to man’s own higher intelligence – but the self-
formative use to which the image is put; for in each case the bearer of
this rational being will be man, as he carries out the exercises designed
to reshape himself in this image.
It is in seeking to clarify the role of university metaphysics as an intel-
lectual paideia that we briefly break the bounds of our early modern
focus, in order to take advantage of a remarkable study of Albert the
Great’s Metaphysics Commentary. In doing so, we seek not to posit doctri-
nal continuity between late medieval and early modern metaphysics, but
to uncover the roots of university metaphysics as a distinctive culture of
the self. Beroald Thomassen’s study of Albert’s commentaries on
Aristotle’s metaphysics and ethics offers invaluable assistance in this
regard (Thomassen ). It provides an outline of a metaphysical
 The metaphysical ethos 
culture or Lebensform – an ensemble of doctrines and disciplines dedi-
cated to a mode of spiritual grooming – which we shall find surfacing
time and again through the entire history of university metaphysics,
albeit of course in a wide variety of forms. Indeed, we shall be return-
ing to Thomassen’s study in order to help elucidate the sense in which
Kant’s metaphysics of morals may also be regarded as a form of spiri-
tual grooming (.).
At the heart of Albert’s construction of academic metaphysics is the
reciprocal relation established between knowledge of its object and per-
fection of the intellect that knows. Metaphysics is the highest form of
knowledge because its pursuit bestows the highest form of perfection of
which the human intellect is capable, its participation in the divine; while
physics and mathematics only perfect the intellect in its temporal and
spatial forms, respectively. As Albert formulates this in his Metaphysics
Commentary: through metaphysics ‘we accede to that true wisdom of phi-
losophy, which perfects the intellect according to the degree that some-
thing divine exists in us; in the same way that natural science perfects the
intellect so far as it is bound to time, and inclined to the continuum
[space], to the extent that it is perfected by instruction’ (Albert in
Thomassen , , fn. ). This is the basis on which Thomassen
effects the fundamental methodological shift lying at the centre of his
study. It allows him to show that Albert’s exposition of the foundations
of metaphysics is not grounded in concepts thinkable by a generic
human subject. Rather, the pursuit of foundations takes place instead
through a construction that ties the concepts of metaphysics to the moral
condition of the being qualified as their bearer:
The grounding of metaphysics, which . . . is a constitutive element of metaphys-
ics itself, is not simply aimed at the exposition of a logically and factually coher-
ent system of metaphysical basic concepts – concepts suited to comprehending
the object domain of metaphysics in a subject-independent manner and to
demarcating it from the object domain of other sciences. The grounding of
metaphysics asks more generally for the enabling of metaphysics as a science
whose bearer is man, and is to this degree anthropocentric. (Thomassen ,
)
Thomassen argues that Albert constructs the possibility of metaphys-
ics through a complex set of doctrines regarding the nature and relations
of divine and human being (, –). According to these doctrines,
which Albert elaborates through an Averroistic paraphrase of Aristotle’s
Metaphysics, God exists as a pure intellect spontaneously thinking the
forms of the intelligible world. He is related to man by virtue of the fact
 University metaphysics
that man, despite being an embodied creature, also possesses a pure
intellect, or at least the potential to realise one. In fact man’s intellect is
regarded as the ‘substantial form’ or telos of his being, itself emanating
from the divine intellect. This means that the ‘completion’ of man’s
intellect, through the discipline of metaphysics, signifies both the perfec-
tion of the human being and its partial return to God.
This metaphysical anthropology is indispensable for understanding
not just the grounding of metaphysics as a science, but also the model-
ling of the intellectual deportment whose grooming lies at the heart of
metaphysics as an academic culture. According to Albert, metaphysics
is founded in man’s desire for knowledge of it; but this subjective ground-
ing also has an objective dimension, as the desire arises from the onto-
logical difference between the divine and human intellects. The divine
intellect differs from the human one by virtue of the fact that it is pure
active intellection (Thomassen , –). Unhampered by the
passive or receptive faculties characteristic of the human, the divine
intellect knows things by bringing them forth from its own thinking,
creating the ‘intelligibles’ or substantial forms of all things through
reflection on itself, which means that the divine intellect creates and
encounters the world through spontaneous self-reflection. The sponta-
neous activity of the divine intellect is linked to its perfect simplicity, for
this allows it to have direct intuitive knowledge of the simple (non-
embodied) substances – the intelligibles that arise from its intellection of
them. The human intellect, though, ‘beshadowed’ through its combina-
tion with space and time, and complexified through its possession of
passive receptive faculties, is incapable of knowing the intelligible forms
directly in their simple non-embodied state. It encounters them instead
only as they have been ‘scattered’ through space and time in material
things (–). The human intellect is thus discursive rather than intui-
tive. It must use syllogistic and other forms of argument to pick its way
through the scatter of phenomena, gradually and painstakingly synthe-
sising knowledge of the intelligible principles of the world, which are
known to the divine intellect through instantaneous and eternal self-
reflection. As Heimsoeth has argued, this fundamental oppositional
elaboration between the divine and human intellects provides the basis
for the distinction between the active and passive intellect in Leibniz’s
monadology, and for Kant’s distinction between noumena and phenom-
ena (Heimsoeth b; Heimsoeth ; Heimsoeth ).
Given that the intelligibles or substantial forms are in fact the object
of metaphysics as a science – constituting the domain of ‘being as being’
 The metaphysical ethos 
prior to its embodiment in the specific kinds of being which are the
objects of the particular sciences – then the divine intellect must be the
true bearer of metaphysical knowledge. Indeed, Albert says that God
contemplates himself in metaphysics. At the same time, though, because
he too possesses the spark of an active intellect, man is also capable of
metaphysical knowledge, even if he must, for the most part, be satisfied
with it in the approximate form suited to his discursive faculties
(Thomassen , –). The condition of man attaining this knowledge
is that he purify his intellect of its attachment to the sensory forms of
space and time. He achieves this through the practices of abstraction
and speculation, the three speculative sciences – (Aristotelian) physics,
(Euclidean) mathematics, and metaphysics – constituting in fact a hier-
archy of ways of perfecting the human intellect (). In other words, the
human intellect accedes to metaphysical knowledge only to the degree
that it transforms itself into an approximation of the divine. Man only
comes to grasp the simple non-embodied substances to the extent that
he ‘participates’ in the simple divine intellect that emanates them ().
Abstraction and speculation in metaphysics thus assume the form of
spiritual exercises, representing a work of self-purification performed by
the intellect on itself.
Three features of Thomassen’s account are of particular significance
for our conjectural outline of the culture of university metaphysics. First,
the reciprocal relation between the knowledge of metaphysics and the
‘spiritual’ or moral constitution of its bearer means that metaphysics is
always shadowed by a particular moral anthropology. In Albert’s
Aristotelian version this reciprocity is focused in the figure of the ‘sepa-
rated’ or non-embodied substantial forms. For these are both the object
that man strives to know in order to have access to ‘being as being’; and
they are also the principles that make everything knowable, to which man
accedes only by perfecting his own substantial form, his intellect. Of
course, the particular character of this reciprocity between the metaphys-
ical subject and object alters when the Aristotelian substantial forms are
replaced by the Scotist treatment of being in terms of the divine intellect’s
non-contradictory intelligising of possibilia, some of which it then wills
into actual existence (Möhle ). But this does not alter the fundamen-
tal ‘ascetic’ reciprocity between the object and subject of metaphysics.
For, in Scotist metaphysics, it remains God’s simple, spontaneous, and
intuitive intellect that is responsible for the non-contradictory intelligising
of the possible concepts; and it is still man’s duplex, sensible–intellectual
subjectivity that must be purified through abstraction in order to qualify
 University metaphysics
it for knowledge of this object (Honnefelder , –). Seen in this
light, Sparn’s distinction between ‘Lutheran’ and ‘Calvinist’ metaphysics
– the former insisting that the limits of the human intellect preclude its
‘philosophical’ participation in divine intellection, the latter arguing that
such participation is possible for a suitably purified intellect – does not rep-
resent the difference between a truly theological and a merely ‘theosoph-
ical’ metaphysics. Instead, it points to a confessional variation in the
anthropology being used to configure the intellectual deportment of the
metaphysician.
Second, the manner in which the metaphysical anthropology ties the
knowledge of its objects to the moral constitution of its bearer also holds
the key to the discipline’s ‘ascetic’ or self-transformative character.
Albert regarded the gap between human and divine intellection as the
enabling condition of metaphysics. By separating man’s natural desire
for knowledge from its satisfaction, this gap creates the need for a
specifically metaphysical knowledge – that is, for knowledge of things in
the pure form in which they emanate from the divine intellect
(Thomassen , –). Through the teaching that only God has full
possession of metaphysical knowledge, man comes to know himself as
the being who seeks this knowledge and whose perfection lies in its
attainment. For, unless metaphysical knowledge were inaccessible to
man, he would not desire it (–). This is why Albert says that meta-
physics is founded in wonder – the impact of man’s ignorance on himself
– which causes him to turn from the practical to the theoretic life, as the
only way of overcoming his deficit (–).
For Albert, of course, man’s desire for metaphysics comes ultimately
from God, whose perfect contemplative felicity makes his condition the
most desirable possible. From a properly historical perspective, however,
it is the paideia of metaphysics itself – inculcated in religious or academic
institutions dedicated to grooming the spiritual elite – that is responsible
for inducing the desire for metaphysical knowledge. It does so by
imbuing its novices with a view of themselves as beings cut off from
divine intellection by the sensible embodiment of their intellects.
Through this anthropologically induced pathos, apprentice philoso-
phers are disposed to relate to themselves as beings whose true selves lie
in the pursuit of metaphysical knowledge. This mode of relating to
themselves in turn impels their adherence to metaphysics as an ethos; for
it leads them to treat the discipline of metaphysics as the means of pur-
ifying their sense-affected intellects, hoping thereby to realise the pure
one in which the intelligible forms of the world will be revealed. We may
 The metaphysical ethos 
pause to observe how profoundly this alters our understanding of Kant’s
doctrine of the inaccessibility of noumena – the intelligibles created
through divine intellection – to human understanding. We should regard
this doctrine neither as if noumena were real entities lying beyond
human intelligence (the ‘metaphysical’ interpretation), nor as if they
were null posits designed to restrict reason to empirical experience (the
‘phenomenalist’ interpretation). Instead, we can treat the inaccessibility
of the Kantian noumena as the latest variation in a longstanding paideia
designed to induce the pathos of metaphysical longing and the ethos of
intellectual self-purification. This paideia continues to work its magic
even on today’s philosophers (Holzhey ).
Finally, in tying human perfection to the characteristic life-activity of
the metaphysician, the self-transformative function of university meta-
physics gives rise to a particular claim to moral and social authority.
Here, in defending the vita contemplativa as the highest form of life – on
the basis of Aristotle’s subordination of civil well-being to contemplative
happiness – Albert again prefigures a key tendency of the whole culture
of university metaphysics. Thomassen argues that the Aristotelian hier-
archy of forms of life is based on the fundamental distinction between
activities undertaken in order to realise some end and those undertaken
for their own sake. Perfect happiness arises only from the latter kind of
activity; for, by being its own end or good, such activity depends upon
no goods outside itself, thereby unifying all the goods and becoming
autarkic (, ). Contemplation is the only activity of this kind,
which means that contemplative happiness is the highest possible and
the contemplative life the most virtuous, as man is perfectly happy only
when he possesses all the virtues.
Civil happiness though arises from activity undertaken in accordance
with a single virtue: prudence (, ). Prudence is the form of all the
civil virtues, as it is the principle of acting to realise some end, typically
the political and commercial ends of civil life. The man of justice or polit-
icus perfects the virtue of prudence, and his role is to realise the civil
security required for the man of wisdom or philosophus to pursue the true
end of humanity, speculation. Despite the fact that prudence plays a nec-
essary role in providing the personal and social tranquillity required for
speculation, it cannot be compared with the summa of the virtues in con-
templation, which means that civil happiness is only a preparatory stage
for contemplative happiness. This is because, through theoretical activ-
ity, the higher part of the soul is enlightened by the active intellect, per-
mitting it to ‘touch’ the domain of the intelligences, thereby perfecting
 University metaphysics
man. Prudential activity and civil happiness, though, are viewed as prod-
ucts of the lower or ‘unenlightened’ part of the rational soul, governed
by the ends of useful action in the civil world (–). Here we can see
the genesis of the entire line of ‘anti-consequentialist’, anti-civil moral
and political philosophy – from Leibniz through Wolff to Kant and
beyond – whose hostility to civil prudence is grounded in the self-sacral-
ising cultivation of contemplative autarky.
With this account of metaphysical anthropology as an instrument for
the spiritual grooming of a ‘contemplative’ intellectual elite, we com-
plete our fourth and final observation on the history of metaphysics as
the philosophical subsumption of theology. We have argued that the
return of metaphysics to the early-seventeenth-century Protestant uni-
versity was driven by the exigencies of confessional conflict rather than
the need to recover man’s rational being. Rather than responding to a
rational need for the unity of ‘philosophy’ and theology, it imposed this
unity – in conflicting ways – at the behest of confessional theologies.
Further, rather than bequeathing a rational philosophical theology to
the Enlightenment, the philosophical explication of the Christian mys-
teries in Schulmetaphysik gave rise to natural theologies in which the ends
of Christian metaphysics would be pursued via ‘rationalist’ means.
Finally, in grasping that the metaphysician returned to the academy not
as the subject of reason but as the bearer of an elite self-sacralising
culture, we have begun to grasp the source of the authority wielded by
this personage. We shall conclude our overview of university metaphys-
ics with a few remarks on this last topic.

 .                   
In responding to the account of the return of metaphysics as a purely
rational–philosophical phenomenon, we have begun to show its role in
the confessional–political circumstances of early modern Germany,
concentrating on the cultural authority claimed by university philoso-
phers as a particular estate. By cultivating insight into the transcendent
concepts and laws of a divinely intelligised universe, metaphysically
trained philosophers could present themselves to bishops and princes as
uniquely able to discern the true ends of church and state. At the same
time, the reciprocity between religious and civil discipline in early-
seventeenth-century cities and states provided political metaphysicians
with a context well suited to the reactivation of this ostensibly ancient
form of spiritual–political authority. In this religiously charged political
 Political metaphysics 
environment – in which conflicts between Empire and territorial state
were deeply informed by those between opposed confessional-political
estates – university philosophers could seek to shape civil governance in
accordance with their quasi-sacral role as ‘Christian philosophers’.
This is, of course, a highly idealised portrait. In seeking to provide it
with concrete historical anchorage – by briefly discussing the Politica
() of Johannes Althusius – we encounter all the difficulties of
attempting to clarify the significance of abstract thought in highly
ramified historical–political circumstances (Althusius ; Friedrich
). Althusius was a political philosopher rather than a university
metaphysician and, as Robert von Friedeburg has shown, his Politica rep-
resents a sophisticated attempt to configure the political relations
between the Empire and the territorial estates (Friedeburg ).
Nonetheless, without dissenting from Friedeburg’s account, we may
observe that Althusius relies on several leading Calvinist metaphysicians
and theologians, including Keckermann, Zanchius, Aretius, Ursinus,
and of course Calvin. Moreover, as Sparn has argued, in providing an
overarching theological ordering of the contents of politics, ethics, and
jurisprudence, Althusius’ Politica is a characteristic instance of confes-
sional Schulphilosophie (Sparn ). In the Preface to the third edition we
thus find Althusius arguing that: ‘I claim the Decalogue as proper to
political science insofar as it breathes a vital spirit into symbiotic life, and
gives form to it and conserves it, in which sense it is essential and
homogenous to political science and heterogeneous to other arts . . . No
one denies, however, that all arts are united in practice’ (Althusius ,
).
This theological framing of politics, however, is only a pointer to
Althusius’ central political–metaphysical construct: his concept of ‘uni-
versal symbiotic communion’ (communio symbiotica universalis). In stressing
his difference from those, like Bodin, who locate sovereignty in the
prince and the supreme magistracy, Althusius insists that it resides in the
‘universal consociation’ or ‘the people’. For Althusius, sovereignty comes
from the associated people because the conservation of their welfare,
which forms the end of politics, arises not from the exercise of princely
power, but from the communication of rights and capacities in univer-
sal symbiosis: ‘Universal symbiotic communion is the process by which
the members of the realm or universal association communicate every-
thing necessary and useful to it, and remove and do away with every-
thing to the contrary’ (, ). By grounding political right in a
communion of the people that is simultaneously spiritual and material,
 University metaphysics
the Politica achieves the integration of religious and civil governance,
which is the hallmark of confessional political theologies:
Universal symbiotic communion is both ecclesiastical and secular. Correspond-
ing to the former are religion and piety, which pertain to the welfare and eternal
life of the soul, the entire first table of the Decalogue. Corresponding to the
latter is justice, which concerns the use of the body and of this life, and the ren-
dering to each his due, the second table of the Decalogue. In the former, every-
thing is to be referred immediately to the glory of God; in the latter, to the utility
and welfare of the people associated in one body. These are the two founda-
tions of every good association. (Althusius , )
This metaphysical grounding of right and law in the spontaneous
spiritual and physical communication between community members
holds the key to Althusius’ political and religious doctrines. It allows him,
for example, to include both tables of the Decalogue in his conception
of natural law, on the grounds that this law expresses the fundamental
forms of spiritual and civil communion of the ‘symbiotes’. Further, it
also permits him to insist on the superiority of this theologically
informed natural law over the civil law propounded by jurists and
princes: ‘For there is no civil law, nor can there be any, in which some-
thing of natural and divine immutable equity has not been mixed. If it
departs entirely from the judgment of natural and divine law ( jus natu-
rale et divinum), it is not to be called law (lex). It is entirely unworthy of this
name, and can obligate no one against natural and divine equity’ (,
). Finally, and most importantly, Althusius’ metaphysical conception of
political community lies at the root of his construction of popular sove-
reignty. For it allows him to argue – against Bodin’s political jurispru-
dence and Machiavelli’s reason of state – that supreme political power
comes not from the sovereign’s role in securing social peace, but flows
instead from the symbiotic community, as the means by which it enforces
the forms of its spiritual and civil communion (–).
Given his desire to ground political sovereignty in a morally associated
people, and given their desire to find precursors for a rationally grounded
democratic sovereignty, it is not surprising to find post-Kantian philo-
sophical historians embracing Althusius in these terms. Beck, for
example, while acknowledging a ‘moderate’ degree of religious intoler-
ance in the Althusian polity, sees the concept of political symbiosis as a
‘naturalistic’ expression of Calvinist rationalism that anticipates theories
of the secular democratic state (Beck , –). Similarly, Schmidt-
Biggemann regards Althusius’ conception of natural law as anticipating
the enlightenment subordination of positive Staatsrecht to a higher moral
 Political metaphysics 
law, even if the confusion of moral and religious community in the con-
fessional period proved an obstacle in this regard (Schmidt-Biggemann
b). Historians of political thought have begun to show how inaccu-
rate this view is, particularly given Althusius’ use of ‘popular sovereignty’
as a means of defending the political rights of the territorial estates
against those of the Empire (Friedeburg ; Skinner ). Given our
interest in Althusius as a political metaphysician, however, our attention
is focused on the manner in which the concept of symbiotic communion
superimposes the religious on the political community.
In this regard, it is crucial to observe that Althusius’ symbiotic com-
munication is grounded in the metaphysical concept of the spiritual
community and the religious figure of the communion of the saints in
Christ’s mystical body. Althusius’ account of the role of the provincial
religious estate (Geistliche Stand) shows just how tightly these conceptions
bind the religious and civil concerns of the Politica:
A collegium of pious, learned and most weighty men from the collegia of pro-
vincial clergymen, elected and commissioned by common consent, represents
the sacred and ecclesiastical order. Entrusted to this collegium is the examina-
tion and care of doctrine, of public reverence and divine worship, of schools,
of ecclesiastical goods and of the poor. Indeed, the care of all ecclesiastical busi-
ness of the holy life in the entire province is entrusted to it in order that all the
saints may unite for a common ministry, and constitute one mystical body.
(Althusius , )
If the conception of symbiotic communion permitted Althusius to
ground sovereignty in moral community, then it simultaneously allowed
him to conceive of a civil exercise of religious authority, designed to
conform the fallen civil community to its spiritual archetype. This
merging of religious and civil discipline is particularly apparent in his
account of the provincial presbyters, ‘to whom is assigned the adminis-
tration of ecclesiastical things – that is, the administration of things
other than the word and sacraments – for holding the saints together, for
the work of the ministry and for building up the body of Christ’. He con-
tinues:
Upon the presbyters rests especially the care of those things that have been insti-
tuted for arousing repentance in the brethren and for conserving discipline.
Therefore, together with bishops, who are properly called presbyters, they
preside over censorship of morals. Their office is also to observe that ministers
perform their duties, and to disclose errors, schisms, scandals, and public neces-
sities to the ministers for the purpose of producing prayers and repentance.
(, )
 University metaphysics
It is also on this basis that ‘the presbytery receives from God the power
of the keys by which the kingdom of heaven opens and closes’ ().
Writ large, the Politica provides a political theology for the Protestant
territorial state of the pre-Westphalian period. It seems likely, however,
that its concrete political correlate is to be found in the governance of the
Imperial city-state, jointly ruled by councillors and presbyters. In fact, in
the Calvinist city-state of Emden, where Althusius held the position of
Syndic or chief magistrate from  to , we find a practice of pres-
byterial governance strikingly like that outlined in the Politica. Heinz
Schilling’s research in the Emden presbyterial archives gives us some
sense of the way in which Althusius’ programmatic identification of spir-
itual and political community was played out in historical reality
(Schilling ). In showing how the city presbyters used ex-communica-
tion (‘the power of the keys’) to punish a wide variety of civil misdemea-
nours – drunkenness, fights between neighbours, sexual transgressions –
this research shows that it was in fact the circle of communicants that
formed the model for the political community. Breaches in the moral
purity required for holy communion thus led to disqualification from civil
association. In short, while Althusius sought an appropriate figuration for
the governance of the city and the state, his Politica was grounded in the
political metaphysics of the church, as the kingdom of God on earth.
By grounding civil authority in moral community, the political meta-
physics of universal symbiotic communion allowed Althusius to attack
Bodin’s purely political–juridical conception of sovereignty. But this
metaphysics simultaneously committed him to using civil authority in
order to enforce moral community. As we noted in the Introduction, in
attacking political metaphysics Thomasius alleged just such a homology
between the merging of theology and the civil sciences in ‘sectarian phi-
losophy’, and the merging of religious and civil power in the confessional
state. It was for this reason that civil philosophy emerged as a profound
repudiation of all forms of university metaphysics, Catholic and
Protestant, secular and theological.
    

Civil philosophy

.     

In the Foreword that he wrote to the first German translation of Grotius’
De Jure Belli ac Pacis (), Christian Thomasius was in no doubt about
who the enemy was. In outlining the damage done to law, ethics, and
politics by scholasticism, he begins with the four books of Peter
Lombard’s Sentences, attacking them for offering a philosophical explica-
tion of Christian doctrine:
It is likely that in these four books Lombard attempted to unite the doctrines of
Augustine and Aristotle; [for] the whole work contains a mish-mash of theol-
ogy and philosophy. The Holy Scriptures are explained in accordance with the
principles of pagan philosophy. In ethics and natural law the old stupidities are
advanced. Lombard’s book was the staff and rod of the theology faculty, over
which the theology professors fought in their glosses, just as the jurists fought
over their Corpus juris.
If scholasticism corrupted religion, then it simultaneously gave rise to
philosophical sectarianism among those purporting to offer the one true
metaphysics of faith:
Because their explanations were not of a single opinion and yet each claimed
to be right, various sects arose among these orthodox scholastics, including the
Albertists, the Thomists, the Scotists, and the Occamists, among whom the rep-
utation of Thomas Aquinas overwhelmed the rest. [Aquinas] not only wrote a
commentary on Lombard but also a new system of theology, which led many
to later forget Lombard in order to write commentaries on Thomas, as we find
with Thomas de Vio Cajetan, Bartholomew Medina, Gabriel Vasquez and
Francisco Suárez. One can expect to find nothing rational in any of these,
because everything arises from subtleties, authority and from being self-opin-
ionated. One also finds that doctrines belonging to ethics and natural law begin
to be ascribed to the theology faculty, under all kinds of titles. (VG, )
Further, if university metaphysics was a weapon for theologising ethics
and natural law, then it was wielded in the interests of priestcraft:

 Civil philosophy
When, however, the Pope and the clerisy were assured that Aristotelian meta-
physics, physics and ethics did no harm to their glory – because there is little or
nothing in them that can be applied to the right use of the natural light [of
reason] – and in fact it rather appeared that Aristotelian philosophy increased
the clerisy’s authority, [then] . . . physics, metaphysics, and ethics were publicly
taught in accordance with Aristotelian doctrine. (VG, )
This problem, however, was not just confined to the Catholic scholastics.
Despite Luther’s banishment of metaphysics from Protestant academies
at the beginning of the sixteenth century, by the beginning of the seven-
teenth it had returned, modelled in part on the teachings of Francisco
Suárez, who ‘began to expound mystical theology in accordance with a
scholastic method’. As a result:
In claiming that the Augsburg Confession is grounded only in this theological
system, not though in ethics and natural law or in the Corpus juris, Protestant
theologians and philosophers – that is, all those who have to teach about the
difference between good and evil, right and wrong – feel able to follow the
Catholic writers in these questions of right and wrong without any inhibition
. . . So it happened that also everywhere at Protestant universities, moral phi-
losophy and jurisprudence were bundled together without foundation, by many
sometimes opposed writers. (VG, )
Finally, if the long ruination of the civil sciences could thus be laid at the
feet of a metaphysical scholasticism – Protestant and Catholic – then
their renewal was largely the work of the jurists, political and natural.
Despite their own inability to relegate Roman law in favour of modern
public and natural law, the French jurists Francis Hotman and Jean
Bodin should be honoured among ‘the legists who everywhere began to
defend the rights of worldly authority against the tyranny of the clergy’
(VG, ). For the full detheologisation of ethics and politics, however, the
learned world had to wait for the natural law of Grotius and Hobbes,
and, more importantly, of Pufendorf.
We shall return to Thomasius’ remarkable cultural diagnosis in the
final section of this chapter (.). For the moment, we can treat it as
indicative of the historical self-consciousness with which the civil philos-
ophers grasped their conflict with metaphysical scholasticism and con-
structed an alternative to it. Not only does Thomasius trace the mixing
of theology and the civil sciences to the metaphysical explication of the
Christian mysteries, he also identifies this with the sacerdotal exercise of
authority by a clerisy. Further, he is aware that the natural law doctrines
that would carry an alternative civil philosophy were grounded in a juris-
prudence dedicated to the defence of worldly civil authority. Regardless
 Introduction 
of what today’s philosophical historians might say, rather than seeing
the seventeenth-century return of metaphysics as the resumption of
reason’s journey of self-discovery, Thomasius treats it as indicative of the
theological contamination of ethics, law, and politics by a clerisy bent on
defending its civil power.
Given the clarity with which Thomasius grasped the historical need
for a civil philosophy, the great puzzle confronting its modern historian
is this philosophy’s present obscurity. The obscurity has two main
sources. Firstly, civil philosophy has been subjected to historiographies
intent on reducing its jurisprudential, political, and theological charac-
ter to realities of a quite different kind. On the one hand, it has been sub-
jected to sociological histories dedicated to showing the emergence of a
socially grounded democratic reason. Such histories can only under-
stand the expert (political–jurisprudential) and non-democratic (author-
itarian–liberal) character of civil philosophy as aberrations arising from
the social alienation of reason. On the other hand, as we have already
seen, civil philosophy has also undergone reduction and assimilation at
the hands of a philosophical history that identifies reason with meta-
physical philosophy.
The second reason for civil philosophy’s current obscurity is minor in
comparison, but arises from a degree of uncertainty regarding the
sources and form of its ‘civil’ character. Although historians of political
thought agree that seventeenth-century Germany gave rise to civil sci-
ences oriented to the desacralised government of a secular state, there is
significant disagreement regarding the respective roles of law and poli-
tics in this development. As mentioned in the Introduction, some histo-
rians trace the desacralisation of government to its juridification, while
others ascribe it to the emergence of political humanism, albeit of
varying kinds. These differences have in turn affected the manner in
which historians regard the central organ of civil philosophy, the
‘modern’ natural law of Grotius, Pufendorf, and Thomasius. Some, like
Tuck, see this ‘profane’ natural law as playing a mediating role between
a political humanism oriented to ‘reason of state’ and one dedicated to
shaping sovereignty in accordance with the norms of civic republican-
ism (Tuck a). Others though, particularly Dreitzel, see natural law
as a normative juridical retreat from a statist political science (Dreitzel
b). Finally, Heckel and Kriegel both treat natural law as the philo-
sophical expression of a politics already desacralised by jurisprudence
(Heckel –, , –; Kriegel ).
It is by working our way through these positions – from all of which
 Civil philosophy
there is much to learn – that we shall arrive at our account of natural
law as the intellectual clearing house for seventeenth-century civil phi-
losophy. In doing so we shall outline a less exclusivist treatment of the
relation between politics and law. In fact we shall argue that while there
was indeed a juridical detheologisation of politics, this had the paradox-
ical effect of placing the sovereign above the law, by neutralising the
moral-theological restraints on secular politics. The remarkable thing
about the natural law doctrines developed by Pufendorf and Thomasius
is that they may be regarded as reconstructing academic ethics and pol-
itics in order to reflect this juridical unleashing of a fully secular politics
– but doing so in the very discipline that had been designed to prevent
this from occurring.
In order to provide an appropriate understanding of the emergence
of civil philosophy, therefore, we must undertake two preliminary tasks.
First, we must disarm those sociological and philosophical histories
whose objective is to treat civil philosophy as a defective expression of
society and reason. Next, we must clarify the relation between the jurid-
ical and political dimensions of civil philosophy. Then we will be in a
position to grasp the full significance of Thomasius’ diagnosis of his own
historical situation.

 .       :        

Jutta Brückner’s Staatswissenschaften, Kameralismus und Naturrecht offers an
account of the emergence of the civil sciences by tying them to the his-
torical sociology of bourgeois society. For its part, Michael Albrecht’s
Eklektik incorporates an account of civil philosophy in a Begriffsgeschichte
or conceptual history of early modern eclectic philosophy. Despite their
methodological differences, it is striking that these representatives of his-
torical sociology and philosophical history both treat the (authoritarian)
political–jurisprudential character of civil philosophy as indicative of
cultural–historical ‘failure’. For Brückner this is the failure of Germany
to ground its law and politics in a democratically self-governed
Öffentlichkeit or ‘public sphere’. For Albrecht it is the failure of the eclec-
tic civil philosophy to ground itself in the true (a-priori–systematic) con-
ditions of subjectivity. Neither is it coincidental that both histories share
a similar dialectical method. For, by construing ‘failure’ in terms of the
misfiring of dialectical integration, these histories locate the (statist)
political–jurisprudential character of seventeenth-century civil philoso-
phy as a blockage in a historical dynamic which is intrinsically oriented
 Reductions of the civil: society and reason 
to a self-governing society or a self-governing reason. If, therefore, we are
to reinstate the historical reality and autonomy of civil philosophy, we
must show why early modern politics and jurisprudence cannot be
explained either in terms of a theory of bourgeois society or in terms of
a philosophy of subjectivity.
Brückner’s account of the emergence of the early modern civil sci-
ences – economics, politics, jurisprudence – is framed by a conception
of their prior moral unity. This conception is partly institutional–histor-
ical – with Brückner pointing to their scholastic treatment as branches
of practical philosophy – but it is more importantly socio-moral. It is
central to her account that the civil sciences precipitate from the milieu
of the early modern court, where they had been unified within a con-
crete social ethos or way of moral life: ‘because in and around the court,
the professional and social spheres, the life-realm and the realm of
efficiency coalesce’ (Brückner , ). As for Habermas, on whose
account of the relation between theory and practice she relies, for
Brückner the seventeenth-century political and juristic sciences emerge
from the splintering of a prior social order, in which the ends of politics
and law had been embedded in moral culture and social relations. She
thus regards the ‘prudential’ character and expert basis of these sciences
as symptomatic of the loss of their organic relation to a moral-democ-
ratic ‘public sphere’ (Öffentlichkeit). In this regard at least, Brückner’s
account joins several others that ascribe a ‘conservative’ or ‘authoritar-
ian’ character to German culture and politics on the basis of its supposed
lack of an appropriate material basis in liberal-democratic society
(Epstein ; Krieger ).
In projecting this social theory onto the early modern civil scientists
and natural jurists, Brückner’s account can only view them in relation to
the splitting of theory and practice, and the consequent alienation of
reason from the social ‘life-world’. She thus characterises the objectify-
ing political science of Arnisaeus and Conring – dedicated to treating
the maintenance of political order as a ‘therapeutic’ (non-moral)
problem – as symptomatic of the instrumentalising of formerly moral
arts of government (Brückner , ). Drawing on Denzer’s neo-
Aristotelian reading of Pufendorf, Brückner treats his natural law as
damaged by the instrumentalising of politics, but as retaining a residual
normative–legal character, grounded in a teleological conception of
human sociability (–). It is left to Thomasius therefore to dissolve
the last fragile bonds linking politics and morality, practice and theory in
the civil sciences. Drawing on Werner Schneiders’ influential study of
 Civil philosophy
Thomasius, Brückner argues that this occurs in two stages. First,
Thomasius replaces Pufendorf ’s moral conception of natural law (as the
law of human sociality) with a purely prudential conception of it as the
means to political security. Next he introduces an anthropology based in
‘physiological facts’ – actually, the Epicurean anthropology of passion-
driven man – which leads him to abandon the image of man as a ration-
ally self-governing creature. In its place, Thomasius develops a purely
prudential or instrumental ethics. This is grounded in the self-restraint
needed for inner peace (morality), and the observance of social manners
needed for civil peace (decorum), breaches of which would be punished
by the law (Brückner , –).
We can now see how difficult it is for histories based in modern social
theory to grasp the circumstances that gave rise to early modern civil
philosophy. Due to her own commitment to a socio-morally grounded
political order, Brückner misunderstands the imperatives driving the
early modern separation of state and society in political and natural law.
In treating the uncoupling of government from moral community as
symptomatic of the instrumental fracturing of the ‘life-world’, she fails
to grasp its driving force: namely, the attempts by political and natural
jurists to render the state independent of the fratricidal moral commu-
nities that had plunged Europe into religious civil war. This, as Dreitzel
has shown, was one of the central preoccupations of Helmstedt politi-
cal Aristotelianism (Arnisaeus and Conring). Here the therapeutic
objectification of politics represented not a lapsing into political instru-
mentalism but its difficult achievement, through a protracted exercise in
intellectual reconstruction (Dreitzel ; Dreitzel ). In detaching
the concept of political order from moral–philosophical and natural law
norms – the very move that Brückner identifies with the social alienation
of political knowledge – Arnisaeus intended to free it from the confes-
sional division and conflict that entered politics through these norms.
Rather than expressing the social interests of a rising class of bourgeois
professionals, the autonomising of political expertise in Helmstedt polit-
ical science was the expression of a fundamental cultural–intellectual
strategy, developed as a means of desacralising civil governance.
Similarly, in restricting law to the commands of a sovereign charged
with maintaining social peace, decorum to the cultivation of the exter-
nal manners required by social intercourse, and morality to the restraint
of the passions required by inner serenity, Thomasius was not the unwit-
ting representative of a bourgeois professionalism intent on monopolis-
ing political expertise and privatising moral aspiration. Rather, as a
 Reductions of the civil: society and reason 
law professor and jurisconsult to the Brandenburg-Prussian state,
Thomasius was the self-conscious representative of a deep-seated cam-
paign to destroy the infrastructure of the confessional politics by parti-
tioning civil and religious authority (Dreitzel ; Wiebking ).
Thomasius’ juridification of politics and ‘Epicurean’ privatisation of
morality – which Brückner identifies with the bourgeois-professional
fragmentation of a political public sphere – thus reveal a starkly different
face to us. Rather than representing hindrances to the emergence of a
participatory civil society, they were in fact part of a strategy for the
deconfessionalisation and pacification of societies that had been all too
participatory. Through its anti-political and anti-juridical interpretation
of the early modern civil sciences – as symptoms of the alienation of
political expertise from moral community – historical social theory
forgets just how hard won and fragile this alienation was, not to mention
how indispensable.
While deploying a different methodology, Michael Albrecht’s
Begriffsgeschichte of ‘eclectic philosophy’ suffers from a similar inability to
grasp the historical sources and purposes of civil philosophy. At first
sight, Albrecht’s history of early modern ‘eclectic philosophy’ encom-
passes a broader scope than the civil philosophy with which we are con-
cerned. Yet, because the eclectic style was defined primarily by its
opposition to scholasticism, and was typically dedicated to advancing a
more irenic pluralistic philosophical discourse, it actually overlaps with
the domain of civil philosophy, in a manner that we shall clarify. Despite
its philosophical–historical character, Albrecht’s history shares many of
the features and all of the limitations of Brückner’s historical–sociolog-
ical account. For in discussing the ‘civil’ dimension of eclectic philoso-
phy – its ‘anti-sectarian’ (anti-scholastic) pursuit of an irenic pluralistic
philosophical style suited to life in a deconfessionalised civil society –
Albrecht deploys a familiar dialectical strategy. He treats this as the
‘delayed’ or incomplete form of a systematic philosophy whose recovery
of the a priori forms of subjectivity would render eclectic philosophy
redundant. In adopting this telos for his history, Albrecht’s account is
closely associated with the post-Kantian dialectical histories whose
general form and limitations we have already discussed; and, in fact,
several of the key dialectical historians have written accounts of eclecti-
cism broadly similar to Albrecht’s (Holzhey ; Schmidt-Biggemann
; Schneiders a).
Despite their exhaustive breadth, Albrecht’s materials are shaped by
a single powerful dialectical schema. After characterising eclecticism as
 Civil philosophy
the pursuit of free choice among different philosophies in order to arrive
at truth, Albrecht opens a fundamental opposition within it. On the one
hand, he argues, eclecticism was an idea, attitude, or intellectual deport-
ment (Denkart, Einstellung). This was adopted by a range of early modern
philosophers, jurists, and theologians seeking to cultivate intellectual
independence, usually in opposition to various forms of scholasticism
and orthodoxy. On the other hand, Albrecht claims, eclecticism was also
a method for discovering the truth, modelled at this time on the hypo-
thetical procedure employed by the seventeenth-century experimental
physicist Johann Sturm (Albrecht , –, , –, –, ).
Albrecht’s Begriffsgeschichte is premised on the unargued (ultimately
Hegelian) doctrine that for the eclectic idea to step into history as an
autonomous or self-grounded concept, then it would have to be possible
for the eclectic attitude to be reconciled with the eclectic method. This
must occur in a manner that reconciles the former’s aspiration to
freedom of intellectual choice with the latter’s methodologically guaran-
teed access to truth.
Albrecht argues that such a dialectical union was not possible under
the name of eclecticism. For to the extent that eclectic philosophers cul-
tivated the attitude of free choice they lacked a fundamental method
capable of grounding this choice in demonstrable truth, which meant
that this wing of eclecticism petered out in the merely fashionable culti-
vation of Selbstdenken or intellectual freedom (, –, –, –).
Conversely, to the extent that eclectic philosophy did possess a method
producing demonstrable truth – Sturm’s hypothetico-experimental
method – then it lost the attitude of reflective choice among philoso-
phies, solidifying into a merely scientific certainty (–). The striking
result of this procedure is that Albrecht writes the history of a concept
of philosophy that never really succeeded in existing: ‘One finds scarcely
a single author embracing eclecticism who made the transition to praxis’
(). At the same time, because Albrecht’s history is organised around
a particular philosophical–historical telos – namely, the idea of a philos-
ophy whose ‘scientific’ method is simultaneously the reflective recovery
of the grounds of free intellectual choice – it is actually oriented to a style
of philosophy he regards as destined to eclipse eclecticism: the ‘critical
rationalism’ of the Leibniz–Wolff–Kant line (–). Albrecht thus treats
the emergence of Wolffian rationalism as signalling the appearance of a
method that was capable of grounding the intellect’s free judgments in
a systematic recovery of their a priori conceptual grounds. According to
Albrecht, this discovery abolished the need for any merely contingent
 Reductions of the civil: society and reason 
cultivation of an eclectic attitude. In absorbing the capacity for free
intellectual choice into the methodological recovery of its transcendent
grounds, Wolff’s critical rationalism thus subjected eclectic philosophy to
an Hegelian Aufhebung – preserving it by annihilating it (–).
Thomasius’ civil philosophy fares particularly badly under this dialec-
tical regime, falling foul of both of Albrecht’s strategies for denying
the reality of eclectic philosophy. On the one hand, in discussing
Thomasius’ Introductio ad Philosophiam Aulicam () – translatable as
Introduction to Court Philosophy but also as Introduction to Civil Philosophy, given
the role of the court as a metonym for civil politics – Albrecht argues
that while cultivating the eclectic attitude as a means of attacking ‘sec-
tarian’ (scholastic) philosophy, this work fails to count as eclectic philos-
ophy. In developing merely empirical versions of logic and ethics,
grounded in the use of concepts and norms suited to civil communica-
tion and civil intercourse, Thomasius is deemed to lack the systematic
method capable of grounding his eclectic comportment in philosophi-
cal truth. This leads Albrecht to consign him to the ranks of the modish
Selbstdenkers (, –). On the other hand, drawing on biographi-
cal accounts of his reconversion to a biblicistic Pietism in , Albrecht
argues that Thomasius’ methodologically unsupported eclectic attitude
collapses into an irrational fideism, whose central document is the Versuch
vom Wesen des Geistes (Essay on the Nature of Spirits, ). Here, says
Albrecht, Thomasius’ ‘eclectic’ attack on the mixing of philosophy and
theology in sectarian philosophy has itself become sectarian, being
grounded in adherence to a neo-Platonic nature philosophy of a quasi-
Paracelsan kind (–). In short Thomasius occupies an exemplary
place in Albrecht’s history because his work encapsulates the larger fate
of eclectic philosophy. Both are condemned to oscillate between an anti-
sectarian eclecticism whose lack of true philosophical method reduces it
to a mere attitude, and a merely concrete method whose lack of
transcendental reflexivity reduces it to another form of sectarianism.
Once again, however, we are confronted by an approach to early
modern ‘civil eclectic’ philosophy that misunderstands its historical
circumstances and intellectual form. As we shall see in more detail below
(.), Thomasius’ support of eclectic philosophy arose not from this
modish incapacity to penetrate the transcendental conditions of subjec-
tivity, but from his anti-scholastic campaign to uncouple philosophy
from theology. In the Foreword to Grotius, Thomasius’ objection to the
merging of ethics, law, and politics in neoscholastic natural law is
grounded in his acute sense of its role as a prop for the power of the
 Civil philosophy
clerisy. By separating philosophy and theology in accordance with their
divergent objects, and by insisting that students should be taught to
choose freely among rival philosophies in accordance with the ends of
human happiness, Thomasius’ eclecticism formed an element of his
anti-metaphysical attack on scholasticism (‘sectarian philosophy’).
Rather than lacking a method, his eclecticism was based in a method of
cultivating the pluralistic attitude he deemed appropriate to the discus-
sion of secular knowledge. Thomasius’ empiricism and nominalism
were thus grounded in powerful ethical–epistemological doctrines – in
particular the ‘voluntarist’ doctrine of man’s incapacity for insight into
transcendent objects – whose role was to ensure that politics and juris-
prudence would be approached in terms of their (several) historical dis-
positions and purposes.
Next, we may observe that in viewing civil eclecticism from the stand-
point of its failure to recover the transcendental conditions of reason,
Albrecht’s history obscures the historical point of civil philosophy’s
attack on metaphysical scholasticism. In assembling the various ele-
ments of his Philosophia Aulica – in particular those designed to preclude
access to forms of transcendent reason common to God and man –
Thomasius was engaged in a frontal assault on university metaphysics.
This attack, we recall, was driven by Thomasius’ conviction that the
mixing of theology and philosophy in university metaphysics was com-
plicit with the merging of sacerdotal and civil power in the confessional
state. In what remains the best analysis of the eclectic ‘syndrome’,
Dreitzel provides a helpful sketch for the context in which this attack
took place:
To religious confessionalism there corresponded a type of philosophical con-
fessionalism in the higher educational and scientific institutions. [This was]
especially pronounced in the restoration of scholasticism following the counter-
Reformation monopolisation of philosophical training via the Jesuits at
Catholic universities and gymnasiums. The sciences and ‘arts’ were demoted,
homogenised, their disciplines polemically repelled or syncretistically assimi-
lated – a procedure that was the less maintained the more strongly the scientific
disciplines, anchored in life-practice, developed a life of their own and put into
question academic philosophy’s claim to a total interpretation of things. In
Protestant Germany, though, it was not the natural sciences that dealt the
death-blow to Aristotelianism and philosophical confessionalism, but jurispru-
dence together with the doctrine of natural law, under the influence of
Pufendorf. (Dreitzel , )
Dreitzel’s remarks are of course entirely in keeping with Thomasius’
own view of his historical situation in the Foreword to Grotius.
 Sources of the civil: politics and law 
Most damaging of all, though – given Albrecht’s treatment of eclec-
ticism’s Aufhebung in Wolffian rationalism – is the fact that Thomasius
was quite familiar with Wolff’s grounding of subjectivity in transcendent
reason, but vehemently repudiated it. As we have seen, he warned his
students off the intellectualist anthropology contained in metaphysical
rationalism – the doctrines ‘that God’s nature consists in thinking’ and
‘that man’s nature consists in thinking and that the welfare and happi-
ness of the whole human race consists in the correct arrangement of
thought’ – on the grounds that the cultivation of a transcendent reason
shared with God was wholly unsuited to future jurists and statesmen. In
arguing that Thomasius’ civil philosophy failed to reach the level of
transcendental philosophy (in fact university metaphysics), Albrecht’s
history is thus methodologically inimical to its object. If we recall our
discussion of the role of transcendental insight in Albert’s metaphysics,
then we obtain a clearer view of its role in Wolff’s. In using the promise
of transcendental insight as the goal of a practice of abstractive self-
purification, Wolff may be regarded as refurbishing the central ethos of
metaphysical scholasticism, in order to defend Schulmetaphysik against its
civil opponents. If this is so, then in presuming that Wolffianism marked
the transition from merely historical philosophies to a properly transcen-
dental recovery of the laws of reason, Albrecht’s history itself constitutes
an apology for university metaphysics, albeit in its modern post-Kantian
form.

 .                  :            
Having sketched the limits of the social-theoretic and philosophical–his-
torical approaches to civil philosophy and the civil sciences, we may now
turn to some accounts that take us closer to the ‘merciless sobriety’
required to address this philosophy in its sheer historicity. These are
accounts for which the political-jurisprudential character of civil philos-
ophy signifies not the alienation of expertise from community, but its
emergence from particular expert communities. Further, for these
accounts, civil philosophy’s emergence through opposition to various
political theologies signifies not its failure to reach beyond historical con-
tingency to transcendent philosophy, but the historical contingency of
philosophy itself.
Such accounts are given not in social theory or philosophical history,
but in the historiography of political and jurisprudential thought. In dis-
cussing some representative instances of this historiography we shall be
 Civil philosophy
concerned to clarify a particular question: namely, the relation between
political and jurisprudential conceptions of the desacralisation of civil
governance. For this holds the key to understanding what is meant by
‘civil’ in civil philosophy. In clarifying the approach of the political his-
torians we shall take Richard Tuck’s work on Philosophy and Government
– as broadly indicative of the ‘Cambridge school’ view, while
Horst Dreitzel’s study of Henning Arnisaeus represents a characteristi-
cally German approach to the empirical history of political thought
(Dreitzel ; Tuck a). For a distinctively jurisprudential treatment
of the emergence of a desacralised conception of politics, we shall be
indebted to several remarkable essays by Martin Heckel (Heckel
–).
Despite his own call for a renewed attention to ‘modern’ natural law,
Tuck’s study traces early modern civil philosophy to the intellectual tra-
dition of civic humanism and the political milieu of civic republicanism
(Tuck ). Like some other members of the Cambridge school, he
looks to civic humanism for the intellectual sources of a detheologised
philosophy, and to the figure of the political humanist – joined to the
prince through the roles of educator and political secretary – for the
nexus between philosophy and government (Pocock ; Skinner ).
Anchoring his account in the early modern commercial republics of
Northern Italy and the Netherlands, Tuck argues that it was the recov-
ery of Ciceronian political humanism in these settings that allowed a
civil philosophy to break away from Aristotelian scholasticism, by rein-
vesting virtue in the life of active participation in the affairs of the repub-
lic (Tuck a, –). Focused in the genre of ‘advice to the prince’, and
combining a liberal constitutionalism with enough scepticism about the
transcendent to focus the mind on the city, this Ciceronian humanism
provides the framework for Tuck’s account of civil philosophy.
Significantly, it is not jurisprudence that provides the tension driving
Tuck’s history, but another form of humanism: the ‘new’ humanism that
he characterises through the trio ‘scepticism, Stoicism and raison d’état’.
The sources of this humanism lay not in Cicero’s constitutional republi-
canism but in the statist histories of Seneca and Tacitus, whose moral
scepticism and political pessimism found their answering milieu not in the
commercial republic but in states requiring extreme measures to deal with
the circumstances of religious civil war (Tuck, a –). Despite his
descriptive treatment of scepticism and Stoicism – explored via Lipsius’
programme for cultivating the deportment of ‘constancy’ required to face
the vicissitudes of religious civil war – a certain ambivalence surrounds
 Sources of the civil: politics and law 
the third term of Tuck’s new humanism, reason of state. For it is reason
of state – the sovereign’s use of extra-constitutional measures to preserve
the state – that conflicts most sharply with the ‘constitutional’ political
virtues of Ciceronian humanism.
In relying on this inner tension between constitutional and statist
political humanism, Tuck’s history of civil philosophy begins to assume
a dialectical character. In fact the ‘civil’ or desacralised politics of civic
humanism is seen as oscillating between its two opposed forms. Tuck
thus treats the political Aristotelians, Arnisaeus and Clapmar, as assim-
ilating Tacitean reason of state to the old Ciceronian humanism. They
do this via a concept of political order that allows the prince to break
lower-level laws while nonetheless restraining his authority within a nor-
mative constitutional order (a, –). Tuck also views the refurbish-
ing of scholastic natural law by Molina and Suárez in accordance with
the same dialectic, treating their elaboration of metaphysical laws
binding on the prince as another version of ‘liberal humanist’ constitu-
tionalism (–). Finally, he regards Grotius’ natural law as culminat-
ing in the drive to mediate the constitutionalism of republican
humanism and the statism of its Tacitean rival.
According to Tuck, Grotius’ achievement of this reconciliation in the
De Indis is marked by a reciprocity between the individual’s right to self-
preservation and the prince’s right to preserve the state; for the fact that
these rights are reciprocal – being held together by the political contract
– means that the power of the state comes ultimately from the ‘consti-
tutional’ consent of individuals (a, –). Tuck concludes,
however, by stressing the fragility of this reconciliation. For, after his per-
sonal experience of religious persecution at the hands of the Dutch
Calvinists, Grotius’ writings shifted focus to the theme of the need for a
state-enforced religious toleration, culminating in the revised natural law
doctrine of De Jure Belli ac Pacis (). Here, religion is considered solely
in terms of its political utility, and the preservation of the citizens also
takes on a purely utilitarian character, becoming the absolute source of
the state’s power over them (–). With this Tacitean turn, Tuck
argues, Grotius forfeits the balance between republican and statist
humanism he had achieved via the natural law notion of consent.
For all that can be learned from it, Tuck’s account of early modern
civil philosophy encounters certain perspectival limits. These arise in
fact from the manner in which he derives the ‘civil’ character of this phi-
losophy – its detheologised form and secular political function – from the
tension between the two kinds of political humanism. For these two
 Civil philosophy
humanisms are in fact the loci for different conceptions of the secular-
isation of politics: the ‘Ciceronian’ one grounded in the ethics of civic
participation in a constitutional republic; and the ‘Tacitean’ conception
grounded in the statist pursuit of social peace, using extra-constitutional
means to cope with religious civil war. The play between these two
sources of civil philosophy’s secularised character gives rise to a
certain instability in Tuck’s history, which is the source of its two central
limitations.
In the first place it leads to a significant ambivalence in Tuck’s con-
ception of the political. Despite his endeavour to provide a neutral his-
torical contextualisation for the two kinds of humanism, there can be
little doubt that the image of the Ciceronian humanist – defending the
virtue of political participation in the commercial republic – functions
as an implicit norm for Tuck’s history. This image represents both the
normal course for the secularisation of politics, and a model for the role
of political intellectuals. As a result, the statist politics designed to cope
with religious civil war tend to lose their historical neutrality and appear
instead as abnormal responses to extreme circumstances. In discussing
Pibrac’s ‘Tacitean’ defence of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre,
Tuck remarks that it ‘illustrates how extreme were the circumstances
which called Tacitism into existence and broke Cicero’s hold on human-
ists’ (a, ). This tends to prejudge the historical issue, however; for,
from a purely historical viewpoint, the capacity for unbridled religious
warfare is no less normal than the capacity for irenic commercial repub-
licanism. Concomitantly, extra-constitutional constructions of politics –
in terms of the instrumental exercise of sovereign power to achieve
social peace – are no less normal than constitutionalist conceptions,
based on the participation of citizens in the governance of the republic.
To the extent that this instability over the political informs Tuck’s
approach to ‘modern’ natural law – the metonymic discipline of civil
philosophy – then it gives rise to a parallel ambivalence in this context
too. In treating Grotius’ natural law as slipping from a constitutionalist
into a statist form – under the pressure of religious oppression – Tuck’s
account tends to skew the manner in which this natural law would be
taken up in the German context by Pufendorf and Thomasius. For
Pufendorf and Thomasius were elaborating a civil philosophy under his-
torical circumstances in which religious civil war was the norm, and in
which statist conceptions of sovereignty were central to the desacralisa-
tion of politics. In his Foreword to Grotius, Thomasius traces these con-
ceptions not to ‘scepticism, Stoicism and reason of state’, but to a new
 Sources of the civil: politics and law 
form of natural law informed by positive jus publicum or Staatsrecht. In
developing their versions of natural law, Pufendorf and Thomasius thus
drew on a conception of the political far removed from both Ciceronian
civic republicanism and Tacitean reason of state. Further, they did so
under circumstances in which German political jurisprudence had
already played a major role in the desacralisation of politics. In order to
clarify further the role of the political and jurisprudential sciences in the
formation of civil philosophy we must address both of these issues: the
statist secularisation of politics arising from German political science,
and the juridical desacralisation of governance arising from German
Staatsrecht.
As far as the role of political science is concerned, Horst Dreitzel’s
reconstruction of early-seventeenth-century ‘political Aristotelianism’ –
in particular the work of the Helmstedt professors Henning Arnisaeus
and Hermann Conring – provides a convenient starting point; for
Dreitzel’s account of Arnisaeus differs from Tuck’s in a manner that is
significant for our larger concerns. Unlike Tuck’s Arnisaeus – whose
conception of political order imposes constitutional normative limits on
the actions of the prince – Dreitzel’s Arnisaeus conceives of political
order as the historical form of rule or domination characteristic of a par-
ticular kind of society. In fact there can be little doubt that Arnisaeus
treats political order not as a constitutional order imposing normative
limits on the prince’s conduct, but as an empirical reality whose mainte-
nance constitutes the ‘scientific’ end of the prince’s political action
(Dreitzel , –). That this is so is shown most strikingly by the fact
that Arnisaeus justifies extra-constitutional political measures – includ-
ing political murder – if these were required for the preservation of the
state (–). Tyranny for Arnisaeus is defined not by the breach of
constitutional norms but in a quite different manner: namely, by the
prince’s pursuit of his personal interests in a manner incompatible with
his role as a political expert responsible for diagnosing and eradicating
threats to the political order.
These local facts are only pointers to the significantly different concep-
tion of the political or civil arising from Dreitzel’s account of Arnisaeus,
whose fascinating detail we can summarise in three broad points. In the
first place, while the political Aristotelians were humanists in the sense of
adapting classical texts and wisdom to deal with contemporary problems,
they were not humanists in the Cambridge school sense of functioning as
‘humanistic–rhetorical’ educators and secretaries to the prince. As pro-
fessors of political science at the University of Helmstedt who were also
 Civil philosophy
advisors to the dukes of Brunswick-Wölfenbuttel, Arnisaeus and Conring
drew their expertise not from Cicero or Tacitus, but from a combination
of Galenic ‘medical empiricism’ and the ‘scientific’ analytic–synthetic
method of Paduan Aristotelianism (, –). Rather than being seen
as virtuous participation in civic affairs, in this intellectual setting politics
was understood as the expert ‘diagnosis’ and elimination of pathologies
threatening the political order (–).
Second, it may be observed that the secularisation of politics entailed
by Arnisaeus’ discipline was not the result of a neo-pagan recovery of
civic humanism. Rather, it arose from the particular manner in which
his science of political order was elaborated to meet the threat of relig-
ious civil war. In reconstructing politics in terms of the instrumental
maintenance of any historically existing form of rule, Arnisaeus sought
to render it autonomous of scholastic moral philosophy in general. In
particular he sought to free politics from its Aristotelian conception as
the form of rule required to realise man’s moral nature or his moral com-
munio. ‘Where it is concerned with law-making for citizens or the
appointment and deposing of rulers’, Arnisaeus argues, ‘then a [politi-
cal] prudence directed to the public good follows neither the commands
of ethics nor those of the church, because these are all exclusively polit-
ical matters’ (Dreitzel , ). As a result, Arnisaeus was hostile to
both Althusius’ conception of a sovereignty based in the people’s
moral–religious communio, and to all attempts to ground politics in
transcendent natural law – whether these arose from Melanchthon’s
Protestant natural law or from Suárez’s Jesuit version. In purporting to
subordinate the sovereign’s legislative acts to ‘legal’ norms lying beyond
his positive commands, natural law jeopardised the autonomy of poli-
tics and the stability of the political order. Further, it threatened to allow
jurists to slip their role as servants of the sovereign’s positive laws and
take on the mantle of moral philosopher. ‘I believe’, Arnisaeus pro-
claims, ‘that there is no more accurate distinction than that between law-
making [Gesetzgebung] and legal judgment [Rechtsprechung]. Law-making
is not the task of jurists but of kings and statesmen’ (). Arnisaeus thus
sought to make the concept of the state independent of all moral–phil-
osophical and religious foundations, conceiving it as the instrument of
an autochthonous exercise of political domination: ‘We learn and teach
politics not to gain knowledge through it but so that we can direct the
state in accordance with its precepts . . . In its constituent elements, of
those who rule and those who obey, however, that state will have been
built by the statesman himself . . . The immediate end of political action
 Sources of the civil: politics and law 
is the state itself, because when it is set up in the right way, the human
groups belonging to it live happily’ (). The anti-democratic or ‘abso-
lutist’ character of Arnisaeus’ conception of politics was thus not a
feudal hangover. Rather it was a direct consequence of the manner in
which he sought to autonomise politics by expelling the church from the
state, seizing that eternal ecclesiological stalking-horse – the moral com-
munity – and transforming it from the source of sovereign power into
the latter’s main target.
Finally, we may observe that the context for Arnisaeus’ and Conring’s
elaboration of a secular science of politics was not provided by a com-
mercial republic, but by one of the several ‘political enterprises’ to be
found in Germany prior to the Treaty of Westphalia: namely, the would-
be sovereign territorial state of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. In aspiring to
the creation of such a state, specifically through the territorial incorpo-
ration of the imperial free city of Brunswick, the dukes of Brunswick-
Wolfenbüttel engaged in such characteristic undertakings as the political
integration of the estates (nobility and clergy), and the ‘cameralistic’
development of their territory’s social and economic infrastructure
(Schorn-Schütte ). The founding of the Academia Julia in , and
the appointment of the circle of humanist scholars to which Arnisaeus
would belong, was an integral part of these activities. Successive dukes
thus saw the university as a source of the clergy and politici required by
a territorial state, and regarded the training in politics in particular as a
means for the political integration of the nobility (Baumgart ).
Dreitzel thus regards Arnisaeus’ secular political science – whose
‘absolute’ character was focused in his rejection of any contract between
sovereign and citizens and his treatment of politics as a technical
problem of domination – as suited to the construction of an absolute
state under circumstances of confessional conflict. The objective corre-
late of Arnisaeus’ profound detheologisation and instrumentalisation of
politics was the transformation of Brunswick-Wölfenbuttel’s nobility
into a political elite, one equipped with a science that would allow it to
subordinate all other religious and political interests to those of the ter-
ritorial sovereign (–).
Juridical and natural law doctrines, however, play only a subordinate
role in Dreitzel’s account of the emergence of a desacralised politics, as
is the case with the Cambridge school account. In Dreitzel’s case this
seems to arise from his view that natural law in particular has been cap-
tured by social theories of the political, several modern versions of
which – including Brückner’s – he has submitted to searching criticism
 Civil philosophy
in an important series of articles (Dreitzel ; Dreitzel ; Dreitzel
). In any case, it is clear that Dreitzel regards the construction of an
autonomous secular conception of the political by the Helmstedt neo-
Aristotelians as the achievement of a non-juridical, purely political
science. Natural and positive law play a subordinate role in this setting;
the former providing the exercise of power with a juridical form, and the
latter being regarded as one of the regalia or royal rights (Dreitzel ,
–). As a result, Dreitzel regards the rise of natural law doctrines
in the second half of the seventeenth century – especially those of
Pufendorf and Thomasius – as signalling the lapsing of the ‘scientific’
autonomy of politics in favour of a normative theory of sovereignty
(Dreitzel ; Dreitzel b).
For all that we have learned from it, however, there are several reasons
for thinking that Dreitzel’s account overstates the role of Helmstedt
political Aristotelianism, and underestimates that of jurisprudence in
the emergence of a desacralised conception of civil governance. First,
as Dreitzel himself comments, in addition to neo-Aristotelian political
science there were several other intellectual movements seeking to con-
struct the autonomy of the political in seventeenth-century Germany,
including Lipsian neo-Stoic ‘political psychology’, Protestant political
jurisprudence (Staatsrecht), and Pufendorf ’s statist natural law and
political history. Without doubting Dreitzel’s claim that political
Aristotelianism gave rise to a distinctive conception of the secular auton-
omy of politics, there is no need to treat this either as pre-eminent or as
incapable of joining the other modes – just as Stolleis argues that Lipsian
neo-Stoicism flowed into the practice of Staatsrecht as part of the ethos of
the political jurists (Stolleis , –). Second, in order to demon-
strate the pre-eminence of the political over the juridical, Dreitzel has to
do more than show that Arnisaeus and Conring treated positive law as
the form in which the sovereign exercised rule. For, even if Dreitzel is
right that utility trumped justice in this secularisation of the political, this
does not explain the aptness of German Staatsrecht for such a desacral-
ised exercise of sovereignty. As we shall see, this aptness had an indepen-
dent source, arising from the manner in which German politics itself had
been juridified during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Finally,
once we have done justice to the secularising work of positive political
jurisprudence, then, in the chapter’s final section, we shall see that
Pufendorf ’s and Thomasius’ natural law was not in fact a continuation
of earlier normative ‘social’ theories of politics. Rather, it was an
attempt to transform these theories in the wake of the detheologisation
 Sources of the civil: politics and law 
of politics arising from its juridification in Staatsrecht and its instrumen-
talisation in absolutist political science. In order to overcome these lim-
itations in Dreitzel’s approach, we must move from the political history
of civil philosophy to its juridical historiography.
In , as part of a wide-ranging attack on scholastic moral philos-
ophy, Thomasius identified several reasons for Protestant universities to
teach German jus publicum or Staatsrecht, as an academic discipline dis-
tinct from Roman law. Initially, he argues, learned legists and glossators
such as Bardolus and Hotman had attempted to use the Roman-law
construction of majestas in order to model the new forms of territorial
sovereignty which were emerging in the German Empire. This was to
prove insufficient: ‘When though in our time high potentates and their
ministers observed that this old method explained little, and that the
Respublica Germanica, [while] bearing the title of the Holy Roman
Empire, differs completely from the ancient Roman Republic, then it
became necessary to separate the doctrine of public law [ Juris publici]
from the profession of Justinian law [ Juris Justinian], if one wished . . .
to teach it to scholarly youth’ (KTS, –). The reasons for the teaching
of the new jus publicum or political jurisprudence were however more
immediate and more pressing, because they flowed from its use by all
parties to formulate the conduct of the Thirty Years War and the peace
that ended it:
When therefore during this war the parties on both sides advanced claims and
arguments that were in fact largely grounded in [appeals to] the form of the
German Empire, this opened the way for the scholars to apply themselves to
study this more assiduously. And it helped not a little that other [scholars]
sought to explicate the same arguments on the basis of their principles, through
other writings and systems of public law [Juris publici] . . . When though after
the Thirty Years War the electoral princes began to extend the peace treaties
further and further, and through this the estates, especially the princes, appar-
ently expanded their privileges; and, additionally, when through the instrumen-
tum pacis Caesareo-Svecicum . . . the rights of the estates were strengthened –
although from both new controversies arose – then many estates have consid-
ered it useful that Jus publicum be taught in their universities, either privately or
publicly; so that for any case arising one would have people available skilled in
claiming the rights [Jura] of the high potentates through public writings. (KTS,
–)
In his studies of Protestant political jurisprudence, Martin Heckel
confirms and deepens Thomasius’ eye-witness account of the emer-
gence of Staatsrecht as an instrument for the regulation of confessional
conflict. In doing so, he elucidates the role of positive jurisprudence in
 Civil philosophy
the desacralisation of civil governance. At the centre of Heckel’s
account lies the argument that this secularisation was not a symptom of
a general process of rationalisation – whether grounded in the
Reformation’s division of worldly and spiritual government, the emer-
gence of bourgeois society, or the gradual philosophical self-assertion of
human reason. Instead, he argues, desacralisation assumed a specific
and limited historical form – that of ‘juridification’ – as a result of the
fact that Protestant political jurists were forced to deal with the stagger-
ing problems of confessional politics and religious civil war in the only
way they could, by juridifying them (Heckel , –). Heckel thus
sees the desacralisation of civil governance – the detheologisation of
political thought, the separation of church and state, the emergence of
religious toleration as the prime ‘liberal’ right – arising neither from a
secular–rational philosophy, nor from Roman law as such, but from a
unique set of intellectual and historical circumstances. These were
circumstances in which, once it became abundantly clear that the relig-
ious wars were incapable of theological adjudication or military-politi-
cal termination, Protestant jurists developed a series of measures
designed to end the conflicts by securing the coexistence of the confes-
sions within the legal framework of the Empire. Beginning with the
Peace of Augsburg in , and continuing through to the Treaty of
Westphalia in , the desacralisation of the Imperial framework
resulting from these measures led to the formation of a ‘non-confes-
sional or supra-confessional order of coexistence between the two great
confessional blocks’ (Heckel , ).
Heckel identifies the central features and effects of these measures
under five main themes. First, there was an attempt to rescue the Empire
from the splitting of its religious foundations by reconstituting its unity
in secular–political terms. This attempt to salvage a political unity for
the Empire from the fragmentation of the church was, however, only
partially successful, as both Protestants and Catholics continued to view
this unity as grounded in the notion of ‘the one true church of Jesus
Christ’, which both believed themselves to be (Heckel , –).
Second, the legal coexistence of the confessions was pursued through a
series of measures designed to establish ‘parity’ between them at the
level of their representation in the key institutions of imperial govern-
ance, the Reichstag and the Reichskammergericht. This mode of establishing
equality between the confessions depended on a far-reaching secularisa-
tion of the imperial constitution, as all of its various offices, privileges,
and protections had now to be distributed in a non-confessional manner,
 Sources of the civil: politics and law 
in accordance with a purely ‘instrumental’ political end – social peace
(Heckel ). Third, the secularisation (juridification) of political
governance witnessed the emergence of a purely secular-political
concept of peace, in place of the religious conception of pax Christiana.
This worldly concept of peace required that excommunicated heretics
be included in peace settlements such as Augsburg. It therefore gave rise
to confessional neutrality between states at the level of their Imperial
relations, even while allowing confessionalisation (the Jus Reformandi) to
proceed unabated inside state territories, on the principle of Cujus regio
ejus religio (Heckel , –). Fourth, somewhat paradoxically, the sec-
ularisation of the legal framework allowed a greater degree of freedom
for the religious. For theologians could also accept that a purely secular
legally regulated coexistence offered them the best protection from the
covert undermining of their religion by rival theologians (–). Finally,
and perhaps most importantly for our present concerns, the progressive
secularisation (juridification) of Imperial church law (Reichskirchenrecht)
led to a striking relativisation of its religious content. Given that this law
had now to apply to two theologically opposed confessions, its central
ecclesiological and liturgical concepts could no longer be defined in
terms of the existing theological systems. This gave rise to a form of
ecclesiastical jurisprudence that separated itself from Catholic and
Protestant church law by coming to view the governance of religion in
a non-theological manner, as a purely political problem. From this secu-
larised Reichskirchenrecht would grow the theologically indifferent
Staatskirchenrecht of Pufendorf and Thomasius (–).
It was indeed through this protracted elaboration of the political–legal
instruments required to deal with religious civil war that German politi-
cal or public law (Staatsrecht) gradually became independent of Roman
law, employing the latter’s categories as the scaffolding for these great
works of legal construction, but filling them with contents suited to pur-
poses unknown to the Roman legists (Stolleis , –). This does
not mean, however, that positive law emerged as a neutral instrument for
an exercise of power whose secular character arose from a ‘utilitarian’
political science of the Helmstedt kind. On the contrary, through its elab-
oration as a means of securing the political–legal coexistence of the
warring confessions, German Staatsrecht became the source of a
specifically juridical autonomising of political governance. This helps to
clarify the relation between politics and law in Arnisaeus’ absolutist polit-
ical science and, indeed, more generally. For it allows us to see that if
Arnisaeus’ prince exercised sovereign power in the form of positive law,
 Civil philosophy
this was because Protestant political jurists had already detached
German jus publicum from all higher-level moral and theological ends,
thereby allowing it to be treated as a series of the purely instrumental
commands required to achieve social peace (Schmitt , –).
Rather than making a forced choice between politics and law as sources
of the desacralisation of civil governance, therefore, it is more histori-
cally appropriate to treat them as independent strategies converging on
this end – each drawing on the intellectual resources at its disposal in
order to forge instruments capable of meeting the challenge to govern-
ance posed by religious civil war (Stolleis , –).
One of the striking results of Heckel’s research is the demonstration
that many of the central features of a ‘liberal’ civil society – the secular-
isation of war and peace, the religious neutrality of law and politics, the
gradual acceptance of the ‘permanence of heresy’ which accompanied
the introduction of religious toleration – were not the result of a line of
transcendent philosophical reflection whose culmination would come in
the democratic natural law theories of the Aufklärung. We learn rather
that they arose as unplanned consequences of a whole series of juridi-
cal improvisations undertaken by anonymous political jurists seeking the
political–legal bases of social peace. Conversely, when we examine con-
temporary arguments on the need to ground positive Staatsrecht in a
‘higher’ natural law – such as Althusius’ argument that unless it were
founded in a natural law containing the Decalogue human society (‘sym-
biosis’) would be ‘a beastly congregation of vice-ridden men’ – we find
that they are in fact attempts by political metaphysicians to undo the
secularising effects of political jurisprudence (Althusius , ).
If, therefore, positive political jurisprudence was the source of an
independent juridical secularisation of civil governance – and if this
process of deconfessionalisation and instrumentalisation was a source of
‘moral’ consequences that we now identify with the emergence of a plu-
ralistic civil society – then we might expect that this role of political juris-
prudence would be reflected in the early modern civil philosophy of
Pufendorf and Thomasius. This is in fact the case. For what distin-
guishes their civil philosophy from political metaphysics – and what dis-
tinguishes their ‘profane’ natural law from neoscholastic natural law – is
just this fact: that it was elaborated in order render ‘practical philosophy’
(university ethics and politics) capable of reflecting the profound secu-
larisation of religious and political culture that had been taking place in
the political–jurisprudential sphere.
 Civil philosophy and profane natural law 

 .           

Having disarmed the sociological and metaphysical reductions of civil
philosophy, and located it at the confluence of the great political and
jurisprudential desacralisings of civil government, we may conclude our
exposition of Thomasius’ Foreword to Grotius. Taking the form of a
brief history of natural law, Thomasius’ Foreword offers us a striking
insight into the cultural role and significance that he and Pufendorf
envisaged for their reconstructed version of this discipline. Nothing
could be clearer, Thomasius begins, than the difference between
revealed and natural truths – the former coming through faith and rev-
elation and leading man to eternal beatitude, the latter arising in man’s
understanding and guiding him to temporal happiness: ‘Herein lies the
simple and clear distinction between theology and philosophy or
between theology and the three other faculties: theology is concerned
with the light of grace and teaches in accordance with it, jurisprudence,
medicine, and philosophy teach in accordance with the natural light’
(VG, ). Yet, he continues, nothing has been more responsible for derail-
ing man’s natural pursuit of a long and happy earthly life than the
mixing and confusion of these two kinds of truth; for from this have
arisen shameful exercises of priestcraft with all their attendant misery of
religious tyranny and conflict.
It is the ‘scholars’ who have been most responsible for this grievous
confusion, Thomasius argues; particularly those who inherited the
pagan philosophical conception of nature and mixed it with the
Christian doctrine of creation – that is, the metaphysicians. Ensnared by
‘Platonic fables’, the metaphysicians not only produced a bastard philo-
sophical–theological conception of a creation divided into visible and
invisible things, they also used their alleged insight into transcendent
being as the basis for doctrine-mongering and religious oppression: ‘One
was not content to present Christians with errors that contradicted the
sound reason and senses of normal men. Through heresy-hunting and
the coercion of conscience one forced these errors on the people as nec-
essary articles of faith’ (VG, ). Above all it was the incorporation of
Aristotelian and Platonic metaphysics in the development of scholastic
philosophy that formalised this corrupting mixture of philosophy and
theology, leading to the progressive ruin of ethics, statecraft, and natural
law. In this regard, Thomasius’ Foreword belongs to the genre of ‘histo-
ries of morality’, whose role in forming an intellectual bulwark for the
 Civil philosophy
new natural law has been investigated by Timothy Hochstrasser
(Hochstrasser , –).
In a striking instance of his analysis of the corrupting effects of meta-
physical doctrines, Thomasius divides their proponents into two kinds,
the ‘orthodox’ (Rechtmeinenden) and the ‘esoterics’ (Geheimen). The former
exercise power through the public imposition of articles of faith, the
latter through a secret practice of mystical spiritual direction. In pur-
porting to know the divine through natural (pagan) philosophical means,
each of the two forms of metaphysics – orthodox Schulmetaphysik and the
clandestine pursuit of mystical enlightenment – amounts to a ‘secret
theology’:
Both therefore misuse the natural light. The orthodox do so in that they over-
step the limits of reason, seeking through its powers to explain things that God
has held it not necessary to reveal, overly neglecting, however, the will and its
improvement. The esoterics do so in that they make the powers of the will
greater than they are, and, on the other hand, diminish the light of the under-
standing too much. Both complain about the pagans and pagan philosophy, and
yet both are descended from pagan wisdom and its disciples. The orthodox in
fact [descend] from refining Platonic disputations regarding the divine being,
the esoterics though from the Platonic doctrine regarding the end of true
wisdom: namely, union with God through the way of purification and enlight-
enment. (VG, )
Further, both use their secret theology to engage in priestcraft – the illicit
exercise of authority through the claim to privileged religious insight –
to the ruin of true Christianity:
So everything leads either to idle speculation or enthusiasm and, thereby, simple
active Christianity is forgotten. Both of them impress upon the laity that giving
is more blessed than taking, although for them this means that taking is more
blessed than giving. Both seek to strengthen the pretences of their doctrines
through holy fraud, through the fabrication of many evidently false histories,
and through false miracles . . . Finally, we can add that both classes rob their lis-
teners of the right use of their God-given reason. The orthodox [do so] by
binding their listeners to their formulas, the esoterics by binding them to inner
inspirations. So they spread the two most grievous prejudices of the human
understanding, the former [the orthodox] that of human authority, the latter
[the esoterics] that of untimely rashness. (VG, –)
Thomasius is particularly concerned with the effects of Schulmetaphysik
on the civil sciences of ethics, politics, and natural law, regarding it as
the source of their confessional corruption and assimilation to scholas-
tic moral philosophy:
 Civil philosophy and profane natural law 
It is certain that the [teaching of] ethics by the first philosophers in the univer-
sities founded by the Pope was so bad that, so to speak, one could not entice a
dog behind an oven with it. The profession of statesman first arose long after
that. In his account of the papal monarchy, Herr Pufendorf has remarked that
it belongs to the secrets of papist states either not to teach politics in the univer-
sities or to do so only in accordance with the interests of the clergy. Because of
this even the name of politics itself has been made suspect, and a taint of shame
attached to it. More should be said about this elsewhere, because politics and
natural law or ethics [Moral] – which are in fact markedly different – were often
confused. (VG, )
Several brave and wise men had attempted to redress this situation –
among them Pierre Bayle, Hermann Conring, Jean Barbeyrac, and,
most notably, Samuel Pufendorf – attacking the scholastic anthropolo-
gies and cosmologies and pointing the way towards a new conception of
politics and natural law. Their efforts, though, have been hampered by
the scholastic domination of the universities. In the law faculties the
dominance of jus civile has been a retarding factor; for this has meant that
the glossators have been unable to separate natural law from Roman
law, and thereby provide it with the political form required by recent his-
torical circumstances. Things are even worse in the theology faculties,
however. For here natural law has been ensnared by the full metaphysi-
cal confusion of theology and philosophy, being in effect transformed
into a branch of moral philosophy and losing its civil vocation altogether
(VG, ). While Thomasius castigates the Jesuits (Vitoria, Molinas,
Suárez) for this corruption, he is equally scathing of the Protestant theol-
ogy faculties. Here too the ‘secret theology’ of Aristotelian and Platonic
metaphysics had crept back in, allowing the Protestant theologians and
philosophers to follow the Catholics in assimilating natural law to meta-
physics and moral philosophy: ‘As a result, at the beginning of the seven-
teenth century, the doctrine of virtue and vice, or of the difference
between good and evil, of the natural law and such like, was in a
wretched and deathly condition, among both the Catholics and the
Protestants’ (VG, ).
Turning at last to the subject of his Foreword, Thomasius writes that
it was Grotius’ task and honour to begin cleansing the Augean stables of
scholastic metaphysics and natural law. He characterises Grotius as a
man who had himself held political office and had experienced at first
hand the monster of religious authority. In his treatment of ‘the law of
war and peace’, Grotius had been the first to show that conflicts between
princes could not be decided on the basis of Justinian or canon law but
 Civil philosophy
only through natural law. In doing so he separated divine, universal,
mosaic, and human laws from each other: ‘In a word, Grotius was the
instrument that served God’s wisdom in lifting the long-lasting confusion
of natural and supernatural light by making a beginning’ (VG, ).
Perhaps keeping in mind the fundamental corrections that Pufendorf
had made to Grotius’ construction of natural law, Thomasius concludes
his Foreword by observing that Grotius represented only the dawning of
truth from the long night of scholastic error.
Modern commentators – particularly those wedded to post-Kantian
philosophical history – have great difficulty in understanding the separ-
ation of knowledge and faith in Thomasius’ civil philosophy, or the
manner in which it combines a secularising empiricism and a ‘spiritual-
istic’ (anti-sacramental) theology. In treating this as a failure to reconcile
philosophy and theology – and in treating this failure as destined to be
overcome in the great line of German metaphysics running from
Leibniz through Wolff to Kant – they overlook two signal issues. First,
they fail to observe that the reconciliation of philosophy and theology
actually pre-dated Thomasius; that it was the defining mark of the meta-
physical ‘confusion’ that he set out to destroy; and that he had carefully
diagnosed the ‘secret theology’ of Aristotelian and Platonic metaphysics
on which this reconciliation depended. They also overlook the fact that
Thomasius linked the confusion of philosophy and theology in this
secret theology to the merging of civil and religious authority in confes-
sional society. These were joined by the ‘priestcraft’ of the theologians
and philosophers, and in particular by their claim to be able to admin-
ister a philosophical salvation to the laity through speculative and self-
purifying access to the Platonic intelligibles. In short, far from failing to
reach the transcendental reconciliation of philosophy and theology in
the great line of German metaphysics, Thomasius identified this recon-
ciliation with the catastrophic fusion of civil and religious governance in
the confessional state. He located the nexus between university meta-
physics and the monstrosity of a religious state in the exalted deportment
of the academic theologians and philosophers – the clerisy – who pur-
ported to govern others on the basis of their access to a domain of pure
intellection.
In fact, the reshaping of the relations between the civil sciences and
theology which lay at the heart of Pufendorf ’s and Thomasius’ natural
law arose not from their philosophical failure but from the failure of uni-
versity philosophy; that is, its failure to comprehend the profound trans-
formation in the relations between civil and religious governance that
 Civil philosophy and profane natural law 
had already been achieved in the domain of politics and jurisprudence.
The comprehension of this transformation was to be the task of the civil
philosophy developed by Pufendorf and Thomasius, in particular of
their refashioned natural law. Rather than signalling their failure to
become metaphysicians, the fact that their natural law contains a statist
conception of politics and law alongside an unreconciled ‘spiritualist’
theology points to a quite different historical reality. It indicates the
manner in which Pufendorf and Thomasius sought to destroy meta-
physics so that they could transform practical philosophy in accordance
with the juridical and political secularisation of civil governance. This
transformation was dependent on two fundamental and interdependent
strategies which in fact form the basis of Pufendorf ’s and Thomasius’
civil philosophy.
The first of these strategies concerns the manner in which their
profane natural law separates the exercise of civil authority from the
pursuit of moral regeneration. In excluding the question of truth from
the great religious peace treaties, political jurisprudence had not only
detheologised politics, it had in effect ‘detranscendentalised’ it; for the
key to the peaceful legal coexistence of the rival confessions lay in the
sovereign power’s complete indifference to their transcendent truth
claims. This in turn required the recalibration of politics and law as
instrumental disciplines whose object was restricted to political order as
such. The detranscendentalising of politics and law was reflected in the
anti-metaphysical voluntarism of the new civil natural law. Pufendorf
and Thomasius denied that natural law could be founded in the
transcendent truths of man’s moral nature or moral community,
grounding it instead in his limitless capacity for mutual self-destruction.
This supported a conception of politics and law understood in terms of
the commands of a sovereign power issued for the sole end of maintain-
ing social peace. As we shall see, it also led to the fundamental doctrine
that the sovereign power had the absolute right to settle religious contro-
versies, by force if necessary; but only if they threatened social peace and
only if this power remained completely indifferent to the conflicting
religious truths.
At the same time, because this detranscendentalising of politics
resulted from a specific (political–jurisprudential) kind of desacralisation
– and was not the result of a general philosophical or social process of
rationalisation – it did not lead to a wholesale secularisation or instru-
mentalisation of all social spheres. On the contrary, in accordance
with a second strategy, the civil philosophers sought to remove ‘true
 Civil philosophy
Christianity’ from political supervision by treating it in terms of the
informulable and unenforceable faith of an ‘invisible church’. This
accounts for the ambivalent attitude to religion in the new natural law.
To the extent that it is considered in its public ecclesiological sense, then
religion is strictly subject to political utility, with a refashioned
Staatskirchenrecht being the source of laws designed to neutralise the inde-
pendent power of the churches and transform them into instruments of
social pedagogy. To the extent that religion was regarded in its transcen-
dent salvific sense, however, then Thomasius in particular sought to free
it from all forms of authority – clerical and political – treating it as a
matter of private faith and grace. In so doing, of course, he was simul-
taneously removing politics and law from all religious obligations.
The instrumentalising and detranscendentalising of politics and law,
accompanied by the ambivalent ‘privatising’ of religion, signalled a pro-
found reconfiguration of the relations between civil and religious
governance. It gave rise to an outlook in which the exercise of civil
authority would only be considered legitimate to the extent that it was
indifferent to transcendent truth, and in which the pursuit of transcen-
dent truth would be considered legitimate only to the extent that it
involved no exercise of civil authority and had no impact on social
peace. Pufendorf and Thomasius were amongst the first to formulate
this new outlook, which lay at the heart of their civil philosophy.
This combination of secular civil sciences and spiritualistic theology
was the instrument and outcome of a radical reorientation of the aca-
demic–intellectual field, giving rise to the outlook of civil philosophy. On
the one hand, it meant that the civil sciences would only be considered
legitimate to the extent that they eschewed revealed or transcendent
objects and restricted themselves to empirically available ones. On the
other hand, it dictated that the transcendent objects of theology would
be considered legitimate only to the extent that they were treated as
objects of faith, completely inaccessible to natural philosophical knowl-
edge. This outlook, while it employed the traditional Lutheran ‘dualist’
formulations regarding the gap between reason and revelation, knowl-
edge and faith, was not oriented to a metaphysical delimitation or recon-
ciliation of the two domains. On the contrary, by inheriting the
political–jurisprudential imperative to separate the spheres of civil and
religious governance, and through its spiritualistic rejection of all
attempts to provide either a transcendent basis for the civil sciences or a
rational basis for theological doctrine, the outlook of the civil philoso-
phers was dedicated to the radical decoupling of the civil and theological
 Civil philosophy and profane natural law 
knowledge, and the consequent destruction of university metaphysics.
This of course is the viewpoint informing Thomasius’ Foreword to
Grotius.
It will already be clear that Protestant university metaphysics and its
natural law adopted diametrically opposed positions to civil philosophy
in both of the above regards. In the first place, university metaphysics
remained committed to anchoring the civil sciences of ethics, law, and
politics in transcendent truth, through philosophical reflection on their
‘rational’ foundations. Whether in the form of Alberti’s recovery of
divine law, Leibniz’s recovery of the transcendent concept of justice,
Wolff’s recursion to the intellectual possibilia that underlie all possible
things, or Kant’s ascent to a transcendental moral law underlying all
empirical ethics and politics – German university metaphysics would be
characterised by a relentless drive to overcome civil philosophy’s separ-
ation of the empirical–civil and the transcendent–religious sciences. It
sought thereby to re-establish the unity of Christian academic culture at
whose centre sat the privileged figure of the metaphysician himself, pre-
serving a quasi-religious disposition for the civil sciences through his own
self-purifying recovery of their transcendent grounds.
Secondly, university metaphysics and its natural law rejected civil phi-
losophy’s uncoupling of the spheres of civil and spiritual governance.
Metaphysicians from the Martinis to Kant refused to accept the
indifference of sovereign power to moral truth – thereby rejecting the
autonomy of the political – with Kant commenting on how ‘terrible’ it
was that ‘no philosopher has yet been able to bring into agreement with
morality . . . the fundamental principles of the great societies called
states’ (., RRT, ). At the same time, these metaphysicians remained
committed to reconciling Christian theology and metaphysical philoso-
phy, with Leibniz, Wolff, and Kant all producing elaborate ‘philosophi-
cal theologies’. In doing so they continued to seek a ‘rational faith’
capable of reunifying Christianity and forming the basis of a ‘moral
commonwealth’. As a result, they remained wedded to a political escha-
tology, conceiving the state via the figure of the church, or the ‘kingdom
of God on earth’.
We may conclude the first part of our study, therefore, by observing
that the metaphysical and civil philosophy found in early modern
German universities represented independent and opposed responses to
the reshaping of civil and religious governance that was taking place in
the political–jurisprudential domain. Far from emerging as a failure to
achieve the metaphysical synthesis of philosophy and theology – a
 Civil philosophy
failure that would force it to combine an amoral statism and an irrational
theology – civil philosophy emerged as a deliberate repudiation of the
whole programme of metaphysical reconciliation, patiently uncoupling
the civil sciences from theology in order to separate political authority
and religious truth. For its part, university metaphysics remained consti-
tutionally committed to the unification of philosophy and theology –
albeit on the basis of increasingly ‘secular’ conceptions of the transcen-
dental domain – and refused to renounce the ecclesiological desire for a
state governed in accordance with transcendent moral principles. These
rival intellectual cultures were neither mediated by a dialectic internal to
a universal human intellect nor unified by a singular form of truth.
Rather they confronted each other as divergent modes of forming par-
ticular intellectual deportments, each characterised by its own way of
acceding to truth. Such is the manner in which we shall approach the
civil philosophy of Pufendorf and Thomasius, and the metaphysics of
Leibniz and Kant, treating the works of these philosophers as represen-
tative instances of a still-unresolved divergence in the fundamental
forms of intellectual culture.
  
Civil and metaphysical philosophy
This Page Intentionally Left Blank
     

Leibniz’s political metaphysics

.     

If the conflict between civil and metaphysical philosophy represented a
major fissure in the academic–intellectual culture of early modern
Germany, then one of its central texts is Leibniz’s celebrated Opinion on
the Principles of Pufendorf. Written in  at the request of the abbot of
Locum (Molanus), this text was first published as an appendix to Jean
Barbeyrac’s French edition of Pufendorf ’s De Officio (). Here it was
interspersed with Barbeyrac’s adjudicatory comments, intended to
mediate the conflict for the Huguenot Diaspora (Barbeyrac ). In his
monitory discussion of the De Officio, Leibniz comments that while he
agrees with Pufendorf ’s derivation of duties from laws, Pufendorf has
no idea of the depth of natural laws or the scope of the duties they
embrace. Leibniz expands this comment with the following remarks:
But my analysis of this is scarcely recognised by our author, [namely] that in a
universal society governed by God every virtue . . . is comprehended among the
obligations of universal justice; and not only external acts, but also all of our
sentiments are regulated by a certain rule of law; thus those who are worthy of
being philosophers of law [must] consider not only concord among men
[humanae tranquilitatis], but also friendship with God, the possession of which
assures us of an enduring felicity. (PW, )
These remarks provide a useful pointer to the central differences
between the natural law doctrines of Pufendorf and Leibniz. As we shall
in more detail in chapter , Pufendorf had indeed sought to limit natural
law duties to those derivable from the end of human tranquillity. He had
done so in order to separate civil authority from man’s pursuit of his
‘enduring felicity’ or salvation, thereby restricting law to ‘external’ or
civil actions, to the exclusion of all concern with man’s inner moral or
religious purity. Moreover, in disputing Pufendorf ’s account of the
‘efficient cause’ of natural law, Leibniz clearly identifies the rival theo-
logical–political underpinnings of their divergent constructions:

 Leibniz’s political metaphysics
‘[Pufendorf], indeed, does not find [the cause of natural law] in the
nature of things and in the precepts of right reason which conform to
it, which emanate from the divine understanding, but (what will appear
to be strange and contradictory) in the command of a superior’ (PW, ).
Against Pufendorf, Leibniz insists that justice is not to be restricted to
the governance of external actions in accordance with the end of civil
peace, being grounded instead in God’s salvific governance of the uni-
verse, which extends to man’s inner moral condition. For, in Leibniz’s
metaphysical philosophy, man shares in God’s intellection of the ‘sub-
stantial forms’ or ‘perfections’ responsible for the universe’s intelligible
and moral order: ‘Neither the norm of conduct itself, nor the essence of
the just, depends on [God’s] free decision, but rather on eternal truths,
objects of the divine intellect, which constitute, so to speak, the essence
of divinity itself; and it is right that our author [Pufendorf] is reproached
by theologians when he maintains the contrary’ (PW, ). According to
this neo-Platonic metaphysics, wisdom is knowledge of the forms or per-
fections which are the source of the universe’s teleological order. To
know the rational forms or perfections, however, one must love them; for
in loving or finding happiness in the perfections man perfects himself –
realises his telos as a rational being – and thereby qualifies himself to dis-
pense justice as one in whom love and wisdom are combined.
Leibniz’s metaphysical conception of justice, justitia est caritas sapientis
– justice is the love of the sage – thus constitutes a thoroughgoing con-
trast with and self-conscious repudiation of Pufendorf ’s anti-metaphys-
ical or civil conception. For, according to Pufendorf, the natural law
duties find their effective source not in the reasons of a quasi-divine intel-
lect but in the commands of a political superior. How, though, should
we approach these rival natural law doctrines? In what historiographic
space are they most appropriately located?
Seen from the viewpoint of the history of moral philosophy, the
natural law doctrines of Leibniz and Pufendorf appear as competing
attempts to provide a rational basis for political duties or, equivalently, a
moral basis for the exercise of civil authority. Historians writing from this
standpoint regard Leibniz’s natural law as philosophically superior to
Pufendorf ’s, despite the fact that Leibniz wrote nothing of the magni-
tude of Pufendorf ’s De Jure Naturae et Gentium, or even of its epitome, the
De Officio. As we have already noted, some of these historians regard both
philosophers as destined for eclipse with the appearance of Kant’s moral
philosophy (Schmidt-Biggemann a; Schneewind ; Schneewind
). Others, though, with greater sympathy for Leibniz’s neo-Platonic
 Introduction 
metaphysics, focus more directly on its supposed philosophical superior-
ity to Pufendorf ’s ‘Hobbesian’ perspective. They regard Leibniz’s
attempt to provide civil authority with a metaphysical–moral basis as
intellectually and morally preferable to Pufendorf ’s alleged reduction of
right to might (Barreau ; Riley ; Sève ; Sève ).
Viewing Leibniz’s relation to Pufendorf in these terms, however,
underestimates the degree to which it was shaped by the religious and
political circumstances of post-Westphalian Germany. In his discussion
of Pufendorf ’s theological writings, Detlef Döring observes that both
thinkers were attempting to influence Protestant Religionspolitik (Döring
, –). In writing his Jus Feciale Divinum sive de Consensu et Dissensu
Protestantium Exercitatio Posthuma (The Divine Feudal Law, or On Consensus and
Dissensus among Protestants, ), Pufendorf sought to provide a core
theology acceptable to Lutherans and Calvinists, in accordance with the
religious policy of Brandenburg-Prussia. Leibniz, however, had never
deviated from his visionary quest to reunite the whole of Christendom
around an agreed philosophical theology – his own (Döring a).
Leibniz’s stinging attacks on Pufendorf ’s theology and natural law were
thus in part driven by personal rivalry – Leibniz resented the high office
Pufendorf had obtained at the Brandenburg court – but, more impor-
tantly, by a fundamental difference in their cultural and political out-
looks. This difference, as Döring comments, is given symptomatic
expression in their radically opposed views of the discipline of meta-
physics: ‘Is a greater opposition thinkable than that between Leibniz’s
pride in having already penetrated the depths of metaphysics in his
youth, and Pufendorf ’s thanking fate for having allowed him the timely
recognition that metaphysics is nothing other than a useless mish-mash
of empty concepts?’ (Döring , ).
In the face of the modern proclivity to treat Leibniz as simply a better
philosopher than Pufendorf, Döring’s comments are a pointer to just
how deeply Leibnizian metaphysics were embedded in a specific set of
religious and political conflicts – particularly the conflict with civil phi-
losophy. We have already indicated that Leibniz’s metaphysics may be
regarded as a characteristic neo-Platonic improvisation on seventeenth-
century Protestant university metaphysics. Despite the important doctri-
nal shifts involved here, there are, we have suggested, important
continuities at the level of the culture of metaphysics itself; for Leibniz
and those who came after him continued to cultivate the spiritual
authority of a personage with access to the divine–intelligible order of
the cosmos and, on this basis, to claim authority in the civil sphere. This
 Leibniz’s political metaphysics
distinctive cultural–political comportment holds the key to understand-
ing Leibniz’s attack on Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy, which was dedicated
to destroying just this nexus of intellectual and civil authority in the
metaphysical personage. It is also a pointer to the larger conflict framing
this skirmish: that between the civil desacralisation of politics and the
strategy of rationalist resacralisation being pursued by the metaphysi-
cians.
In fleshing out these suggestions, this chapter offers an account of
Leibniz’s metaphysics as a specific kind of intellectual self-culture, one
embedded in the neo-Platonic anthropology and cosmology, and dedi-
cated to the cultivation of a socially authoritative moral persona. This
approach results in a view of Leibniz’s philosophical theology and
natural law quite unlike that offered by the historians of moral philoso-
phy, but one more attuned to the religious and political circumstances in
which his metaphysics did battle with Pufendorf ’s and Thomasius’ civil
philosophy.

 .       S C H U L M E TA P H Y S I K   


In its neo-Platonic pursuit of the ‘intelligibles’ underlying the empirical
world, Leibniz’s metaphysics represents a characteristic early modern
‘rationalist’ transformation of the scholastic inheritance, comparable
with Descartes’ and Spinoza’s. It is helpful to view this transformation
in terms of an intellectual spectrum. Scholasticism may be characterised
in terms of a particular tension: between the drive to elaborate a con-
ception of substance or being common to God, man, and world, and the
equally strong insistence on the gulf separating the divine and human
realms. This gave rise to a variety of ‘orthodox’ metaphysical theologies,
in accordance with several strategies for responding to the tension, as we
have seen in Walter Sparn’s account of Lutheran and Calvinist univer-
sity metaphysics. In its positing of a single domain of intelligibles, open
to both the divine and the human intellect, early modern neo-Platonism
occupies the rationalist end of the metaphysical spectrum. Leibniz’s
metaphysics may thus be regarded as representing a particular histori-
cal negotiation of the path from the scholastic to the rationalist poles of
this spectrum.
We obtain a helpful overview of this transition in a short but pregnant
essay by Bogumil Jasinowski. Jasinowski sees Leibniz’s philosophy emerg-
ing from the interplay between two distinct metaphysical traditions,
 From ‘Schulmetaphysik’ to rationalist metaphysics 
Christian scholasticism and Renaissance neo-Platonism (Jasinowski
, –). Central to Leibniz’s rationalist transformation of his scho-
lastic inheritance are two interlinked doctrines that Jasinowski calls pan-
cosmism and gnoseomonism. Described by Jasinowski as a ‘metaphysical
faith’ originating in Chaldea, pancosmism is the doctrine that the
entirety of the world is contained in each of its parts. This is the organi-
cist teaching that gave rise to both the search for occult relations between
things and the pursuit of mathematical formulas capable of expressing
these relations. Gnoseomonism is Jasinowski’s term for the ‘epistemo-
logical’ concomitant of pancosmism. This is the doctrine that, just as
there is a single order of pancosmic being, so there is a single principle
of knowledge informing God, man, and the world. The prime instance
of this principle is the Platonic Idea, acceded to via pure intellectual
intuition rather than discursive reason, and giving rise to empirical things
through a process of devolution into the world of the senses. The rever-
sal of this process finds expression in the doctrine of a self-purifying
ascent from confused sensory perceptions to their source in the timeless
forms or intelligences.
Jasinowski sees Leibniz’s philosophy as effecting a pancosmic and
gnoseomonistic transformation of scholastic dualism and, in this regard,
his account agrees with fundamental studies by Heimsoeth and Merlan
(Heimsoeth ; Merlan ). Leibniz’s monadology is a typical
expression of this transformation. The monad or ‘spiritual atom’ is both
a substance originating in God’s creative intellection of the universe yet
– in the case of the soul or ‘intelligent monad’ – also contains the total-
ity of substances in a pancosmic manner, through its own intellection,
which mirrors God’s. From this viewpoint, the pantheistic and deistic
tendencies of Leibniz’s metaphysics arise from this neo-Platonic collaps-
ing of the scholastic dualism of divine and human being. This interpre-
tation echoes Sparn’s account of the Platonic provenance of ‘Calvinist’
rationalist doctrines, particularly the doctrine of regenerate man’s
capacity to participate in God’s thinking of things through contempla-
tive ascent to the divine ideas (Sparn , –).
It is somewhat surprising then that Patrick Riley should regard
Leibniz’s neo-Platonic conception of justice – ‘the charity of the wise’ –
as indicative of the harmonisation of Christian theology and scientific
rationality: ‘In the end one can say that Leibniz preserves the
Christian/Pauline notion of charity as one side of justice, that he does
not altogether secularise the idea of justice, but that (at the same time)
the stress on “the wise” is redolent of both ancient Platonic rationalism
 Leibniz’s political metaphysics
and modern scientific Enlightenment’ (Riley , ). In fact, like its
‘Calvinist’ prototype, Leibniz’s conception of enlightenment through
contemplative ascent to the intelligibles may itself be regarded as a form
of ‘metaphysical faith’ – or spiritual self-cultivation – rather than as an
anticipation of science; for we shall see that this ascent takes place not
through experimental method but via a practice of intellectual self-
purification. In fact, Leibniz’s mode of acceding to the intelligibles or
‘perfections’ is symptomatic of the ‘secret theology’ that so concerned
Thomasius, as we gather from Leibniz’s claim that: ‘The divine perfec-
tions are concealed in all things, but very few know how to discover them
there. Hence there are many who are learned without being illumined,
because they believe not God or the light but only their earthly teachers
or their external senses and so remain in contemplation of imperfec-
tions’ (Lm, ). Similarly, as Heimsoeth has shown, rather than antici-
pating experimental biology, Leibniz’s interest in the microscopic
examination of pond amoebae was driven by his pancosmic (anti-
Democritean) desire to prove that even the smallest particles of matter
contained the living universe within them (Heimsoeth , –).
Rather than indicating an epochal transition to a ‘modern scientific
Enlightenment’, Leibniz’s metaphysics is thus better seen as a character-
istic seventeenth-century Platonistic modification of Protestant
Schulmetaphysik. In this regard it is symptomatic of a significant parting of
the cultural ways available to seventeenth-century Protestant intellectu-
als. Other intellectuals, we recall, responded to the Lutheran dualism of
divine and human being in a quite different manner. Rather than col-
lapsing the two levels into a single form of reason or intellection, politi-
cal scientists (Arnisaeus and Conring) and civil philosophers (Pufendorf
and Thomasius) intensified the separation of divine being and human
thought as a means of naturalising and objectifying the latter. This
enabled them to treat the sciences of politics and law as governed by
specific empirical objects and technical–formal methods. By contrast, in
maintaining the classical religious–metaphysical conception of the
divine intellection of the essences, while ‘deconsecrating’ the manner in
which these would be acceded to, Leibniz was turning his back on the
construction of autonomous empirical sciences and improvising the
‘modern’ form of philosophia Christiana. At the very least, then, there are
several paths into the ‘modern scientific Enlightenment’, and these do
not lead to the same destination.
In order to prepare the way for our discussion of the form and circum-
stances in which Leibniz undertook his Platonic modification of
 From ‘Schulmetaphysik’ to rationalist metaphysics 
Protestant Schulmetaphysik, we need to supplement Jasinowski’s schematic
account by bringing forward two of the results of our earlier discussion
of university metaphysics and civil philosophy. In the first place, we need
to recall the central lesson of Thomassen’s discussion of metaphysics as
a particular Lebensform (see section . above). Thomassen, we recall,
treats the pursuit of the intelligibles not as an epistemological necessity,
but as the goal of a way of life grounded in a contingent moral anthro-
pology. This is the metaphysical anthropology of man as the being
whose spark of divine intellect permits him to participate in God’s crea-
tive intuition of the substantial forms, even if his corporeal embodiment
means that to achieve this end he must rise above the discursive–sensory
forms of human understanding through self-purifying abstraction.
Despite its more explicitly Platonic character, we find the same anthro-
pology at the heart of Leibniz’s metaphysics – in the figure of the ‘ratio-
nal monad’, with its inner intellectual spontaneity and its outer sensory
passivity, and with its driving desire for intellectual self-perfection
(Heimsoeth ). We shall therefore approach Leibniz’s monadology as
an improvisation on the longstanding metaphysical anthropology of
homo duplex. Inheriting the latter’s ‘ascetic’ function and moral prestige,
the monadology is also a means of grooming the exalted and authorita-
tive intellectual deportment of the metaphysician.
Next, we need to bring forward the results of our preliminary dis-
cussion of the relation between university metaphysics and the civil
philosophy of Pufendorf and Thomasius (see section .). In their
reconstruction of natural law – grounded in the Epicurean anthropol-
ogy of self-restraint rather than the Platonic one of self-realisation –
Pufendorf and Thomasius sought to uncouple the spheres of political
governance and religious formation through a radical separation of pol-
itics, law, and ethics from theology. They did so by treating the former
as objects of sciences whose epistemological horizons were set by the
state’s pursuit of social peace, and the latter as a discipline rooted in a
private faith lying beyond the reach of all philosophical explication and
doctrinal formalisation. Acting in accordance with the deep-seated de-
sacralisation of politics that had been taking place in the political–juris-
prudential domain, the civil philosophers sought to eliminate the
political enforcement of religious life-styles by excluding transcendent
truth and value from the ‘civil kingdom’. This meant that the ‘kingdom
of truth’ could only be entered through private devotion, not teachable
metaphysics.
Conversely, outraged by Pufendorf ’s and Thomasius’ desacralising
 Leibniz’s political metaphysics
philosophy, the university metaphysicians continued to seek the recon-
ciliation of theology and philosophy and, on this basis, to ground polit-
ical governance in some version of Christian moral perfectionism.
Lutheran political metaphysicians such as Alberti, Veltheim, Placcius,
and Prasch thus continued to offer metaphysical explications of central
theological doctrines. They also refurbished ‘ante-bellum’ neoscholastic
natural law, according to which sovereignty and positive law are con-
strained by transcendental rational and moral laws. Rather than signify-
ing his dialectical overcoming of the civil separation of theology and the
political sciences, the fact that Leibniz sought to resolve religious conflict
through a trans-confessional philosophical theology indicates his close-
ness to the anti-political strategy adopted by the university metaphysi-
cians. Similarly, rather than solving a philosophical problem inherent in
the civil decoupling of positive law and moral philosophy, Leibniz’s re-
establishment of a continuum between these domains is a weapon
against the (political–juridical) desacralisation of civil governance. As
the instrument of a new ‘rationalist’ resacralisation of politics and law,
Leibniz’s metaphysics is also a means of preserving the intellectual and
civil authority of the Christian philosopher in a new form – that of the
‘anti-positivist’ critical intellectual. These at least are the propositions
that we shall defend in our discussion of the ‘ascetic’ character of
Leibniz’s metaphysics, and the ‘neo-confessional’ character of his phil-
osophical theology and natural law.

.         

The key to understanding the self-formative character of Leibniz’s
metaphysics lies in the reciprocal relation it establishes between knowl-
edge of the ‘perfections’ (intelligibles) and the perfection of the intelli-
gible being who strives to know them. Leibniz gives symptomatic
expression to this relation in a short meditation on ‘Felicity’ (c. –).
‘Virtue’, Leibniz asserts, ‘is the habit of acting according to wisdom. It
is necessary that practice accompany knowledge.’ Wisdom, for its part,
‘is the science of felicity’ and felicity ‘a lasting state of pleasure’.
Pleasure, though, ‘is a knowledge or feeling of perfection, not only in
ourselves, but also in others’; and this knowledge or feeling is itself trans-
formative or perfecting of us, ‘for in this way some further perfection is
aroused in us’. In other words, wisdom as the science of felicity is not just
the theoretical understanding of a concept. It is the awareness of the
 The subject of metaphysics 
divine perfections or essences that we achieve when we are ourselves per-
fected through that awareness, and is thus the pleasure or feeling of per-
fection. Leibniz goes on to formulate the transformative character of
metaphysical knowledge of the perfections in this way:
Now it is necessary to explain the feeling or the knowledge of perfection. The
confused perception of some perfection constitutes the pleasure of sense, but
this pleasure can be [productive] of greater imperfections which are born of it,
as a fruit with a good taste and a good odour can conceal a poison. This is why
one must shun the pleasures of the sense, as one shuns a stranger, or, sooner, a
flattering enemy.
Knowledge is of two kinds, that of facts and that of reasons. That of facts is
perception, that of reasons is intelligence.
Knowledge of reasons perfects us because it teaches us universal and eternal
truths, which are manifested in the perfect Being. But knowledge of facts is like
that of the streets of a town, which serves us while we stay there, [but] after
[leaving] which we don’t wish to burden our memory any longer. (PW, –;
Gr, , –)
Here we can make out the lineaments of a particular self-transfor-
mative contemplative practice. In the classic Platonic–rationalist
manner, Leibniz teaches that to be virtuous or act in accordance with
wisdom one must attain the knowledge or feeling of perfection that
comes with being perfected. One attains this knowledge or feeling
through the pleasures of the mind or the knowledge of reasons, which
is in fact the knowledge of the perfections that perfect us. To obtain this
pure knowledge and pleasure, though, is not just a theoretical matter. In
fact it is to undergo a personal transformation. As in Albert’s metaphys-
ics, this is figured in terms of shunning the pleasures of sense and
approaching the perfections or essences at their source, in their contin-
uous emanation from divine intellection. For sensory perception is not
just the confused or ‘imperfect’ knowledge of an intellectual concept but
is also the source of our metaphysical–moral impairment, as we remain
locked in our imperfect sensory condition through the contemplation of
empirical things and satisfactions. Factual or sense-based knowledge is
thus not just intellectually inadequate but spiritually corrupting, as it
threatens to trap us in contemplation of imperfections. The world of
facts should be like a town we pass through on our way to a permanent
dwelling in the city of contemplation. For its part, rationally based
knowledge is not just theoretically true but is so because it is spiritually
purifying. It permits knowledge of intellectual perfections (reasons,
essences, intelligibles) by purging the intellect of the sensory perceptions
 Leibniz’s political metaphysics
that cut us off from self-perfecting contemplation of the source of all per-
fections – the ens perfectissimum.
We can propose therefore that Leibniz’s metaphysics – and, to the
extent that he is its harbinger, enlightenment metaphysics more gener-
ally – represents not the final recovery of man’s ‘rational being’, but a
way of cultivating the self in the image of this figure. This specific mode
of ‘subjectifying’ individuals was adapted from the contemplative prac-
tices of Schulmetaphysik, and was developed in opposition to the rival ways
of grooming ‘truth-capable’ subjects contained in civil philosophy. In
clarifying this metaphysical cultivation of the self, the present section
undertakes three tasks. First, we discuss Leibniz’s anthropology (and cos-
mology) as giving shape to a particular way of relating to and shaping
the self. This in turn will require us to describe the principles of meta-
physical abstraction as a particular spiritual exercise or practice of intel-
lectual self-transformation. Finally, we will have to comprehend the
figure of formal or pure intellection as the comportment-ideal of a pre-
stigious way of life, that of the secular sage. Once we have completed
these tasks we will be in a position to discuss Leibniz’s philosophical
theology and natural law as disciplines whose truth is informed by the
metaphysician’s prestigious moral–epistemological status – that is, his
qualification to speak authoritatively on religious and civil matters by
virtue of his participation in the quasi-divine intellection of pure con-
cepts.

.. The anthropology of pure reason

The most compact formulation of Leibniz’s anthropology is given in his
Monadology (), which also contains a cosmology and theodicy. The
Monadology posits a universe teeming with monads or simple substances.
The ‘atomic’ or non-complex character of the monads means that they
may never pass away, generation and death merely being cyclical com-
positions and decompositions of the simple substances. Increate God
creates the monads by intelligising them, thereby imbuing the created
intelligences with a ‘spark’ or ‘image’ of this same creative intellection,
albeit limited by the receptivity or passivity characteristic of the crea-
turely status: ‘So only God is the primary unity or the simple original
substance of which all the created or derivative monads are products,
and from whom they are born, so to speak, by continual fulgurations of
the divinity from moment to moment, but limited by the receptivity of
the created being, for whom it is essential to have limits’ (Mo, § ).
 The subject of metaphysics 
Through this continuous creative intellection of the monads or substan-
tial forms, the divine mind imbues them with all of the accidents or pred-
icates which will occur to them as events in time, and which they will
experience as ‘perceptions’. All monads, even the ‘naked’ monads that
make up the world of things, are animate in the sense of harbouring a
soul or entelechy, which is the substantial form intelligised by God and
containing the predicates or perceptions that individuate things. Given
that all monads reflect the divine mind, and given that the universe is a
plenum, placing all monads in communication with each other, then:
‘this mutual connection and accommodation of all created things to
each other and of each to all the rest causes each simple substance to
have relations which express all the others and consequently to be a per-
petual living mirror of the universe’ (Mo, § ).
It is, however, in his treatment of the ‘rational’ or ‘thinking’ monads
– man and the angels – that the ‘ascetic’ or self-formative role of
Leibniz’s anthropology comes to the fore. Like ordinary monads or
souls, rational monads or spirits are subject to the same passive percep-
tions that arise from the unfolding of their forms in time. By virtue of
the spiritual substance which they share with the divine mind, however,
the rational monads are capable of becoming self-conscious of these
perceptions, which allows them to rise from passive to active intellection,
in imitation of God:
Among other differences which exist between ordinary souls and spirits . . .
there is still this: souls in general are living mirrors or images of the universe of
created beings, while spirits are also images of divinity itself or of the author of
nature, capable of knowing the system of the universe and of imitating it to
some extent by means of architectonic samples, each spirit being like a little
divinity within its own sphere. (Mo, § )
Due to its structuring by this onto-theological hierarchy, Leibniz’s dis-
tinction between empirical–historical knowledge and knowledge
derived from a priori reflection possesses a strongly moral–anthropolog-
ical character, despite the fact that it is normally discussed in largely epis-
temological or logical terms, as, for example, by Beck (Beck ,
–). Leibniz thus treats empirical–historical knowledge as sympto-
matic of the body-burdened passive perceptions of the lower creatures,
while regarding a priori reflection or intellectual intuition as indicative
of man’s capacity for participating in God’s active timeless intelligising
of the forms of things (Mo, §§ –). The monadology therefore func-
tions as a moral anthropology by tying the capacity for divine intellec-
tion to an image of the being who is to be its bearer. This is what permits
 Leibniz’s political metaphysics
Leibniz to present theoretical speculation as a god-like deportment of
the self, while stigmatising empirical knowledge as passive and beastly.
In this regard, despite its neo-Platonic formulation, Leibniz’s mona-
dology plays a role strikingly similar to the one Thomassen ascribes to
Albertian metaphysics. The common feature is the role of the metaphys-
ical anthropology – always focused in the image of man as a sensibly
embodied intellectual being – in inducing the desire for a particular kind
of self-transformation. In both Leibnizian and scholastic metaphysics
the desire for metaphysical knowledge of the perfections or forms arises
from the imaginal ‘ontological’ gap between divine and human intellec-
tion. This gap is, in its turn, instituted in the paideia of metaphysics, in
order to induce the desire for metaphysical knowledge.
By configuring man as a spiritual being whose spontaneous intelligis-
ing links him to divine intellection of the forms – but whose receptive
sensing threatens to trap him in confused and self-interested empirical
perception – Leibniz, too, is engaged in programming a particular work
of spiritual self-formation. This is one that requires individuals to focus
their desires (and fears) for moral regeneration in the way they know
about things. Specifically, it impels them to relate to their own thoughts
as if these were a conduit to a higher mode of being, but one threatened
with corruption by empirical perceptions that mire them in the sensory
‘historical’ world. Rather than being a philosophical mistake that would
be corrected by Kant’s separation of sensibility and understanding, the
continuum that the monadology establishes between a degraded sensory
perception and a purified rational intellection may thus be regarded as
instituting a particular way of relating to the self. This is a relation
through which certain individuals learn to regard their true selves as a
fugitive pure intellect, emanating from the divine mind yet darkened by
man’s sensible being, hence in need of restorative purification for com-
pletion.
Two features of the intellectual deportment arising from this use of
the monadology are of particular importance for our present concerns.
In the first place, as Patrick Riley has pointed out, by establishing a con-
tinuum between human and divine intellection, the monadology allows
Leibniz to represent man as a citizen in the divine republic or Civitas Dei,
rather than as a mere passive thing in a mechanically ordered universe
(Riley , ):
It is this [their image-relation to divine intellection] which renders spirits
capable of entering into a kind of society with God and makes his relation to
 The subject of metaphysics 
them not merely that of an inventor to his machine (as God is related to other
creatures) but also that of a prince to his subjects and even a father to his
children.
It is easy to conclude from this that the assemblage of all spirits must make
up the city of God, that is to say, the most perfect state which is possible under
the most perfect of monarchs. (Mo, §§ –)
More importantly, however, Leibniz’s monadology is designed to have a
transformative effect on the philosopher himself. If the monadology is
central to the continuum Leibniz establishes between God’s moral
governance of the universe and the prince’s political governance of the
state, then the key to this continuum lies in the exercise in spiritual self-
transformation programmed by this speculative anthropology. For it is
through the exercise in ascent to the a priori intellection of the forms of
things that the individual establishes the unity of his own persona, as
metaphysician, modelling this on the transcendent unity of God’s time-
less intellection of substances prior to their scattering across time and
space. From this perspective, there can be no fundamental distinction
between God’s rational natural law and the civil laws of the secular
prince, or between man’s religious and civil duties. For the latter repre-
sent only the devolution of the former into the world of time and utility,
which it is the task of the metaphysician to transcend. This speculative
deportment, as we shall see in the following chapter, is precisely what is
excluded by Pufendorf ’s anthropology.

.. The exercise of abstraction

In redescribing Leibnizian metaphysical abstraction as a spiritual exer-
cise, we can begin by returning to our observation that the role of the
metaphysical anthropology is to programme a certain kind of ‘work on
the self ’. In treating empirical objects as confused perceptions of quasi-
divine clear and distinct ideas, Leibniz’s monadology is designed to
effect a turn from the outer to the inner world. In fact, it is an exercise
in unifying the person around a single ‘I’ or self – a metaphysical moral
personality – whose God-likeness consists in apprehending the appar-
ently autonomous and differentiated historical world from a single point
of a priori intellection:
It is also by the knowledge of necessary truths and by their abstraction that we
rise to reflective acts, which enable us to think of what is called I and to con-
sider this or that to be in us; it is thus, as we think of ourselves, that we think of
 Leibniz’s political metaphysics
being, of substance, of the simple and the compound, of the immaterial, and
of God himself, conceiving of that which is limited in us as being without limits
in him. These reflective acts provide us with the principal objects of our reason-
ings. (Mo, § )
According to Leibniz our reasonings are ‘based upon two great prin-
ciples’. The first of these is ‘the principle of contradiction, by virtue of which
we judge that false which involves a contradiction, and that true which is
opposed or contradictory to the false’ (Mo, § ). The second is ‘the prin-
ciple of sufficient reason, by virtue of which we observe that there can be
found no fact that is true or existent, or any true proposition, without
there being a sufficient reason for its being so and not otherwise,
although we cannot know these reasons in most cases’ (Mo, § ). The
principle of sufficient reason provides Leibniz with his key method of
abstraction and, indeed, of acceding to truth. It is the means by which
individuals, ‘shunning’ the pleasures of sense, ascend from empirical
facts and the confused murmur of sensory perception, via a ladder of
progressively simpler definitions – which are also causes of the facts they
determine – arriving finally at a priori axioms, laws, and primitive
definitions. The latter terminate the analytic regress in that they define
themselves simply on being contemplated (DM, §§ –; Mo, §§ –). In
this way one passes from ‘truths of fact’ to ‘truths of reason’. Conversely,
the principle of contradiction is the means by which one passes from a
priori intuition of concepts – known to be true (possible) by virtue of
their component intelligibilia containing no contradictions – to the syn-
thetic demonstration of empirical truths independently of experience.
Leibniz recommends the a posteriori analytic path to truth, regarding
the a priori synthetic path as too difficult for unregenerate intellects,
although not for all: ‘Yet superior geniuses should enter upon this [a
priori] way, even without hope of arriving at particulars by means of it,
in order that we may have true concepts of the universe, the greatness
of God, and the nature of the soul, through which the mind can be most
perfected, for this is the most important end of contemplation. Yet we
believe that the absolute use of this method is conserved for a better life’
(Lm, ).
Leibniz’s twin principles of reason are of course normally understood
in terms of epistemology and its (post-Kantian) history. Here, these prin-
ciples have come to stand for Leibniz’s flawed attempt to formulate the
true relation between reason and experience that would eventually be
captured in Kant’s transcendental deduction of the categories. For, so
the standard argument goes, Kant shows that the mind accedes only to
 The subject of metaphysics 
the transcendental forms of empirical experience – the categories of
cognition and the forms of sensory intuition – rather than to the
transcendent forms of ‘things in themselves’, or Leibnizian noumenal
essences (Beck , –; Kahl-Furthmann ; Wundt , –,
–, –). On this telling of the history, Leibniz’s principles of contra-
diction and sufficient reason are incapable of the correct formulation
due to their blurring of causes and reasons, sensibility and understand-
ing. This is unavoidable given the programme of ascending from the
empirical experience or ‘confused ideas’ of the perfections to their ‘clear
and distinct’ intuition. Leibniz of course sees the principle of sufficient
reason as representing the fundamental operation of the soul or mind
itself – the operation through which it perfects itself by following the
path that leads from its corporeal sensations to the pure intelligising it
shares with God.
If, however, we consider its dependency on the metaphysical anthro-
pology – that is, on the philosopher’s image of himself as an intelligible
being mired in the imperfections of empirical experience – then the
principle of sufficient reason acquires a strikingly different significance.
Rather than being a false theory of the conditions of experience, or a
true path to the intelligibles of pure reason, it appears instead as a spec-
ulative practice performed by the philosopher on himself, in pursuit of
the perfection required to know the perfections. In short, it appears as
one of Hadot’s exercises in ‘mental concentration and renunciation of
the sensible world’ (P. Hadot , ). Programmed by the principles
of contradiction and sufficient reason, Leibnizian abstraction takes
place as a fundamental reshaping of the individual’s relation to himself
and his world. Leibniz thus understands abstraction as the moment in
which individuals ‘recollect’ that perceptions of (apparently) external
objects in fact come from their own subconscious thinking: ‘we rise to
reflective acts, which enable us to think of what is called I and to consider
this or that to be in us’ (Mo, § ). This in turn is to be regarded as an
imitation of or participation in God’s ‘continuous fulguration’ of the
intelligibles.
We can propose then that Leibniz’s principles of reason are not theo-
retical mistakes that left him with an insufficient regard for the indepen-
dence of empirical experience. Rather, the abstractive ascent to
determining Gründe – through the shunning of the pleasures of sense and
the contemplation of reasons that are also causes of phenomena – is a
spiritual exercise individuals perform to ensure that they will not regard
empirical experience as independent of pure intelligising. In other
 Leibniz’s political metaphysics
words, Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason is not a mistaken theory
through which a universal subject misrepresents its true relation to a
domain of independent empirical experience. Rather it is a real practice
through which certain individuals cultivate a specific way of relating to
empirical experience: as the passive sensing of ideas originating in the
(presently quasi-conscious) active intellection of the universe. The prin-
ciple of sufficient reason is the means by which individuals can groom a
subjectivity in which all sensory phenomena appear as husks of the
‘hidden perfections’ that God’s intelligising maintains within them: ‘The
divine perfections are concealed in all things’, we recall Leibniz intimat-
ing, ‘but very few know how to discover them there’ (Lm, ).
Seen in this light, Leibniz’s principles of reason appear less as early
forms of Kantian epistemology and more as late versions of scholastic
metaphysical exercises (Honnefelder , –). Like these exercises,
Leibniz’s practice of abstraction requires a prior ‘existential’ acceptance
by the philosopher that empirical experience is both intellectually and
morally imperfect. This, we recall, is the burden of Leibniz’s comment
that: ‘The confused perception of some perfection constitutes the pleas-
ure of sense, but this pleasure can be [productive] of greater imperfec-
tions which are born of it [which is why] one must shun the pleasures of
the sense, as one shuns a stranger, or, sooner, a flattering enemy’ (PW,
; Gr, , ). Without this ‘personal’ acceptance of the spiritual
deficiency of finite empirical experience – that is, in the face of unmoved
acceptance of the ‘brute’ adequacy of such experience – the demonstra-
tion of the world’s metaphysical intelligibility lacks pedagogical grip on
the person who is to undergo enlightenment. This helps to explain
Leibniz’s stigmatisation of those who deny the defective nature of
empirical knowledge as ‘coarse’ empiricists and ‘irreligious’ mechanists.
In any case, in requiring personal acceptance of the spiritual
insufficiency of empirical experience, the proof of a priori intellection
is not just a chain of ideas leading to a propositional conclusion. As the
means of inducing this acceptance, the principles of non-contradiction
and sufficient reason form part of a specific intellectual paideia or forma-
tive regimen. This paideia is one that initiates neophytes into the disci-
pline of metaphysics by inducing in them the experience of empirical
reality’s spiritual insufficiency. It thereby binds them to the exercise in
metaphysical abstraction as the only means of recovering the pure ideas
of their higher being: ‘One need not shun at all pleasures which are born
of the intelligence or of reasons, as one penetrates the reason of the
reason of perfections, that is to say as one sees them flow from their
source, which is the absolutely perfect being’ (PW, ; Gr, , ).
 The subject of metaphysics 
The method of abstraction is thus not a means of recovering concepts
whose thinking in fact makes the experience and reality of things pos-
sible. It is rather a spiritual exercise – a ‘work of the self on the self ’ –
aimed at forming a person who will relate to their concepts and them-
selves in this way. This exercise operates by inducing a (milieu-specific)
state of metaphysical anxiety or longing for pure vision of the intelli-
gibles, thence to resolve it through assiduous winnowing of the husks of
empirical perception, leading finally to the contemplation of pure ideas
as if they were the source of empirical experience. This is the ascesis
lying behind Leibniz’s claim that in order to know the pure ideas or
‘hidden perfections’ individuals must perfect themselves, as human
understanding has to approach the same intensity or perfection of being
as its spiritual object. But this ascesis is simultaneously the means by
which the threatening autonomy of civil authority and its sciences could
be held in check. For abstractive intellection leads not only to God but
to the intelligibles that are responsible for the knowability of being as
such, and are hence presupposed by all the particular sciences, includ-
ing the civil ones.
Seen in this light, Leibniz’s Platonic conceptualisation of justice is not
inherently superior to the nominalist–empiricist conceptualisations of
Pufendorf and Thomasius. Rather, it is just historically different to
theirs, but in a highly significant way. In claiming insight into the divine
idea of justice – and in stigmatising the empirical conceptions of the civil
philosophers as imperfect and utilitarian – Leibniz was in fact using
metaphysical abstraction as a weapon for combating the secularisation
of civil governance inherent in their objectification and instrumentalisa-
tion of political–juridical rule. We will return to this issue below. For the
moment, let us say that, far from representing the true path from empir-
ical to ‘theoretical’ concepts of justice, Leibniz’s method of metaphysi-
cal abstraction is the ascetic discipline for a highly specific ‘theo-rational’
mode of acceding to truth. As such, it is not inherently superior to other
methodological disciplines – such as Arnisaeus’ empirical–technical
conceptualisation of political order, or Pufendorf ’s empirical–historical
construction of natural law – which resulted in ‘therapeutic’ or instru-
mentalist modes of acceding to the truths of law and politics.

.. The philosopher’s deportment

This is the appropriate angle from which to approach our third and final
task in this section: understanding the pursuit of formal or pure intellec-
tion as the comportment-ideal of a prestigious way of life. If Leibniz’s
 Leibniz’s political metaphysics
anthropology and cosmology represent the configuration of a subject
capable of acceding to divine or rational truth – and if his method of
abstraction is a spiritual exercise that individuals carry out on themselves
in order to shape the being capable of this accession – then it seems that
knowledge of theo-rational truth is inseparable from attaining a partic-
ular kind of personhood, that of the self-purifying metaphysical sage.
This inner relation between rational knowledge and personal deport-
ment is given symptomatic expression in Leibniz’s own discourse. After
all, Leibniz posits just such a relation in his cardinal doctrine that knowl-
edge of the pure concepts or ‘hidden perfections’ is dependent on the
spiritual perfection of the being who is to know them. In fact this linkage
between reason and spiritual perfection was both instrument and
outcome of the process through which Leibniz was able to tap into the
cultural authority that Schulmetaphysik had acquired through its confes-
sional proximity to theology, channelling this into a new conception of
philosophy and the philosopher.
We are fortunate in having several helpful commentaries on the
appearance of this new and exalted conception of secular philosophy that
accompanied ‘modern’ rationalist metaphysics (Schmidt-Biggemann
a, –; Schneiders b, –). What these accounts have
perhaps not made sufficiently clear, however, is the degree to which
Leibniz’s fashioning of a new and culturally authoritative persona for the
philosopher – that intellectual being who uncovers the forms of intelli-
gibility common to all the sciences through an act of abstractive self-
purification – was dependent on a complex process of cultural
transmission and adaptation. This is the process that saw the exercises
used in the self-perfecting contemplation of the divine perfections
adapted to the practice of philosophical reflection on the pure concepts.
These are the concepts intended to anchor the centrifugal civil sciences
in transcendental reflection on the pure forms of experience, thereby
allowing philosophia Christiana to make the transition to its modern form –
rationalist metaphysics.
So culturally ambitious was this metaphysical philosophy that it
sought to expel rival civil modes – neo-Stoic, neo-Epicurean, empiricist
– from the domain of philosophy altogether, appropriating the term
‘philosophy’ for metaphysical philosophy alone. The effects of this cul-
tural arrogation can still be felt today, in those histories of early modern
German philosophy that chart a course from Leibniz to Kant via Wolff,
consigning the civil philosophers to a minor, barely philosophical role.
Leibniz thus initiated a distinction between ‘philosophy’ and ‘history’
 The subject of metaphysics 
that would indeed pass via Wolff to Kant. He did so by identifying phi-
losophy with pure insight into the a priori possibilities (possibilia) of things
prior to their occurrence in time, and history with the merely empirical
knowledge of things as they are given to the senses post facto (Schneiders
b). This hierarchical distinction between philosophy and history
became metonymic for a whole series of distinctions between the ratio-
nal and empirical disciplines, the pure and applied sciences. It also har-
bours an image of the philosopher as a type of secular prophet who,
through his pure apprehension of the a priori concepts, possesses privi-
leged insight into the future course of history, as the eschatological
unfolding of these concepts in time.
The relation between the truth of metaphysical philosophy and the
enlightened or exalted condition of the philosophical personage is clear
enough in Leibniz’s meditation ‘On Wisdom’, probably written in the
last decade of the seventeenth century. Commenting that ‘persons of
rank’ too often squander their power to do good through succumbing to
the pleasures of ‘sensual indulgence’ – only to reap the punishments of
ill-health and ill-repute – Leibniz prescribes a course of philosophical
meditation. Only this can bring the true regenerative pleasure that
comes with the perfecting of our intellects in the intellection of perfec-
tion:
Such joy, which a person can always create for himself when his mind [Gemüth]
is well ordered, consists in the perception of pleasure in himself and in the
powers of his mind, when a man feels within himself a strong inclination and
readiness for the good and the true, and particularly through the profound
knowledge which an enlightened understanding provides for us, namely, that we
experience the chief source, the course, and the purpose of everything, and the
incomprehensible excellence of that Supreme Nature which comprises all
things within it. Thus we are lifted above the unknowing, just as if we were
looking down from the stars and could see all earthly things under our feet. (Lm,
; Ge, , )
From this panoptic vantage-point, to which he accedes through the
purification of his intellectual being, the metaphysical philosopher can
view the objects of all the sciences via the light of reason ‘which is born
with us’; for these objects are themselves only empirical manifestations
of the pure ideas revealed in this light. Through this linkage of pure
knowledge to the exalted purity of the philosopher’s persona, Leibniz
carries forward the conception of metaphysics as the transcendental
science of ‘being as being’ and as the ‘science of the sciences’.
For Leibniz, all men are in principle capable of attaining this level of
 Leibniz’s political metaphysics
intellectual perfection, although in fact few actually do so, due to the pre-
ponderance of the sensory perceptions and passions in the majority. We
have already argued, however, that Leibniz’s subject of reason is not
even in principle universal. By virtue of its dependency on an instituted
spiritual anthropology and an administered exercise in abstraction, the
intuition of pure ideas takes place as the goal of a specialised spiritual
grooming. Similar anthropologies and spiritual exercises were respon-
sible for tying knowledge to personal ‘holiness’ – that is, to the culturally
authoritative comportment of the sage or the holy man – in antiquity
(Brown ; Brown a; I. Hadot ; P. Hadot ). They can also
be found in the early modern Schulmetaphysik that Leibniz was adapting
(Sparn , –; Sparn ). Lutheran natural jurists such as
Samuel Rachel, for example, tie knowledge of natural law to the good
man’s ‘nobility of character’ in a manner that is typical of Protestant
neoscholasticism:
In the same way, although Natural Laws are in themselves certain, yet relatively
to men and human knowledge they may be either obscure or uncertain or clear;
so that, just as jurists employ as a kind of standard of human conduct the dili-
gence of the good man [arbitrium boni viri], so, and rightly, philosophers refer to
the judgment of a good man, whose nobility of character, ␬␣␭␱␬␣␥␣␽␫␣, is
known to be conjoined with Wisdom in an indissoluble connection, and who
therefore knows better than anyone else whether a given action is or is not con-
formable to the Natural Laws which Prudence has promulgated. (Rachel ,
)
It is reasonable to propose, therefore, that in tethering rational knowledge
to spiritual perfection – and thereby attaching the civil sciences to the hub
of Christian philosophy – Leibniz was placing the ancient cultural
authority of the sage at the disposal of the metaphysical enlightenment.
It should now be clear that in deriving theo-rational concepts of law,
politics, and religion through abstractive ascent to the intelligibles,
Leibnizian metaphysics is not the elaboration of a confirmable theory.
Rather, it constitutes a spiritual discipline aimed at forming a particular
kind of intellectual deportment which, in fact, is the deportment of a
particular kind of intellectual. This is an intellectual who will treat the
existence of empirical–historical forms of law, politics, and religion as
imperfect and corrupting. This transforms actually existing legal, politi-
cal, and religious arrangements into the starting point for the exercise in
spiritual ascent that will qualify the metaphysician to reshape them in
accordance with metaphysical conceptions of justice and salvation. In
 Philosophical theology 
short, if Leibnizian rationalism does not constitute a confirmable philo-
sophical theory, that is because it embodies the spiritual grooming
responsible for the authoritative spiritual deportment of the metaphysi-
cal sage. It is in this light that we now turn to Leibniz’s philosophical
theology and then his natural law.

.       

Leibniz’s philosophical theology can only be understood against the
backdrop of the civil philosophers’ attempt to extirpate the whole genre
of ‘natural theology’. Here, we can recall Thomasius’ attack on the four
books of Lombard’s Sentences, for their philosophical explication of the
Christian mysteries: ‘It is likely that in these four books Lombard had
attempted to unite the doctrines of Augustine and Aristotle; [for] the
whole work contains a mish-mash of theology and philosophy. The Holy
Scriptures are explained in accordance with the principles of pagan phi-
losophy. In ethics and natural law the old stupidities are advanced’ (VG,
). For a long time, historians have seen the civil philosophers’ refusal
to integrate theology and philosophy as symptomatic of their failure to
develop a reconciliatory philosophical theology. Now, however, we can
see this refusal as indicative of a profound historical analysis of the cul-
tural and political functions of university metaphysics and natural theol-
ogy. In rejecting all forms of natural theology – in programmatically
excluding all philosophical explications of the mysteries of sin, damna-
tion, justification, and salvation from the sphere of civil knowledge –
Thomasius was executing the dual strategy that lies at the heart of civil
philosophy: the desacralising of the civil and the ‘privatising’ of the
sacral.
Concomitantly, in those works which he dedicated to the metaphysi-
cal explication of Christian doctrine – the ‘Catholic Demonstrations’
(–), the Confessio Philosophi (), the Systema Theologicum () and
the Theodicy () – Leibniz was engaged in a process both more con-
tentious and less benign than that of making religion safe for reason, or
vice versa. In fact he was attempting to transfer the philosophical medi-
ation of the Christian faith – together with all of the power and prestige
attaching to it – from the custodianship of confessional theologians to
that of rationalist metaphysicians. In ignoring the civil philosophers’
embargo on natural theology, Leibniz was thus engaged in an uncom-
promising defence of the metaphysician’s access to the divine and,
 Leibniz’s political metaphysics
through this, of this personage’s claim to mediate Christian doctrine and
authority in the civil domain. Leibniz’s grandest version of this claim lies
in his programme for reunifying the faith around a metaphysical expli-
cation of Christian truths agreeable to all three confessions ( Jordan
; Wiedeburg ). These at least are the propositions to be explored
in our discussion of Leibniz’s Confessio Philosophi.

.. Theological philosophy

Leibniz’s Confessio Philosophi or Philosopher’s Confession of Faith was written
in  but remained unpublished during his lifetime. Manuscripts were,
however, circulated to influential philosophers and theologians, includ-
ing Antoine Arnauld and the Catholic vicar to the Hanoverian court,
bishop Nicolaus Steno, who is the probable source of an important set
of marginal annotations. Taking the form of a philosophical dialogue,
the Confessio deals with the origin of sin and the defence of God’s just-
ness in the face of the suffering and damnation. It thus explores the
central questions of the Theodicy, but in a more compact and lucid
manner. In contrast with the civil-philosophical strategy of treating con-
tentious doctrines as adiaphora, while simultaneously establishing theo-
logically indifferent forms of civil authority, Leibniz’s objective in the
Confessio is to construct a metaphysical surrogate for theological truth,
making the latter available as a moral foundation for civil society.
In the Confessio Leibniz concentrates on providing metaphysical expli-
cations for the biblical doctrines of sin, damnation, and election. These
explications are grounded in the metaphysical anthropology and cos-
mology later elaborated in the Discourse on Metaphysics and the Monadology.
In keeping with this Christian–Platonic anthropology and cosmology,
God is conceived as related to the world through an optimally harmoni-
ous ordering of the ‘series of things’. This onto-theological order is
grounded in God’s non-contradictory intellection of the essences and his
choice of the best possible world. Among the infinite other worlds that
God might have actualised from his intelligising of non-contradictory
and ‘compossible’ (logically possible and actually compatible) sub-
stances, the best possible world is the one that permits the maximum
harmonisation of potentially conflicting elements (DM, §§ –).
The ethical or moral–theological dimension of this metaphysical cos-
mology is encapsulated in the Confessio’s concept of happiness, whose
roots lie not in the notion of social security that Leibniz’s civil rivals were
elaborating, but in the notion of spiritual felicity or beatitude. For
 Philosophical theology 
Leibniz, as we have already seen, happiness is a spiritual condition
arising from the soul’s intellectual contemplation of the divine harmony,
representing in fact a ‘taking on’ or participation in this harmony:
[ilosopher]. I will take it from your answer that you and I accept [that if
God is just he loves everyone]. Is there not general agreement that God
is all-knowing?
[eologian]. Yes, so?
. Therefore no thinkable thing possesses harmony unless God perpetually
knows it.
. Agreed.
. So, each happiness is harmonious or beautiful.
. Granted.
. Now, I will prove it so that others won’t deny it. There is happiness only in
the intellect.
. Correct, because no-one is happy if he doesn’t know that . . . Whoever is
conscious of his condition is an intellectual being [mens, geistiges Wesen].
Therefore no-one is happy who is not an intellectual being.
. That follows. In any case, happiness is the condition of the intellect that is
most agreeable to the intellect itself; nothing is agreeable to the intellect,
though, except harmony.
. Yes, of course, because we have just agreed that ‘to take pleasure’
[delectari] means nothing other than to experience harmony.
. Happiness is based therefore in a spiritual condition of highest possible
harmony. The nature of the intellect is thought; the harmony of the
intellect is based therefore in the thought of harmony; [and] the highest
harmony of the intellect or felicity [is based] finally in the contemplation
of universal harmony – that is, God’s – in the intellect.
. Excellent: because at the same time this shows that the happiness of the
intellect and the contemplation of God are one. (CP, –)
Harmony, as a mode of perfection, holds together the cosmological and
moral–anthropological sides of Leibniz’s theology. On the one hand,
harmony refers to the perfect condition of the cosmic order or ‘total
series of things’ arising from ‘God’s nature or, equivalently, the ideas of
things’. On the other hand, it refers to the enlightened condition of the
intellect that, in contemplating this order, establishes harmony within
itself and with the divine order of things, which is the source of its felic-
ity or perfection. As the most perfect being, God finds happiness or love
in the felicity of all beings, this in turn making him most love-worthy;
and, as justice consists in the love of all, God is most just.
With this framework in place, Leibniz is ready to begin his metaphys-
ical explication of the problems of evil and providence. It is the
Theologian who plays devil’s advocate, drawing out what he takes to be
 Leibniz’s political metaphysics
the heterodox fatalistic consequences of the Philosopher’s doctrine, and
doing so in a manner that threatens to make it stand proxy for the
Calvinist doctrine of predestination. If, argues the Theologian, God is
the cause of the whole series of things, and if this series contains sin and
evil, then God himself must be the author of evil – unless, of course,
there is a second wicked God, which is impossible. Moreover, if the
events of the series flow of necessity from God’s intelligising of their a
priori possibility – if, as Leibniz would later argue, all the events that a
monad may undergo are already contained in God’s intelligising it –
then it is necessary that some individuals, such as Pilate and Judas,
should sin and be damned for eternity. Hence, if all-knowing God thus
necessitates the whole cosmic series, he must will the damnation of some
and the election of others, as the Calvinists teach, which is incompatible
with his justice or universal love (CP, , ).
The Philosopher employs two kinds of argument to avert this chain
of consequences, the first one being an ethico-cosmological argument.
As nothing exists without a ‘sufficient reason’, and as the chain of
sufficient reasons leads ultimately to God – as the ungrounded cause of
the whole series – one cannot wish to alter or suspend the chain of con-
ditions without wishing God’s non-existence (CP, , –). At the same
time, however, we know with certainty that this world is the best possible
– that is, the one permitting the optimal harmonisation of dissonant ele-
ments. This means that sin and evil are to be regarded as contributing
to the overall harmony or perfection of the series; just as, in the words
of the Philosopher, the painter uses shadow to enhance brightness and
the doctor uses poison to cure illness. If, therefore, we wish to maintain
the harmony and tranquillity of our own intellect, we must regard sin
and evil as reconciled within the greater harmony of the divine order,
somewhat in the manner of Stoic and Epicurean ethical cosmologies.
Interwoven with this is a second, more strictly Christian–metaphysi-
cal, argument. Just as Scheibler had done sixty years earlier, Leibniz
argues that if we wish to understand how evil can be inevitable without
being metaphysically necessary – which would make God into its author
– we must refine our usual understanding of such concepts as necessity,
possibility, and actuality. The key to this clarification lies in the meta-
physical distinction between God’s existence – that is, his understanding
or intellection of things – and his will. Like everything else, argues the
Philosopher, evil exists in God’s understanding as a ‘necessary possibil-
ity’, or as something whose thinking entails no contradiction. This con-
cerns only the idea or essence of evil though, not its ‘accidental’ or
 Philosophical theology 
existential inevitability in the ‘series of things’ that comprises this world
(CP, –). The existence of evil in the world – which is indeed inevi-
table and foreseen by God – thus represents only an existential necessity,
not an absolute one; something that God tolerates as part of the whole
series of things (CP, –, –). Hence God neither wills nor finds pleas-
ure in sin and damnation, because he takes pleasure only in the integra-
tion of evil in the larger perfection of the whole. Sin or evil thus arises
from the contingency of the actual totality of things – in fact from the
imperfect actualisation of the intelligised perfections – and is reconciled
in God’s ‘best possible’ harmonisation of this dissonant totality (CP,
–).
These two modes of argument are jointly responsible for Leibniz’s
novel metaphysical account of damnation and election. According to
Leibniz the damned are those who die hating God. For, cut off from new
impressions by separation from their bodies, these souls must remain
imprisoned in their dying hateful thoughts for eternity, so that: ‘Who
hates God at their death therefore damns themselves’ (CP, ). On the
one hand the figure of self-damnation is explicated via the ethico-cos-
mological argument. The damned are those who die in a sinful or ‘dis-
sonant’ moral condition, hating God for the presence of evil in the world
rather than achieving the self-harmonising love that comes with contem-
plative acceptance of God’s reconciliation of evil in the greater cosmic
good. On the other hand, Leibniz explains damnation via his distinction
between metaphysical necessity and existential inevitability. Here, in the
subtle fissure between the metaphysical necessity of the relations
between divinely intelligised substances and the contingent necessity of
their actualised forms, the damned souls are free to hate rather than to
love God, which is a symptom of their imperfect actualisation. But they
do so apparently only because of their erroneous knowledge of their
place in this harmonised best of all orders.
It thus appears that the correct metaphysical theory of the harmonic
order is also the salvific means by which the elect bring themselves into
harmony with this order: ‘the harmony of the intellect is based therefore
in the thought of harmony’. If so, then rather than being a rational expli-
cation of Christian doctrine, Leibniz’s philosophical theology is laying
claim to the power to save. We must therefore depart from Walter Sparn’s
interpretation of the Confessio, in which he credits it with striking a
‘dialectical’ balance between the ‘theosophical’ translation of Christian
doctrine into idealist philosophy, and the anti-metaphysical ‘two-truths’
doctrine, which consigns theology and philosophy to discrete (revealed
 Leibniz’s political metaphysics
and natural) spheres (Sparn , –). The synchronisation of this
work’s philosophical and soteriological functions – its ascription of
salvific power to metaphysics itself – suggests, however, that Leibniz was
indeed attempting to fashion a philosophical substitute for religion.
Moreover, by making moral redemption contingent on acceptance of the
‘true philosophy’, this cultural translation betrays the persistence of a
certain kind of confessionalism.

.. Rationalism as religion

We derive some evidence for the quasi-confessional character of
Leibniz’s philosophical theology from the contemporary reactions of an
avowedly confessional theologian, Nicolaus Steno, the Hanoverian
court’s Catholic vicar. In the margin of his copy of the Confessio, adja-
cent to Leibniz’s account of the soul eternally imprisoned in its dying
thoughts, Steno writes: ‘This is a mere assertion. Why shouldn’t the soul
be able to perceive the conditions of the place in which it finds itself ?’
To which Leibniz counter-annotates: ‘How else than through the corpo-
real senses?’ (CP, –, fn. ). Here Leibniz’s metaphysical account of
damnation – with the soul eternally imprisoned in its self-damning last
thoughts through loss of new sensory inputs – is seen by Steno as a non-
authoritative rival confessional doctrine. In fact Leibniz’s metaphysics of
damnation conflicts directly with Catholic teaching on the possibility of
post-mortem redemption arising from the soul’s experiences in purgatory.
Similarly, adjacent to Leibniz’s claim that: ‘God harms those who
slavishly fear him or who wrongly assume that he will harm them, just
as, conversely, he who firmly believes himself chosen or loved by God,
brings it about that he (whom God loves constantly) will be elect’ (CP,
), Steno makes the following annotation: ‘This too is a mere assertion
because, on the contrary, everyone fears God at the beginning of their
conversion, and assumes that he might at least occasionally harm them;
but nonetheless in this way they are led to the complete trust of love.’
This provokes Leibniz’s counter-claim: ‘Those who slavishly fear God
do not love him and are therefore not yet in the condition of grace.
Therefore they will not be led to holiness in this way’ (CP, , fn. ).
Recalling that Leibniz sees fear as arising from erroneous knowledge of
the metaphysical order, this statement again suggests that he regards the
truth of his metaphysics as possessing salvific power – that is, as a rival
confessional doctrine. It appears that only those who possess true meta-
physical knowledge of the harmonisation of evil within the cosmic order
 Philosophical theology 
can be saved. For only thus is it possible to avoid the fear and hatred of
God arising from the erroneous perception of unreconciled evil, and the
damnation to which this leads.
In fact the quasi-confessional character of Leibniz’s enterprise is man-
ifest at the very heart of his philosopher’s theology, at the point where
his cosmology and anthropology intersect: namely, in the rationalist doc-
trine that the moral condition of the will is a function of the rational con-
formation of the intellect to divine ideas. Here, in the field marked out
by the long struggle between rationalism and voluntarism, Leibniz
rehearses a problem which, we recall (see section .), was central to
Protestant Schulmetaphysik. This is the problem of reconciling the meta-
physical conception of evil as the imperfect realisation of an essence or
entelechy, with the biblical conception of sin as a culpable free choice. In
fact, just like his Lutheran and Calvinist predecessors, Leibniz is forced
to confront the problem that metaphysical rationalism appears to allow
little scope for the freedom of the will necessary to make the damned
responsible for their own punishment. Without such responsibility
however God’s providence appears incapable of reconciliation with
human notions of justice.
Once again, Leibniz puts this critique of the metaphysical conception
of evil into the mouth of the Theologian (CP, –). The damned are
those who will not to love God but to fear and hate him, thereby becom-
ing responsible for their own damnation when they are trapped in their
dying thoughts. Given, though, that the Philosopher sees this condition
of the will as arising from knowledge, knowledge from perception, and
perception in turn from the soul’s location in the total series of things,
then the sinful condition of the will is determined by the sinner’s place
in the cosmic order. The damned would thus appear to be souls having
the misfortune to occupy an imperfect or ‘dissonant’ place in the cosmic
order – to be incapable of willing otherwise than the imperfect confor-
mation of their intellects in this place permits – hence to lack the
freedom of will required to make them morally responsible for their
damnation.
The Philosopher begins his answer to this problem by arguing that a
harmonious or good will is available to everyone, by virtue of the fact
that it arises from rational contemplation of the order of things or the
ideas in God’s mind (CP, –). This way of framing the issues, though,
does not address the Theologian’s questions regarding free will and
responsibility. Leibniz understands freedom of the will in a special meta-
physical sense: not as the capacity to choose between alternative paths
 Leibniz’s political metaphysics
in an undetermined manner, but as the capacity spontaneously to actu-
alise one’s (intellectual) nature on the basis of true insight. In fact the
Philosopher distinguishes between spontaneity – the agent’s capacity to
act in accordance with his nature – and freedom, which is the dispas-
sionate condition of the will arising from a pure and tranquil intellectual
insight: ‘Spontaneity comes from potency, freedom from knowledge’
(CP, ). This means, however, that souls can only freely will the good,
never evil; for the freedom of the will that comes with tranquil knowl-
edge of the order of things allows only for the spontaneous actualisation
of the soul’s (good) intellectual nature (CP, ). As a result, Leibniz
advances the definitive doctrine of rationalist theology, that ‘every sin
arises from error’ (CP, ). Sin is thus a purely ‘privative’ or negative phe-
nomenon, arising from the mind’s failure to conform itself to the theo-
rational metaphysical order, which leads to the will’s incapacity for love
and justice.
This doctrine does not, however, immediately solve the problem of
freedom and moral responsibility for, as the Theologian concludes, if sin
is actually based in error then: ‘As a result, every sin is to be excused.’
The Philosopher’s response is worth quoting:
. Not in the least; because just as light falls through a crack into the
darkness [so] a means of escape stands within our power, assuming that
we want to use it.
. But why do some will to use it [the light of divine knowledge] and others
not?
. Because those who do not want to, do not understand that it can be used
with profit; or, more specifically, because their souls [anima, Geist] are
such that it is as if it [the light] were completely absent; that is, [they are]
without reflection or attention, so that they look without seeing, listen
without hearing. Here lies the beginning of the refusal of grace or, as it is
called in the Holy Scripture, obstinacy. (CP, )

The problem with this solution, when seen from the viewpoint of
modern academic philosophy, is clear enough. Leibniz – having
explained the condition of the will in terms of knowledge of the divine
order – when asked why only some make use of this knowledge, answers
in terms of the condition of their will: everyone has access to the light
of knowledge ‘assuming that they want to use it’. This impending circu-
larity in the relation between the condition of the will and knowledge of
the metaphysical order is only postponed by reference to the intellectual
darkness of the damned souls, whose imbecility makes them obstinate
and whose obstinacy makes them imbecile. In either case Leibniz’s
 Philosophical theology 
explication does not leave the circle in which the sinful will is explained
in terms of lack of understanding and lack of understanding in terms
of the sinful will.

.. The philosopher’s sin

We are not however interested in viewing Leibniz’s metaphysics of evil
from the standpoint of modern academic philosophy, as if a better non-
circular solution to this problem was waiting in the Kantian wings (Riley
, –). Rather, we are interested in it as a particular way in which
a secular philosopher could lay claim to the authority flowing from a
longstanding and prestigious metaphysical explication of Christian sin.
Once again bishop Steno offers us a way into the contemporary relig-
ious significance of Leibniz’s philosophical theology. In one of his
several attempts to clarify the free will’s dependency on rational knowl-
edge, Leibniz’s Philosopher comments that: ‘In order to maintain the
privilege of a free will, it is enough that we position ourselves at the cross-
roads of life in such a way that we can only do that which we will, and
that we can only will that which we take to be good; but that we can only
investigate that which is to be taken as good through the most complete
use of our reason’ (CP, ). Steno’s response is brief and to the point:
‘But [can this be so] when free will is necessary for the investigation?’ That
Steno is alert to the aporia lying at the heart Leibniz’s articulation of free
will to rational knowledge is clear in the mini-dilemma that he sketches
for it: ‘Therefore [i.e., given the necessity of free will for the use of
reason], either one praises the highest gift of reason in vain [because
without free will it will not be used to know the good] or one must admit
the freedom of its use.’ Leibniz’s exasperated counter-annotation – ‘As
if anyone seriously denied this freedom of its use! I don’t understand the
ideas that the critic formed as he read this’ – is a more-than-rhetorical
expression of the fact that he has not understood the force of Steno’s
criticism (CP, , fn. ; my italics and square brackets). For Steno is
objecting to the fact that one cannot purport to derive freedom of the
will from the use of reason (for ‘harmonious’ intellection of the divine
order), and then explain this use of reason by appealing to the free will.
The important issue here, though, is not that Steno has identified the
circularity of Leibniz’s account, but that he has done so on the basis of
a rival confessional theological anthropology. In fact Steno’s criticism is
grounded in the Catholic teaching that the subject of reason must be
graced with a degree of moral regeneration, hence freedom of will, before
 Leibniz’s political metaphysics
pursuing rational knowledge of the good. The religious character of the
bishop’s Christian anthropology is thus a pointer to the religious char-
acter of the Philosopher’s Platonic one. In fact both anthropologies may
be regarded as specific ‘ascetic’ means for programming a particular
relation to the self and way of life. In treating rational intellection as
dependent on a prior sacerdotal regeneration of the will, Steno
staunchly limits the ‘power of the keys’ to the Catholic clergy. Leibniz’s
neo-Platonic treatment of rational intellection as the source of purity of
will should thus be seen as a rival theological anthropology, aimed at
making the philosopher morally self-generative.
In this light it comes as less of a surprise to observe that Leibniz’s treat-
ment of evil is an improvisation on patterns of thought already elab-
orated in early-seventeenth-century metaphysical theology. Sparn, we
recall (.), argues that reconciling the fatalism of ‘pagan’ moral anthro-
pology with the Christian demands for free will and moral responsibil-
ity is the constitutive problem for metaphysical discussions of evil. For
Lutheran metaphysicians such as Balthasar Meisner the problem was
how to reconcile the ‘privative’ Aristotelian conception of evil – as the
imperfect realisation of an entelechy or substantial form – with the
Christian conception of sin as the freely chosen transgression of divine
law. This is something that Meisner’s dualistic framework allows him to
overcome by treating mankind’s first sin as a transgressive choice that
corrupted the human faculties, making humanity’s imperfect realisation
into the outcome of a positive choice – the choice of a flawed metaphys-
ical nature. For their part, Sparn argues, the Calvinist and Catholic
metaphysicians held a much more strongly ‘metaphysical’ conception of
radical evil. In treating evil as ontologically embedded either in matter
or in the flesh – just in fact as Leibniz locates it in the rational monad’s
sensory imperfection – they find it much harder to escape the conse-
quences of pagan fatalism (Sparn , –). Given our immediate
concerns, however, it is not the differences between these various formu-
lations that matter but their similarities. For all of them arise as theolog-
ically impelled attempts to reconcile the pagan philosophical and
Christian theological conceptions of evil, in keeping with the constitu-
tive historical task of Christian university metaphysics as such. In
attempting the same reconciliation – moreover in attempting it in pre-
cisely the same terms as its theological predecessors – Leibniz’s theodicy
remains on the terrain of Christian metaphysical theology. The impor-
tant historical difference of course is that Leibniz was pursuing this
 Philosophical theology 
exalted task outside the theology faculty, as an unconsecrated or, better,
as a self-consecrating metaphysician.
We may conclude therefore that the exoteric rationalisation of theol-
ogy in Leibniz’s philosophical theology was underpinned by a profound
sacralisation of philosophy and the philosopher. The main difference
between Leibniz’s metaphysical theology and Lutheran Schulmetaphysik is
that the latter permitted escape from the damning circle between intel-
lectual imperfection and moral corruption via the regeneration of the
subject that came with Eucharistic participation in the Logos. Somewhat
unexpectedly, Leibniz’s trans-confessional Platonic universalisation of
the rational subject removed this escape route. Ostensibly requiring no
prior moral qualification of the capacities, Leibniz’s rational subject is
always already saved or, equivalently, always already damned. In the lan-
guage of the Monadology, the damned soul reflects the cosmic order from
an imperfect viewpoint, whereby its intellectual capacity represents a
degree of perfection determined by the sensory impressions to which it
has been subject in that place: ‘It is not in the object but in the
modification of their knowledge of the object that the monads are
limited. They all move confusedly toward the infinite, toward the whole,
but they are limited and distinguished from each other by the degrees of
their distinct perceptions’ (Mo, § ). The one way of avoiding the hatred
of God arising from the imperfect viewpoint is to achieve that knowl-
edge of the harmony of good and evil in the cosmic order which has the
effect of harmonising the soul itself. But this knowledge represents
another, more perfect, vantage point in that order and is simply not
available to those still mired in their confused sensory impressions. In the
Confessio, this state of affairs is captured in Leibniz’s doctrine that souls
differ only by virtue of their location in the cosmic order. Given that this
location determines their respective moral identities, it would be as vain
for a damned soul to blame God for its reprobation as it would for a
peasant boy to blame his father for not marrying a queen (CP, –).
For our purposes, the significance of this striking figure lies not its
faintly shocking callousness, but in what it tells us about the moral
significance that Leibniz ascribed to his philosophical theology. We have
already observed that it is only the contemplative metaphysical view-
point – with its capacity to harmonise the intellect through the ‘thought
of harmony’ – that permits souls to achieve the inner tranquillity that
attunes them to the divine order and hence redeems them from sin. This
means, however, that the moral–intellectual natures characteristic of
 Leibniz’s political metaphysics
particular places in this order are differentiated only through their
adherence to the metaphysical viewpoint. In other words, Leibniz’s
metaphysics itself now appears as a ‘saving truth’, occupying the same
soteriological space as the confessional theologies it was intended to
replace. Moreover, given the complete incapacity of Leibniz’s rational-
ism to differentiate between philosophical error and moral sin – between
the inattentiveness of the intellect and the corruption of the will – then
it may be legitimate to punish those who adhere to erroneous doctrines
or even to compel them to adhere to a true metaphysics. We will return
to these possibilities at the end of the chapter, when discussing Leibniz’s
views on the decriminalisation of heresy.
For the moment we can conclude that Leibniz’s metaphysics is indic-
ative of a profound re-ordering of the cultural relations between theol-
ogy and philosophy; for it makes metaphysics itself into a ‘saving truth’,
acceptance of which is the condition of membership of a new elect. In
comparison with the twin strategies employed by the civil philosophers
– the privatisation of theological truth and the desacralisation of civil
authority – Leibniz’s philosophical theology is thus symptomatic of a
quite different cultural strategy. It represents the ‘neo-confessional’
transformation of Protestant university metaphysics into a supra-politi-
cal metaphysical rationalism. This is grounded in the exalted spiritual
deportment of the metaphysical sage who now claims the confessional
theologian’s right to direct the civil authority in accordance with
transcendent truths. Such is the transformation that gave birth to
Leibniz’s political metaphysics and metaphysics of law.

.          

In our Introduction we observed that the seventeenth century witnessed
the clash between two kinds of natural jurisprudence. From Aquinas
through Melanchthon to Suárez and Althusius, scholastic or ‘Christian’
natural law had maintained the theological basis of civil authority by
modelling the person as a being capable of natural knowledge of divine
moral law (Haakonssen , –). This allowed political sovereignty
to be treated as the earthly form in which such persons exercised their
‘natural right’ to order the moral communities that are the realisation of
this law (Tierney , –). As the discipline charged with recon-
ciling natural and revealed knowledge, university metaphysics played a
key role in the formulation of neoscholastic natural law doctrines during
the seventeenth century. It taught men how they might accede to natural
 The metaphysics of law 
knowledge of divine laws through the spark of divine reason, and how
the civil community could mirror or foreshadow the heavenly one, if
only men would associate in accordance with the moral law.
It was just this claim to special insight into transcendent law that was
repudiated by the civil philosophers. They saw it as an instance of the
clerisy’s attempt to maintain its civil power, thereby jeopardising the des-
acralisation of the state. This is what led Pufendorf and Thomasius, in
the aftermath of the Thirty Years War to reconstruct natural law from
within, seeking to give it a form that would reflect the secularisation of
civil governance that had taken place in the political–jurisprudential
sphere. The full exposition of this reconstruction is reserved for our
chapters on the two civil philosophers. For the moment we may observe
that – despite the longstanding and deep-rooted failure of philosophical
historians to differentiate clearly the two forms – this civil natural law
differed fundamentally from the metaphysical form that it was born to
combat. Rather than treating man’s natural knowledge of transcendent
morality as the foundation of social order, the new civil natural law saw
such knowledge claims as a central problem for social order – given the
recent profound and bloody disagreements over transcendent morality.
It therefore sought a new natural law foundation for society, finding this
in man’s capacity to change his own moral nature, through the institu-
tion of civil sovereignty, in the interest of civil security. This meant that
ethics would be subordinate to the end of social peace and to the laws
of the only institution capable of attaining this end, the sovereign terri-
torial state. It is no surprise, therefore, that civil natural law was pro-
foundly and vehemently anti-metaphysical. For it identified the
metaphysical image of the person, or the image of the metaphysical per-
sonage – the rational being capable of governing itself and society on
the basis of transcendent rational and moral laws – as the intellectual
icon of confessional society. It sought to replace this image with various
voluntarist and neo-Epicurean conceptions of man. The civil philoso-
pher’s Epicurean man is a creature whose passions not only remove him
from divine intellection but also threaten him with utter destruction,
leaving him only enough knowledge of the natural law – now focused in
sheer survival rather than spiritual perfection – to institute the sovereign
who would enforce it.
Despite the fact that he did not write a full natural law system, Leibniz’s
various writings on this theme are of great historical significance. They
represent the key transitional form in which the neoscholastic metaphys-
ical natural law of the confessional period was modified and passed into
 Leibniz’s political metaphysics
the eighteenth century, where it would be resumed by Kant among others.
Patrick Riley thus illuminates our understanding of Leibniz by treating
his central natural law doctrine – the theory of a ‘universal jurisprudence’
common to the religious and civil domains – as deeply rooted in the
Christian–Platonic anthropology and cosmology of the Discourse on
Metaphysics and the Monadology (Riley , –). Yet we must be careful
not to treat Leibniz’s natural law as simply an alternative theory of justice
to that offered by Hobbes and Pufendorf – especially not as a superior
one. As we have begun to see, these conflicting doctrines were not
grounded in theoretical ideas but in the grooming of certain kinds of
person possessed of distinctive intellectual deportments. Moreover, at
stake in their disagreement was not a theoretical victory but something far
more consequential: the right to configure the relation between spiritual
and political governance in civil society. In fact all of the participants to
this great intellectual conflict were advisors to governments that were
attempting to reprogramme this relation in the aftermath of a protracted,
vicious, and destructive series of religious civil wars. Once this is recalled,
then Leibniz’s proposal to refound law and politics in a transcendent
morality may lose something of the warm glow that surrounds it in many
modern commentaries; for this of course was the longstanding impera-
tive of neoscholastic natural law. Further, in discussing his philosophical
theology, we have seen that Leibniz’s rationalism is not as far removed
from theological metaphysics as it first seems. In any case, approaching
Leibniz’s philosophy in this manner gives us a new insight into the hostil-
ity displayed in his Opinion on the Principles of Pufendorf (), which takes us
to heart of Leibniz’s version of ‘Christian’ natural law.
As we have already noted, Leibniz’s commentary on Pufendorf ’s De
Officio Hominis et Civis arose in response to a prelate’s concern regarding
the suitability of Pufendorf ’s natural law ‘as a topic of instruction for the
young’ (PW, ). Given the steadily increasing use of the De Officio in
Protestant universities in the early eighteenth century, and given our
account of the two forms of natural law as rival ‘comportment educa-
tions’, this pedagogical concern takes on its full significance. As Sieglinde
Othmer has shown, in making the central doctrines of his massive De
Jure Naturae et Gentium () available in an epitome suited to the capac-
ities of undergraduates, Pufendorf ’s De Officio was a potent means of dis-
seminating the new detranscendentalised ethics and secularised politics
of civil philosophy. Commenting on Barbeyrac’s French translation of
the De Officio () for the Huguenot Diaspora, Jacques Bernard, editor
of the Nouvelles de la Republique des Lettres, prophesied that here it would be
‘the magistrate, the military man, the businessman, the artisan . . . who
 The metaphysics of law 
will find the rules of their conduct’ (Othmer , ). This, of course,
was precisely what Leibniz and the Christian natural jurists were afraid
of. It comes as no surprise therefore that Leibniz’s commentary takes the
form of a warning (monita), stressing not only the intellectual errors of
Pufendorf ’s natural law but more especially its moral corruption and
social danger.
We noted in our introductory comments that Leibniz identifies three
central errors in Pufendorf ’s work. First, focusing on the De Officio’s strict
separation of natural and revealed knowledge, and its attendant uncou-
pling of man’s temporal happiness from his eternal felicity, Leibniz
attacks Pufendorf ’s restriction of natural law to the end of secular civil
welfare (PW, –). This restriction, he argues, renders the science inca-
pable of its divine objects, confines it to merely civil duties and, in
excluding the soul’s immortality, robs it of the normative force flowing
from the whole economy of divine rewards and punishments. Leibniz’s
next target is Pufendorf ’s stipulation that natural law applies only to
man’s external actions (PW, –). When joined with its corollary – that
the inner purity of man’s soul is a matter of revelation to be dealt with
in a completely separate discipline of moral theology – this stipulation,
Leibniz argues, is an ‘excessively hard and objectionable doctrine’. Not
only does it jeopardise ‘universal jurisprudence’ by detaching civil from
religious law, it also threatens to exclude ‘Christian philosophers’ –
moral philosophers and natural theologians – from the sphere of a
detranscendentalised natural law. It does so by assigning their privileged
object – the question of the mind’s inner conformity to a pure reason
and will – to the domain of revealed theology. Finally, confronting the
voluntarist character of Pufendorf ’s account of the ‘efficient cause’ of
natural law, Leibniz argues that in deriving natural law duties from the
‘command of a superior’, rather than from the ‘eternal truths’ of a
divine mind, Pufendorf destroys the rational and moral basis of natural
law. Like Hobbes’, Pufendorf ’s voluntarism removes all capacity to
judge earthly tyrants, by equating justice with their positive law; and,
again like Hobbes’, it also threatens to turn God into a divine tyrant, by
robbing us of insight into the norms that govern his actions and make
them praiseworthy. Against Pufendorf ’s secularising and naturalising
voluntarism, Leibniz thus mobilises his own theo-rational metaphysics:
Neither the norm of conduct itself, nor the essence of the just, depends on
[God’s] free decision, but rather on eternal truths, objects of the divine intel-
lect, which constitute, so to speak, the essence of divinity itself; and it is right
that our author is reproached by theologians when he maintains the contrary;
because, I believe, he had not seen the wicked consequences which arise from
 Leibniz’s political metaphysics
it. Justice, indeed, would not be an essential attribute of God, if he himself
established justice and law by his free will. And, indeed, justice follows certain
rules of equality and or proportion [which are] no less founded in the immut-
able nature of things, and in the divine ideas, than are the principles of arith-
metic and of geometry. (PW, )
Leibniz concludes his commentary by constructing a dilemma for
Pufendorf ’s voluntarism (PW, –). Pufendorf, he observes, having
derived natural law duties from the superior’s command, also, and
inconsistently, adds that the superior must have ‘just causes’ for this coer-
cion. But, Leibniz argues, either these just causes are justifying reasons,
in which case political obligation flows from the reasons not the
command; or they are not, in which case the sovereign’s commands lack
a justifying reason, thereby reducing right to the sheer exercise of might.
As we shall see, this way of establishing mutually exclusive relations
between philosophical reason and political sovereignty was destined to
have a big future in the history of philosophy.
The most striking feature of Leibniz’s criticisms is the light that each
of them sheds on the real historical contest that was driving his attack
on Pufendorf ’s natural law: namely, the struggle over the proper
configuration of religious and civil governance, and over the appropri-
ate roles of religious and civil intellectuals. In objecting to Pufendorf ’s
restriction of the end of natural law to civil welfare, Leibniz was actu-
ally resisting the ‘detranscendentalising’ of ethics that the civil philoso-
phers were attempting to bring about in the Protestant arts faculty.
Similarly, in attacking the De Officio’s confinement of natural law to
man’s external actions – to the complete exclusion of any concern with
his inner intellectual purity – Leibniz was not only taking offence at
Pufendorf ’s expulsion of ‘Christian philosophers’ from the domain of
natural law. He was also resisting the exclusion of transcendent moral-
ity from the exercise of civil authority, which was of course central to
Pufendorf ’s desacralisation of political governance. Finally, in criticising
Pufendorf ’s voluntaristic reconstruction of duties in terms of the
command of a superior, Leibniz was repudiating the most fundamental
of the civil philosopher’s desacralising strategies. For this was the way in
which Pufendorf excluded all transcendental justifications for sove-
reignty – the exercise of natural or divine right, the defence of the faith,
the preservation of the godly community – reconstructing political and
ethical duties in terms of unconditional obedience to commands issued
for the preservation of social peace. In each of these regards Leibniz was
of course defending the rival way of configuring the relations between
religious (transcendental–moral) and civil governance. In fact, he was
 The metaphysics of law 
defending some version of a state of affairs in which civil ethics and pol-
itics would continue to be subordinated to a (natural) moral theology.
This ‘resacralising’ subordination of the civil to the transcendental
would be executed not by the old clergy but by a new kind of philosoph-
ical theologian. The natural or rational theologian would be qualified to
judge the inner moral condition of the citizens of the moral community
through his own metaphysical participation in the transcendent ‘wise
love’ that defined God’s universal justice.
Given that this was the historical stake, it is somewhat surprising that
so many commentators should continue to treat Leibniz’s attack on
Pufendorf as simply part of a general theoretical critique of voluntar-
ist (‘Hobbesian’) ethics and politics (Barreau ; Riley , ;
Schneewind ; Sève ; Sève ). Given our present interest in
grasping the historical conflict between civil and metaphysical natural
law, this ‘intellectualist’ approach suffers from three main deficiencies.
First, it uproots Leibniz’s anti-political natural law from the circum-
stances in which it conflicted with civil natural law over the correct intel-
lectual configuration of civil and religious authority. In particular, by
considering him as a genius, it underestimates Leibniz’s dependency on
the neoscholastic natural law of a particular group of Lutheran aca-
demic theologians and natural jurists. Second, those adopting this
approach generally assume that Leibniz’s rationalist construction of
justice is ‘philosophically’ superior to Pufendorf ’s voluntarist one. But
this assumption obscures the degree to which Leibniz’s rationalism is in
fact the instrument for a rival ‘spiritual grooming’, and thereby a rival
conception of the role of religious intellectuals in civil life. Finally, we
can identify the assumption that Leibniz’s maintenance of continuity
between civil law and transcendent morality – between human and
divine justice – is ethically and politically superior to Pufendorf ’s desac-
ralising separation of these spheres. In regarding this continuity as
restoring a higher justice (wise love) to the otherwise brutish reign of
political utility, commentators like Barreau and Sève seem to forget the
extraordinary brutality that had flowed from the meshing of transcen-
dent morality and civil authority in the confessional state. In any case, as
we shall now see, each of these assumptions is unsuited to understand-
ing the historical reality of Leibniz’s legal and political metaphysics.

.. Leibniz and Christian natural law

We have already encountered the so-called Christian natural jurists, in
our Introduction. As one of his theology professors at the University of
 Leibniz’s political metaphysics
Leipzig, Valentin Alberti had warned the young Thomasius against
reading Pufendorf. Later, when Pufendorf ’s arguments had done their
work, Alberti was among the phalanx of neoscholastic philosophers and
theologians who had lobbied the Saxon court to prevent Thomasius
from lecturing on theological matters, forcing him to seek refuge at the
University of Halle in  (Grunert b; Lieberwirth ). As
Thomas Ahnert has argued, this dispute cannot be understood as a
conflict between religious orthodoxy and enlightenment rationalism
(Ahnert , –). In fact, in deriving natural law from necessary
moral laws common to God and man, Alberti is the rationalist, not
Thomasius. Thomasius thus attacks Alberti for overestimating the
powers of reason, precisely because Alberti’s theo-rational conception
of moral law is incompatible with the civil philosopher’s detranscenden-
talising of ethics and desacralising of politics.
Leibniz, we have observed, insists that theologians like Alberti are
right to attack Pufendorf for denying that natural law is grounded in
‘eternal truths common to God and man’ (PW, ). This, we may
propose, is in part because Leibniz’s rationalism is much closer to
Alberti’s Platonised scholasticism than is generally understood. But it is
also because Alberti belonged to a network of Lutheran natural jurists
whose work Leibniz knew intimately. In his still-indispensable study of
the intellectual sources of Leibniz’s natural law, Hans-Peter Schneider
demonstrates the degree to which Leibniz’s legal metaphysics depends
on fundamental forms of thought already elaborated within this
network (Schneider ). Its members – Alberti, David Mevius,
Valentin Veltheim, David Placcius, Samuel Strimesius, Johann Prasch,
and Samuel Rachel – may be regarded as heirs to the early-seventeenth-
century Protestant Schulmetaphysik of Meisner, Scheibler, and the
Martinis, even if some of them had already moved away from the earlier
‘dualistic’ form of Lutheran metaphysics towards a more Platonic meta-
physical rationalism. In fact, the central lesson of Schneider’s study is
that the Lutheran natural jurists had moved in this direction – develop-
ing a doctrine of natural law based on the metaphysical recovery of the
a priori norms underpinning both divine and human justice – in order
to combat the secularising effects of Hobbes’ and Pufendorf ’s anti-
metaphysical separation of religious and civil authority (Schneider ,
–, –).
Schneider’s study thus shows us that even after the Treaty of
Westphalia – whose granting of toleration to the three main confessions
marked a decisive (political–jurisprudential) desacralising of political
governance – Lutheran academic metaphysicians and theologians
 The metaphysics of law 
continued to argue for the subordination of civil authority to transcen-
dent moral truths, insisting, for example, that the Decalogue remain
central to natural law hence to the civil law it founded. Further, in
showing the striking similarity between this Lutheran metaphysics of
law and Leibniz’s – particularly in their common appeal to the notion of
a self-purifying ascent to the divine forms of justice – this study raises the
question of the degree to which Leibniz too sought to continue the sub-
ordination of civil authority to transcendent truth, although this is not a
question that interests its author.
Schneider identifies two main intellectual tendencies that emerged
from the heartland of Lutheran university metaphysics and converged
in Leibniz’s doctrine of natural law. The first is a renewed stress on the
orthodox doctrine of man in his regenerate condition – the status integrit-
atis. Through this moral anthropology of regenerative man, certain
Lutheran jurists and metaphysical theologians sought to combat the vol-
untarism and statism of civil philosophy, by invoking man’s remnant
capacity for governing himself through participation in divine intellec-
tion. The legal metaphysicians David Mevius (–) and Samuel
Rachel (–), the Leipzig theologian Valentin Alberti (–), and
the Regensburg jurist Johann Ludwig Prasch (–) – the latter
invoked by Leibniz in his attack on Pufendorf – were leading represen-
tatives of this line. They argued that man’s intellectual and moral facul-
ties had not been completely corrupted at the Fall; that he retained a
remnant of their perfect spiritual form in the shape of his imago Dei or
God-likeness; and that through this residuum of his spiritual nature man
acceded to a partial awareness of the divine law that governed his society
with God in the state of innocence. This dim outline of divine law
inscribed in human reason – that is, in the spiritual remnant of the soul
– is natural law.
The ‘nature’ on which this conception of natural law is based is not
the passional nature posited by the civil philosophers, but man’s divine
imaginal nature. The fact that this nature is in turn identified with ‘ratio-
nal being’ or reason is an appropriate pointer to the theological charac-
ter of seventeenth-century rationalism. Samuel Rachel’s De Jure Naturae
et Gentium Dissertationes (Dissertations on the Law of Nature and Nations) of 
– which, in addition to a ferocious denunciation of Hobbes, contains a
rebuttal of Pufendorf ’s recently published and similarly titled work –
provides us with a typical formulation of this theme:
Come, then, let us see what is the utility of a knowledge of Natural Law. He
who rightly pursues his enquiry into it will in the first place get in some sort to
understand what is that Image of God [imago Dei ] in which man was originally
 Leibniz’s political metaphysics
created. That it consisted before everything in Justice and Holiness, we have the
Apostle’s warrant (Ephesians, ch. , v. ; Colossians, ch. , v. ), so that man can
not only readily ascertain the Divine will and distinguish what is to be done from
what is to be left undone, but also can exactly conform his own will and conduct
to the Divine will and render perfect obedience to the Law of God . . . Now
after the first-create threw away this perfection by their disobedience (Romans,
ch. , v. ), and had begotten issue in their own likeness (Genesis, ch. , v. ), and
the light of their intellect was darkened and the inclinations and disinclinations
of their appetites had begun to be varied and vast, there was yet left to man
Reason; and this Reason, contriving to retain a certain degree of Rightness, rec-
ognised and promulgated the Law of Nature which is written on the heart, and
controlled and curbed by its authority the activities of the soul. For although
fallen man can not exactly conform his will to the Divine will and his conduct
to the standard of Natural Law, yet it remained as binding on him after as before
the Fall. (Rachel , –)

Here we have a clear indication of the manner in which the Lutheran

natural lawyers could use a rationalistic version of the imago Dei doctrine
in order to defend the notion of a natural or philosophical knowledge of
man’s inner conformation to divine law. This was their way of combat-
ing Hobbes’ and Pufendorf ’s strict separation of revealed and natural
knowledge and the consequent uncoupling of religious and civil law.
On this basis Rachel – who taught Prasch and some of whose works
bear Leibniz’s (probable) annotations – could argue that underpinning
the civil law to which man is subject as the citizen of a particular state,
there is a higher natural law to which he accedes via his imago Dei or
reason. This natural law is in fact the Christian lex caritas or law of love,
epitomised in the two commandments to love God and to love one’s
neighbour. Rachel’s identification of the imago Dei with man’s partially
regenerate reason – which allows him a natural philosophical access to
the law of love – suggests that the neoscholastic natural jurists tied love
to justice in essentially the same way as Leibniz. In fact the figure of the
imago Dei remains central to Leibniz’s metaphysics, helping to give shape
to the transcendent character of man’s capacity for philosophical
reflection, as we are reminded by the following passage from the Discourse
on Metaphysics: ‘It is also only by virtue of the continual action of God
upon us that we have in our soul the ideas of all things; that is to say,
since every effect expresses its cause, the essence of our soul is a certain
expression, imitation, or image of the divine essence, thought, and will
and of all the ideas which are comprised in God’ (DM, § ). In arguing
that man accedes to the law of love by refurbishing the capacity for pure
thought through which he participates in divine intellection, Leibniz was
 The metaphysics of law 
thus improvising on one of the central themes of the Lutheran legal
metaphysics.
The second way of tethering civil law to Christian natural law – or
jurisprudence to Christian metaphysics – involved the direct application
of the central doctrines of Protestant Schulmetaphysik as found, for
example, in the works of Christoph Scheibler. Here Schneider focuses
on the grounding of natural law in the fundamental figure of God’s
‘emanation’ of the universe’s ontological and moral order, through his
intelligising of the non-contradictory essences and his willing of the
most perfect world. It was on this basis that the professors of philosophy
and theology Valentin Veltheim (–) and Samuel Strimesius
(–) argued that God’s intellection is natural law, as it gives things
their ‘whatness’ and actions their goodness (Schneider , –). It
is not the ‘command of a superior’ therefore that provides the ontolog-
ical and cognitive ground of natural law but ‘right reason’ (recta ratio),
either originally – because man’s reason once agreed with God’s – or in
its devolved imaginal form. Human society is thus a reflection of divine
community, as human beings are intellectual substances emanating from
the divine intellection of the universe and imitating this intellection each
according to their degree of perfection.
The extent to which Leibniz drew on this metaphysics or ‘onto-theol-
ogy’ of natural law is conveyed in a striking figure of thought in his
‘Meditation on the Common Concept of Justice’ of c. – which, in
its turn, anticipates some of the central doctrines of the Monadology of
. Having commented that microscopic examination of ‘insects and
other small things’ reveals the design of the divine craftsman in his work,
Leibniz continues:
Thus by much stronger reasons craftsmanship and harmony would be found in
large things, if we were capable of seeing them as a whole. And above all they
would be found in the whole economy of the governance of spirits, which are
the substances most resembling God, because they are [themselves] capable of
recognising and of producing order and craftsmanship. And as a consequence,
one must conclude that the author of things, who is so inclined to order, will
have had particular care for it with respect to those creatures who are naturally
sources of order, in proportion to their perfection, and who alone are capable
of imitating his craftsmanship. But it is not possible that this should seem so to
us, in this small particle of life which we live here below, and which is an incon-
siderable fragment of a life without bounds which no spirit will lose. To con-
sider this fragment separately is to consider things like a broken stick or like the
bits of flesh torn from an animal, where the craftsmanship of its organs cannot
sufficiently appear. (PW, –)
 Leibniz’s political metaphysics
Finally, if Leibniz’s metaphysical grounding of natural law thus bears
a strong resemblance to Alberti and Veltheim’s neoscholastic version,
then his use of this metaphysics as a weapon against Pufendorf also
follows theirs. In fact, in rejecting Pufendorf ’s treatment of natural law
as the means to man’s civil security, Alberti and Veltheim appeal to the
grounding of natural law in morally necessary divine truths. This of
course anticipates Leibniz’s main line of attack on Pufendorf. Leibniz’s
insistence that: ‘Neither the norm of conduct itself, nor the essence of
the just, depends on [God’s] free decision, but rather on eternal truths,
objects of the divine intellect, which constitute . . . the essence of divin-
ity itself ’ is virtually identical with Alberti’s identification of the law with
God’s intellection of necessary truths. Far from being ‘minor German
writers’ who had failed to develop a metaphysics of law harmonious with
Platonistic rationalism, the Lutheran natural jurists were in fact the pow-
erful source of just such a legal metaphysics, elaborated specifically to
combat the desacralising of law and politics being pursued by the civil
philosophers. This is not to deny, of course, that Leibniz’s natural law
was in a certain sense more secular than Veltheim’s, Alberti’s, and
Rachel’s. But even here the differences are not as great as is generally
argued, as we shall now see.

.. Metaphysical abstraction and the spiritualisation of law

Riley, we recall, regards Leibniz’s Platonistic philosophical recovery of
the divine perfections or essences – specifically the perfection of divine
justice – as the mode in which he integrated Christian law (the lex caritas)
in a scientific and enlightened philosophical jurisprudence (Riley ,
). We have already questioned the adequacy of this account as
applied to Leibniz’s metaphysics in general, arguing instead that his doc-
trine of metaphysical abstraction should be regarded as the architecture
of a particular kind of spiritual exercise. This is an exercise that ties the
formal purity of concepts to the moral self-purification of the philoso-
pher, who thinks them via ascent from impure sensory ideas to the self-
perfecting intellection of the perfections or essences. Now we can apply
this historical reconstruction to the role of abstraction in Leibniz’s meta-
physics of law in particular. In doing so we discover that while Leibniz’s
legal metaphysics is indicative of a certain secularisation of Christian
natural law – in the sense that Leibniz’s more intensely Platonistic con-
struction was designed for use beyond the sacral confines of the theol-
ogy faculty – it is also symptomatic of a profound spiritualisation of civil
jurisprudence.
 The metaphysics of law 
Leibniz applies this method of abstraction to the construction of
natural law by treating justice as one of the hidden perfections. To
uncover the intelligible notion or formal reason of justice, it is necessary
to withdraw from the domain of empirical or positive laws and seek the
pure concepts on which ‘universal justice’ is based. Universal justice,
Leibniz declares, is a pure concept formed from the combination of
wisdom, love, and goodness. Wisdom in fact comprises metaphysical
knowledge of the perfections or hidden forms emanating from God’s
intelligising of the cosmos, while love is the happiness intelligent beings
find when conforming themselves to these perfections, and goodness
‘that which serves in the perfection of intelligent substances’ (PW, ).
Rather than viewing it as a mere semantic clarification, Leibniz thus
regards his formal definition of justice – justititia est caritas sapientis, justice
is the love of the wise man – as actually recovering the perfection of pure
justice from the husks of empirical law, and, presumably, as perfecting
the one who recovers it.
Leibniz’s ‘formal’ or a priori construction of the ‘intelligible notion’
of justice – the notion of caritas sapientis or love governed by wisdom –
thus provides the architecture for a particular exercise in intellectual self-
transformation. This is designed to lead those ‘worthy to be philoso-
phers’ from their experience of empirical law to the intellection of the
pure form of justice. Leibniz offers a remarkable short demonstration of
this exercise in a letter to the Electress Sophie of Hanover in :
Justice is charity conformed to wisdom.
Wisdom is the science of felicity.
Charity is a universal benevolence.
Benevolence is a habit of loving.
To love is to find pleasure in the good, perfection, the happiness of another.
And by this definition one can resolve . . . a great difficulty which is important
even in theology – how it is possible that there be a nonmercenary love,
detached from hope and from fear, and from all concern for our own interest.
It is that the felicity, or the perfection of another, in giving us pleasure, enters
immediately into our own felicity.
For all that pleases is desired for itself, and not through interest.
It is a good in itself, and not a useful good.
It is thus that the contemplation of beautiful things is agreeable in itself, and
that a painting by Raphael moves him who looks at it with enlightened eyes,
though he derives no profit from it. (Leibniz in Riley , –)
The key to this construction of formal justice lies in a doctrine that we
first encountered in our brief observation of the metaphysics of Albert
the Great (.). This is the doctrine that humans may only participate
in the divine perfections or intelligibles – here the perfection of justice –
 Leibniz’s political metaphysics
to the extent that they perfect that part of themselves which they share
with the true bearer of metaphysical knowledge, God. They do this, it
will be recalled, by purging their intellects of all those sensory images
and inclinations that tie them to the mere worldly utility of things. In this
way they rise to contemplate the intelligible at the point of its emana-
tion from God, where it brings happiness, or is good, merely by being
beheld. This figure of thought is the source of the longstanding ‘anti-
consequentialist’ character of metaphysical ethics. For, unlike material
beings, whose ends lie outside them in the form of a multiplicity of goods
or desires, divine intelligible being contains its own good, or, equiva-
lently, is ‘good in itself ’, hence constitutes the highest good simply by
realising its own end. For such a being there is no gap between acting in
accordance with the law and realising its own desires – between good-
ness and happiness; for, in realising an immanent end, intelligible being
wills only its own perfection, possessing only good inclinations.
In the case of Leibniz’s metaphysics of law, knowledge of the ‘per-
fection’ or pure concept of justice (as wise love) is thus dependent on one
perfecting oneself. This requires purging one’s love of all sensuous inter-
est, so that it becomes nonmercenary happiness in intellectual perfec-
tions, and purging one’s wisdom of all sensory-empirical adhesions, so
that it becomes the a priori science of this happiness. To see this concept
of justice one must therefore look on it with ‘enlightened eyes’. In con-
crete historical terms this means that only those individuals who have
undertaken these specific self-purifying intellectual exercises – associated
with the cultivation of an ‘illuminated’ intellectual deportment – will be
deemed to have insight into the pure concept of justice. This intellectual
ethos and deportment is of course that of the university metaphysician.
By offering a new way of reconciling philosophy and theology, this figure
began to emerge as an authoritative moral–social personage, character-
ised by the possession of what may be termed ‘secular holiness’. In val-
idating his wisdom through the personal purity he displays in rising
above merely ‘interested’ or utilitarian conceptions of law (as the means
to social peace), the metaphysical sage warrants the higher concept of
justice, as wise love, through the moral and epistemological prestige of
his persona. He thus functions as humanity’s proxy in the divine order,
mediating its supra-mundane concept of justice not through his human
understanding but via the condition that he must imitate divine wise love
in order to know it.
This tying of the abstract or pure concept of justice to the spiritual
purity of the metaphysical philosopher was already a feature of the
 The metaphysics of law 
Lutheran metaphysics of law on which Leibniz was drawing. In his crit-
icisms of Osiander, Rachel, for example, treats abstraction as the means
by which the philosopher passes from the actual (‘positive’) law suited to
man’s fallen state to the natural law governing his incorrupt or regener-
ate condition. ‘Herein, unless I err, he [Osiander] has come to grief
through defining the Law of Nature as Habituation (habitum) and saying
that it resides like something habitual (his own word) in the mind of man,
the result being that he does not contemplate the Law of Nature in itself
and in the abstract [in se & in abstracto], nor the mind of man as it ought
to be, but the latter in a corrupt state and the former (habit forsooth!)
contaminated and, so to say, submerged by a flood of vices’ (Rachel
, ). That men often act contrary to natural law as a matter of fact
is thus no impediment to the teaching that man’s reason or imago Dei con-
tains a pure version of the law. For observation of facts, Rachel argues,
pertains only to man’s conduct as a fallen creature – indeed, is itself
symptomatic of this conduct – while the natural law is acceded to by a
rationality that returns man to his regenerate state, revealing the a priori
norm by which he ought to act: ‘Nor can any objection be based on acts
done contrary to the Law of Nature . . . For in such cases attention must
be directed not to what is actually done but to what ought to be done,
there being all the world of difference between Fact and Law’ ().
Leibniz’s normative-rationalist separation of the ‘is’ from the ‘ought’
– of the facts of ‘law’ (loi, Gesetz) from the norms of ‘right’ (droit, Recht) –
is thus indicative of something far more momentous than a theoretical
or methodological imperative. For it arises in fact from the gap that uni-
versity metaphysics opens between human and divine intellection. This
in turn is the pedagogical condition for the purifying self-transformation
that validates the metaphysician’s insight into what justice ought to be –
the love of the wise – through the manner in which this personage imi-
tates the quasi-divine perfection of wise love. The metaphysician’s claim
to accede to the pure or formal concept of justice is warranted only by
the self-purifying exercise in abstraction through which he acquires
‘enlightened eyes’. The content of this concept may then be provided by
the Christian caritas doctrine, because the metaphysician is now himself
the personification of Christ’s ‘loving’ way of thinking and willing
justice.
On the one hand, this procedure subjects the New Testament theol-
ogy of love to a philosophical sublimation, as it now appears as the
content of the formal philosophical concept of justice. On the other
hand, though, the same procedure forces civil jurisprudence to undergo
 Leibniz’s political metaphysics
a profound spiritualisation; for now the formal concept of justice is only
available to a personage who has completed the self-purifying ascent to
its divine intellection. The formalisation and spiritualisation of jurispru-
dence are thus inseparable in Leibniz’s legal metaphysics. They are held
together by the ascetic link between the formal purity of a concept that
reveals itself prior to all experience and the moral purity of the special
personage in whom such a concept can be thought. Leibniz’s normative
legal metaphysics – his ‘anti-empiricism’ or ‘anti-positivism’ – is thus
really a symptom of the legal metaphysician’s morally prestigious intel-
lectual ethos and self-exalting spiritual deportment.
It is this method of speculative self-purification that allows Leibniz to
treat the empirical civil legal order as the devolved or imperfect level of
an onto-theological hierarchy grounded in God’s rational intelligising of
a cosmic legal order. Like the Lutheran natural jurists and political theo-
logians on whose work he drew, Leibniz finds a jurisprudential foothold
for his metaphysics by superimposing this hierarchy on the central pre-
cepts of Roman law. Using these (now) transcendentalised principles of
Roman law, he is able to construct a natural law that subordinates posi-
tive civil law to the Christian metaphysics of a cosmic legal order.
Leibniz’s rational construction of natural law thus takes the form of
a metaphysical–moral ladder, converting the three Roman law precepts
– hurt no-one (neminem laedere), give each his due (suum cuique tribuere), and
live honourably (honeste vivere) – into an ascent from empirical–utilitarian
forms of justice to the ‘universal justice’ characteristic of God’s rational
governance of the cosmos. At the lowest level, strict justice, character-
ised by the precept to refrain from harming others, and typical of the
natural law theories of Hobbes and Pufendorf, has as its object only the
preservation of civil peace. One step up from this we find the level of
equity or charity, characterised by the precept of rendering each his due,
and finding its object in the state’s conversion of mutual benevolence
into reciprocal rights (PW, pp. –). Love only becomes truly disinter-
ested, however, when we pass beyond the level of ‘political’ law alto-
gether. Here we reach the ultimate stage of natural law which is
characterised by the precept to live piously, and which requires insight
into God’s rational governance of the cosmos in order to reveal the
‘legal’ character of duties having no bearing on civil peace. Leibniz’s
metaphysical hierarchy thus permits him to pass from civil law to a syn-
thesis of natural and Christian law, using his method of abstraction from
the empirical to the transcendent in order to establish the continuum:
 The metaphysics of law 
It is on this ground that justice is called universal, and includes all the other
virtues; for duties that do not seem to concern others, as, for example, not to
abuse our own bodies or our property, though they are beyond [the power of]
human laws, are still prohibited by natural law, that is, by the eternal laws of the
divine monarchy, since we owe ourselves and everything we have to God. Now,
if it is of interest to the state, of how much more interest is it to the universe
that no one use badly what is his? So it is from this that the highest precept of
the law receives its force, which commands us to live honorably (that is, piously).
It is in this sense that learned men have rightly held . . . that the law of nature
and of nations [ius naturae et gentium] should follow the teachings of Christianity,
that is, ␶␣ ␣␯␻␶␳␣, the sublime things, the divine things of the wise, according
to the teaching of Christ. (PW, )
Despite the similarity of this construction to those developed by the
Lutheran natural jurists and political theologians, we have observed that
some commentators regard Leibniz’s natural law as a major secularisa-
tion and rationalisation of his theological sources (Riley , ;
Schneider , ). Leibniz, they argue, while not completely secular-
ising natural law, provides rational concepts or Gründe for the theologi-
cally authorised doctrines of his predecessors. This gives rise to an
‘enlightened’ scientific conception of natural law, while simultaneously
repelling Hobbes’ and Pufendorf ’s more fully secular, but merely empir-
ical and utilitarian conception. Yet, without denying the secularising
aspect signalled in Leibniz’s natural law – specifically, the transfer of a
sacral doctrine from theologians to academics and savants – we may
nonetheless propose that these commentators underestimate the degree
to which Leibniz sought to preserve the sacral character of this doctrine
in its new secular setting. For Leibniz, we recall, the giving of rational
Gründe is itself a sacralising exercise in intellectual self-purification –
‘Knowledge of reasons perfects us’ – leading him to conceive enlighten-
ment as a refurbishing of the spark of divine intellection or imago Dei.
We have already observed the closeness of Leibniz’s rationalism to its
theological sources, noting in particular Rachel’s treatment of the imago
Dei as the remnant of ‘right reason’ through which man ‘recognised and
promulgated the Law of Nature which is written on the heart, and con-
trolled and curbed by its authority the activities of the soul’ (Rachel ,
). For both Leibniz and Rachel, access to the pure or formal concept
of justice requires a pure or regenerate reason – requires, that is, the
intellectual ascesis the determines what counts as purity of thought and
will for a certain theocentric culture – which is precisely what makes
their rationalism theological. The main difference between them is that
 Leibniz’s political metaphysics
Leibniz’s more purely ‘philosophical’ (Platonistic) conception of self-
purifying abstraction allows him to expand the ambit of the regenerate
to include metaphysical intellectuals as a type of secular holy estate.
Finally, therefore, it is quite misguided to treat Leibniz’s rationalist
conception of justice as inherently superior to Pufendorf ’s empirical–
voluntarist one – as if Leibniz had in fact recovered the rational ground
of positive law, while Pufendorf ’s ‘failure’ to do so condemned him to
accept the irrational exercise of power. We have already noted that this
view – deploying the characteristic rationalist distinctions between law
and justice, power and reason – is very widespread in post-Kantian phil-
osophical history. Just how close this historiography is to Leibniz’s own
hostile view of the civil philosophers is clear in these remarks from the
‘Meditation’:
The error of those who have made justice dependent on power comes in part
from confounding right and law. Right cannot be unjust, it is a contradiction;
but law can be. For it is power that gives and maintains law; and if this power
lacks wisdom and a good will, it can give and maintain quite evil laws: but
happily for the universe, the laws of God are always just, and he is in a position
to maintain them, as he does without doubt, although this has not always been
done visibly and at once, for which he has, no doubt, good reasons. (PW, )
Yet, in the light of our reconstruction of the ascetic role of abstrac-
tion in his legal metaphysics, Leibniz’s claim to have insight into the pure
concept of justice should be understood in terms of the moral–episte-
mological prestige of the metaphysical personage. For it is a claim that
may be credited only within the ethos that treats this abstraction as the
self-purifying ascent to the divine intelligibles, undertaken by a being
who is deemed to mediate between divine and human justice. This way
of understanding Leibniz’s legal rationalism re-establishes its historical
symmetry with Pufendorf and Thomasius’ voluntarist and empirical
construction of natural law. For, as we have suggested, their voluntarism
and empiricism is also fundamentally a moral doctrine linked to a
certain comportment education. This education, however, was dedi-
cated to forming intellectuals who would no longer presume to subordi-
nate civil law and politics to transcendent moral truths acceded to in the
quasi-sacerdotal person of the metaphysician. In other words, Leibniz’s
rationalism and Pufendorf ’s ‘empiricism’ are not in fact contradictory
theories, but rival and autonomous ways of configuring the relation
between religious and political laws, operating through the spiritual
grooming of the personages responsible for administering these laws.
 The metaphysics of law 

.. The continuum of spiritual and civil governance

The final obstacle to an adequate historical understanding of Leibniz’s
natural law is the widespread view that in maintaining a continuum
between civil and theo-rational law, Leibniz provides a necessary moral
corrective to Hobbes’ and Pufendorf ’s desacralising restriction of
natural law to ‘utilitarian’ commands issued by the sovereign for the end
of security. In presuming that the continuum between law and morality
is founded in reason, this view fails to comprehend its true grounds – in
the resacralising cultural politics of metaphysical natural law. We have
observed that Leibniz’s reconfiguration of the relation between civil and
religious governance takes place by tying the just exercise of civil power
to the spiritual–intellectual superiority (purity) of the personage who is
to exercise it. The personage in question is of course the sage who, in
accordance with longstanding Christian-Platonic topoi, is regarded as
qualified to influence the exercise of civil authority on the basis of his
self-sacralising ascent to transcendent concepts of justice and goodness
(Brown a, –). In concrete historical terms, the figure of the
metaphysical sage provided the Lutheran natural jurists such as Alberti
and Veltheim with a comportment-ideal suited to their own claims to a
role in the civil governance of the godly state. In extending the rights of
this quasi-sacral figure to the ‘philosopher’ more broadly, Leibniz was
adapting this ideal to his own role as political metaphysician and court
savant to several German Kleinstaaten.
In tying civil authority to the moral superiority of the sage, Leibniz’s
natural law begins to exhibit some of the central features of German
political metaphysics. In the first place, this figuration leads to the chili-
astic doctrine of the ‘withering away of the state’, or the redundancy of
legal coercion for beings who have fully recovered their capacity for
rational self-governance. In the course of his attack on Pufendorf, we
thus find Leibniz insisting that: ‘Whoever, indeed, does good out of a
love for God or his neighbour, takes pleasure precisely in the action itself
(such being the nature of love) and does not need any other incitement,
or the command of a superior; for that man the saying that the law is
not made for the just is valid. To such a degree it is repugnant to reason
to say that only the law or constraint make a man just’ (PW, ).
At the same time, the same figuration leads Leibniz to claim political
authority for the sage himself. For, to the extent that not all individuals
will be capable of achieving the level of spiritual self-purification needed
 Leibniz’s political metaphysics
for rational self-governance, then they will have to be subjected to the
purified will of the sage:
After this one can say absolutely that justice is goodness conformed to wisdom,
even in those who have not attained to this wisdom. For, apart from God, the
majority of those who act according to justice in all things, even against their
own interest, do in effect what a wise man would demand who found his pleas-
ure in the general good; but in certain cases they will not act as sages themselves,
not being sensible of the pleasure of virtue. And in these cases, where their dis-
interestedness would not be compensated either by praises or honors, nor by
fortune, nor otherwise, they would not have acted in a way most conforming to
prudence. But as soon as they consider that justice conforms to the will of a sage
whose wisdom is infinite and whose power is proportioned to it, they find that
they would not be wise at all (that is, prudent) if they did not conform them-
selves to the will of such a sage. (PW, )

In fact, says Leibniz, ‘it must be conceded that those who have not
reached this point of spiritual perfection are only susceptible of obliga-
tion by hope and fear’ (PW, ). In other words, by providing a meta-
physical grounding for political obligation in rational self-governance,
Leibniz provides a metaphysical rationale for the exercise of political
coercion, treating it as compensating for the lack of intellectual perfec-
tion required for self-governance. He thereby re-establishes the sacral
linkage between political and spiritual governance, which now appears
in the demand that political authority be exercised to enforce the capac-
ity for rational self-governance that will eventually make such authority
redundant.
The twin icons for this envisaged reunification of politics and moral-
ity are the sage–prince and the ‘unlimited’ or total society. If justice is a
perfection fully manifest only in the self-perfecting personage of the
metaphysical sage, and if the exercise of civil power is legitimated
through its capacity to compensate for the lack of such perfection in
others, then a just political order requires the unification of reason and
power, the sage and the prince. For Leibniz, coercion is only legitimate
insofar as it is used to turn ‘right into fact’, and this requires the
unification of power and reason in a single person: ‘Those to whom God
has given at once reason and power in a high degree are heroes created
by God to be the promoters of his will, as principal instruments’ (Leibniz
in Riley , ). With the figure of the sage–prince, Leibniz recapit-
ulates the political-theology of godly government in its modern form, as
government driven by the desire to realise reason and advised by politi-
cal metaphysicians.
 The metaphysics of law 
At the same time, if human society is ultimately ordered by the uni-
versal justice of man’s ‘society with God’, then the civil authority gov-
erning human society must apply universally, to all areas of life. The
sage–prince will thus rule over an unlimited or total society: ‘Every
society is either unlimited or limited. An unlimited society concerns the
whole life and the common good. A limited society concerns certain pur-
poses, for example, trade and commerce, navigation, warfare, and travel’
(Lm, ). We also recall Leibniz’s assertion contra Pufendorf that social
justice may not be limited to the end of ‘human tranquillity’, but that ‘in
a universal society governed by God every virtue . . . is comprehended
among the obligations of universal justice; and not only external acts,
but also all of our sentiments are regulated by a certain rule of law’ (PW,
). In other words, through his image of the sage–prince ruling over an
unlimited or total society, Leibniz is envisaging the resacralised state in
its modern enlightened form. This would be a state in which politics
could be grounded in morality through the enforcement of a metaphys-
ical ethics, perhaps in the form of a civil religion.
Several commentators have argued that in maintaining a continuum
between civil and theo-rational law, Leibniz provides a necessary correc-
tive to Hobbes’ and Pufendorf ’s desacralising restriction of natural law
to ‘utilitarian’ commands issued by the sovereign for the end of social
peace. Riley, for example, argues that in maintaining a continuum
between the lower forms of justice dedicated to the negative preservation
of security, and the higher form oriented to universal benevolence and
the perfection of society, Leibniz offers a more rational, generous, and
benevolent vision of the legal–political order than Hobbes or Pufendorf
(Riley , –). Similarly, Sève claims that by establishing a hier-
archical ascent from the ‘narrow sense’ of justice, as the maintenance of
security, to higher form of caritas sapientis, Leibniz supplements the merely
negative conception of justice with the positive ethic of doing good for
others. Sève regards this as opening up the prospect of a complete moral
transformation of society. For his part, Hervé Barreau argues that
because Leibniz’s natural laws form a graduated hierarchy leading from
civil security to spiritual perfection, so too do the natural rights founded
on them: ‘One must conceive this gradation as the call of moral con-
sciousness in each person, who sees the degrees of good, and undertakes
to actualise them by beginning with the lower degrees, without ever repu-
diating them, since the higher degrees contain the lower ones, which they
bring to greater perfection’ (Barreau , ). In fact, Barreau goes so
far as to suggest that without this call to a higher moral consciousness, the
 Leibniz’s political metaphysics
mere ‘Hobbesian’ grounding of justice in security contains the ‘germ of
totalitarianism’, as can be seen from Hobbes’ interference in the affairs
of the church.
In neglecting the historical circumstances in which law was first
uncoupled from morality, however, this viewpoint forgets a crucial
lesson. Once a continuum has been established between the exercise of
civil authority and the pursuit of a higher moral good, then the desired
outcome – the moral elevation of political power – is inexorably shad-
owed by its far less desirable twin: namely, the exercise of civil authority
in order to enforce (someone’s) higher moral good. Yet it was their expe-
rience of the catastrophic consequences of such enforcement that had
led the civil philosophers to break the nexus between civil authority and
transcendent morality in the first place.
We catch a glimpse of the constitutive ambivalence of rationalist
political metaphysics in this regard in Leibniz’s attitude to the decrimi-
nalisation of heresy. In a little-cited text reviewing Thomasius’ argu-
ments for such decriminalisation, Leibniz takes Pufendorf ’s most
famous follower to task for failing to see that purity of will may be depen-
dent on purity of doctrine (Gr, , –). Thomasius had argued, firstly,
that as an intellectual error heresy lies beyond all civil compulsion and,
second, that even where it arises from corruption of the will, heresy is
not a punishable offence; for only conduct disturbing the republic falls
into this category, and the prince may not use intellectual or moral error
as a criterion for such conduct (ADS, –, –). In rejecting these
arguments – that heresy concerns intellectual errors lying beyond
human judgment and outside the reach of civil coercion – Leibniz con-
tends that the ‘theoretical heretic’ can be compared to the law-breaker
who refuses to look at the laws the prince has proclaimed for his salva-
tion: ‘Hence, to the degree that in heresy he might fail to understand a
question of great importance for his salvation, wickedness is combined
with lack of learning and, what is more, through this insight we cannot
deny that heresy deserves punishment’ (Gr, , ). If, thus, not downright
evil, intellectual error is nonetheless deserving of punishment as it arises
from culpable negligence and results in the great evil of damnation.
Recalling our earlier discussion of the reciprocal relation which
Leibniz establishes between intellectual error and the corruption of the
will, it is not surprising that he regards this culpable failure of learning
as itself arising from a prior failure to purify the intellect: ‘Again, the will
to learn can arise from the intellect if anyone pays attention to the great
importance of having the intellect purified for things to be done well’
 The metaphysics of law 
(Gr, , ). Given, though, that metaphysical philosophy is the means by
which the intellect and will are purified, then it follows that if heretics
may be punished for lacking the will to learn saving truths, they may be
compelled to undergo the purifying discipline of metaphysics in order to
acquire this will. The real danger residing in Leibniz’s rationalist
identification of heresy with crime, or sin with error, is thus not the one
imagined by the Theologian in the Confessio – that sins might be excused.
It is rather that error might become punishable and metaphysics
enforceable. Leibniz’s conception of heresy as a crime is thus insepara-
ble from a conception of rationalist metaphysics as the secular theology
for an enforceable ‘rational faith’. In its battle with civil philosophy to
resacralise the state, rationalist metaphysics would be tempted to
become the natural theology for a new kind of confessional society.
    

Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy

 .      
Born in  and coming to intellectual maturity in the immediate after-
math of the Thirty Years War, Samuel Pufendorf found himself con-
fronted with the task of developing an ethics and politics suited to life in
the descralised states sanctioned by the Treaty of Westphalia. As a polit-
ical–jurisprudential councillor at the courts of Sweden (–) and
Brandenburg-Prussia (–), he had first-hand experience of the
problems such states confronted in attempting to establish deconfession-
alised civil orders in the wake of protracted confessional conflict. In this
context, Pufendorf encountered university metaphysics – with its claim
to ground political right in philosophically known transcendent reasons
and laws – as a major intellectual obstacle and institutional enemy. In
order to render moral and political philosophy capable of comprehend-
ing the gap that had been opened between civil and religious authority,
Pufendorf had to ‘detranscendentalise’ it in a manner that would par-
allel the desacralising of law and politics. This task – whose central texts
are the De Jure Naturae et Gentium Libri Octo (On the Law of Nature and Nations
in Eight Books) of , its epitome of the following year, the De Officio
Hominis et Civis juxta Legem Naturalem Libri Duo (On the Duty of Man and
Citizen according to Natural Law in Two Books), and the De Habitu Religionis
Christianae ad Vitam Civilem (Of the Disposition of Religion in Relation to Civil
Life) of  – entailed a fundamental and far-reaching reconfiguration
of philosophical, political, and moral culture. If today the true charac-
ter and full extent of this reconfiguration are only just emerging, that is
because, since its academic marginalisation at the end of the eighteenth
century, Pufendorf ’s natural law has remained obscured, put in the dark
by the interpretive canons of neo-Aristotelian and neo-Kantian meta-
physics. In this chapter we show just how profound Pufendorf ’s reshap-
ing of the early modern intellectual landscape really was.

 Introduction 
If modern commentators have underestimated the scale of
Pufendorf ’s reconstruction of moral and political philosophy, that is
because they have failed to comprehend the gulf separating Pufendorf ’s
natural law and the line of metaphysical natural law running from the
neoscholastics through Leibniz to Wolff and Kant. As a result of this
failure, it is widely assumed that Pufendorf ’s natural law was a continu-
ation of the moral–philosophical attempt to contain the positive legal
commands of the sovereign within overarching moral norms. This
assumption is particularly marked in modern Aristotelian and Kantian
interpretations, which assimilate Pufendorf ’s natural law to the meta-
physical line by treating it as an attempt to formulate absolute norms for
politics based on the figures of the moral community or the moral law.
We will discuss representative instances of these interpretations in the
following section. For the moment, we may propose that both lines of
interpretation fail to observe the degree to which Pufendorf ’s concep-
tion of natural law is designed in fact to free the sovereign’s law-making
commands from any effective appeal to higher moral norms. It is true
that Pufendorf distinguishes natural law from both (positive) civil law
and moral theology: ‘From the first flow the most common duties of
man, particularly those which render him capable of society [sociabilis]
with other men; from the second flow the duties of man as a citizen living
in a particular and definite state [civitas]; from the third, the duties of a
Christian’ (DOH, Pref., ). Yet it soon becomes clear that Pufendorf ’s
prime concern is to drive a wedge between the duties of the Christian
and those of the citizen, while the duties of the man and the citizen are
in fact treated as convergent. For, we shall argue, in giving natural law
and positive law the same end – social peace – and in granting the sove-
reign sole discretion to determine how the natural law should be enacted
in the state’s positive laws, Pufendorf in effect makes natural law norms
immanent to the process of political governance through which citizens
are formed.
In showing how deeply embedded it was in the political and theolog-
ical circumstances of post-Westphalian Germany, political and theo-
logical historians provide us with a sharper insight into the historical
disposition of Pufendorf ’s natural law. In the illuminating introduction
to his edition of the De Officio, James Tully argues that after the emer-
gence of the post-Westphalian deconfessionalised sovereign territorial
state, ‘the question which underlies and orients Pufendorf ’s theory (and
the theories which he followed) is . . . how does one conduct oneself so
as to become a useful member of such a society and polity’ (Tully ,
 Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy
xx–xxi). For his part, recalling Thomasius’ arguments on the complicity
of metaphysics in the formalisation and enforcement of religion in the
confessional state, Detlef Döring argues that Pufendorf ’s voluntaristic
expulsion of moral theology from natural law should be seen as a means
of prising the levers of civil coercion from the hands of the clergy; that
is, as an instrument for the secularisation of political governance (Döring
b). The truly remarkable characteristic of Pufendorf ’s enterprise,
however, is that he undertook this desacralising separation of transcen-
dent morality and civil authority by reconstructing the very discipline
that had been designed to hold these spheres together, natural law. This
observation holds the key to understanding Pufendorf ’s natural law as a
comprehensive civil philosophy.
In the first place, it provides an appropriate understanding of the rela-
tion between Pufendorf ’s natural law and the other civil sciences that
were engaged in the desacralisation of politics – Lipsian neo-Stoicism
and Helmstedt political Aristotelianism in particular. In relegating
Christian natural law in favour of a Stoic political psychology or a tech-
nical–instrumental science of political order, these civil sciences in effect
secularised politics by creating new foundations for it outside the sphere
of Christian moral and political theology. But while this strategy may
have succeeded in forging a detheologised political science and demea-
nour for a ruling elite – Dreitzel characterises Helmstedt political science
as an intellectual regime for the political nobility of absolute states – in
marginalising natural law it left untouched the very discipline that pro-
vided politics with moral legitimacy. In detranscendentalising natural
law itself, therefore, Pufendorf ’s aim was to provide the new desacralised
forms of political governance with a broad-based moral intelligibility.
His reconstruction of natural law was intended to make it hospitable to
the idea that both ethics and politics were legitimately grounded in the
commands of a superior issued in accordance with the end of social
peace. It is for this reason that the De Jure functions as a clearing-house
for the other civil sciences – Lipsian political psychology, Helmstedt
political instrumentalism, Hobbesian anti-clericalism, Bodinian sove-
reignty theory, positive Staastrecht – assembling their several secularising
tactics, via the architecture of voluntarist natural law, into a single desac-
ralising strategy. Pufendorf thus refers to his natural law as including ‘all
moral and civil teaching [doctrinam moralem & civilem] that is genuine and
solid’ (DJN, .ii., ). The object of this strategy was not to marginalise
the domain of natural law but to transform it, confining ethics and pol-
itics to the horizon of social peace and civil governance, and consigning
 Introduction 
the desire for salvation and transcendent truth to the separate sphere of
private piety.
Now we are better placed to grasp the historical circumstances from
which Pufendorf ’s natural law arose and that it was intended to meet.
We recall that the endeavour to pacify the warring confessional states
and communities found its most potent intellectual instrument in posi-
tive political jurisprudence (Staatsrecht), which offered the central means
of partitioning civil authority and transcendent truth, the search for
civility and the pursuit of salvation. In the great struggle to find religious
peace that stretched from the Treaty of Augsburg in  to the Treaty
of Westphalia in , it was the Protestant political jurists who gradu-
ally secularised the Empire’s legal and political culture and laid the con-
stitutional groundwork for the system of sovereign territorial states.
They did this, Martin Heckel argues, not through a new rational or
secular philosophy – most jurists remained committed Lutherans – but
through a series of measures, driven by force of circumstance rather
than force of reason, aimed at securing the legal–political coexistence of
the confessions. The most important of these measures were the accep-
tance of jurisprudence rather than theology as the prime political dis-
course; the establishment of legal parity between the confessions within
the juridical and political apparatus of the Empire; and, above all, the
exclusion of the question of theological truth from the legal–political
settlements that ended religious Bürgerkrieg (Heckel , –). Still,
despite resulting in a profound secularisation of the judicial and politi-
cal apparatus, these changes were not aimed at the secularisation of
society as a whole. Driven by the exigencies of social pacification rather
than an all-embracing ideology, and typically motivated by the desire of
the faithful to preserve their particular confession amid the wholesale
carnage of the religious wars, this was a secularisation that stopped at
the cathedral door. It left the churches free to pursue their transcendent
aims as voluntary associations, while excluding these aims from the
sphere of civil governance (Heckel , –).
This gradual disarticulation and re-ordering of the institutions of polit-
ical and religious governance – which was the work of hundreds of name-
less lawyers and statesmen and for which no philosophical genius may
claim the glory – was arguably the most important cultural and intellec-
tual transformation to take place in early modern Germany. In fact it pro-
duced the characteristic political and moral topography of the modern
state. This emerged in the form of an apparatus of legal and political
governance from which all ‘higher’ theological and metaphysical ends
 Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy
had been excluded in favour of the single end of security. Inside this
agnostic security envelope an array of religious, academic, and other
‘social’ associations were free to pursue their absolute truths, so long as
they did so within the limits of social peace. If, therefore, Pufendorf ’s
natural law doctrine enacts a fundamental partitioning of the ‘civil
kingdom’ from the ‘kingdom of truth’ – the exercise of civil coercion from
the pursuit of transcendent morality – this is not because he fell short of
the dialectical reconciliation of philosophy and theology. Neither is it
because, in excluding all appeals to transcendent right, his voluntarism
drove him into the arms of a state based on might alone. Rather, by enact-
ing this separation Pufendorf was attempting to reshape the learned
culture’s prime discipline of ethical and political reflection, giving it a
form that would comprehend the fundamental desacralisation of govern-
ment and privatisation of religion that had already taken place in the
political–jurisprudential domain.
Now we begin to see the scale of the reconfiguration of ethical and
political culture contained in Pufendorf ’s natural law, and the depth of
the gulf separating it from its metaphysical rival. In continuing to
ground civil authority in transcendent moral philosophy, metaphysical
natural law – whether neoscholastic or rationalist – represented a cultu-
ral formation of great intellectual strength and social power. The intel-
lectual strength of this metaphysical natural law lay in the manner in
which its Christian Platonic anthropology permitted the privilege of
transcendent insight to be claimed by the metaphysical personage, who
thereby acquired a quasi-sacerdotal authority as a secular sage. Its social
authority arose from the fact that through this anthropology ‘rationalist’
metaphysics remained in touch with the central Christian symbols and
rituals – particularly those associated with moral regeneration and sal-
vation. Through the training of a metaphysically imbued clerisy, univer-
sity metaphysics could thus engage a population whose moral
physiognomy was still deeply informed by these symbols and rituals. On
the basis of the spiritual prestige attached to the metaphysical person-
age, rationalist university metaphysics could instruct citizens in how they
might achieve moral perfection, even if this meant acting in accordance
with a conception of justice ‘higher’ than that embodied in the positive
laws of the state.
If, therefore, Pufendorf ’s De Jure begins by cutting the knot of meta-
physical anthropology, that is because this is where the threads joining
civil authority and transcendent truth are tied the tightest. Replacing
this anthropology with his own conception of man – as a being whose
 Introduction 
passional nature is imposed by the divine sovereign and necessitates the
commands of the earthly sovereign – was the first step in Pufendorf ’s
extraordinarily ambitious attempt to reshape the landscape of early
modern German ethical and political culture. In showing how civil
authority could be separated from transcendent truth, this quasi-
Epicurean anthropology held the key to a natural law designed to reflect
the desacralisation of government and the privatisation of religion, by
forming a new kind of civil deportment for rulers and citizens:
But by far the greatest difference [between natural law and moral theology] is
that the scope of the discipline of natural law is confined within the orbit of his
life, and so it forms man on the assumption that he is to lead this life in society
with others [hanc vitam cum aliis sociabilem exigere debeat]. Moral theology, however,
forms a Christian man, who, beyond his duty to pass this life in goodness, has
an expectation of reward for piety in the life to come and who therefore has his
citizenship [politeuma] in the heavens while here he lives merely as a pilgrim or
stranger. (DOH, Pref., )
We still have difficulty comprehending the depth of the changes to
moral and political philosophy entailed by this project. For, in order to
fashion a persona for the citizen that would allow individuals to accede
to their civil obligations independently of their Christian moral person-
ality, Pufendorf had to displace the Christian–metaphysical figuration of
the person with a pluralistic construction that was perhaps unprece-
dented in early modernity. This is a construction that relativises duties
to the several statuses or personae occupied by individuals in the course
of civil life, while maintaining the duty of obedience to the civil state as
the ultimate parameter within which this variation takes place. In thus
detaching political and legal governance from transcendent morality,
Pufendorf earned the hostility of metaphysicians from Leibniz to Kant
and beyond. Regardless of their attacks on the allegedly ‘tyrannical’ or
‘totalitarian’ implications of Pufendorf ’s doctrines, and notwithstanding
their righteous defences of ‘freedom’, the cardinal sin of Pufendorfian
natural law in the eyes of metaphysical intellectuals has always been its
uncoupling of political sovereignty from moral truth. For in this separa-
tion these intellectuals have seen both the dissolution of the ‘moral com-
monwealth’ and of their own prestigious role in it, as the guardians of a
rational moral politics.
In continuing to frame civil duties by theorising the self-governing
moral personality or a self-perfecting moral community – the modern
avatars of purified reason and the godly state – today’s moral philosophy
remains inimical to the desacralisation of civil governance undertaken
 Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy
by Pufendorf. In fact, in an unhappy historical irony, it has used these
figures of thought as its means of interpreting Pufendorf, thereby post-
humously assimilating him to the culture of metaphysics that he sought
to destroy. The central symptom of this assimilation is the discussion of
Pufendorf ’s conception of political obligation in terms of either the self-
realising community or the self-legislating personality. We can begin to
excavate the depths of Pufendorf ’s natural law by recovering his concep-
tion of political obligation from beneath these neo-Aristotelian and neo-
Kantian treatments of it.

.                       

Pufendorf formulates his conception of political obligation in a well-
known passage in the De Jure Naturae et Gentium:
An obligation is properly laid on the mind of a man by a superior, that is, by
one who has both the strength to threaten some evil against those who resist
him, and just reasons [justae causae] why he can demand that the liberty of our
will be limited at his pleasure. For when a person has such power, after he has
once signified what reward awaits those who obey his will, and what evil conse-
quences those who resist it, there must necessarily arise in the faculty of reason
a fear mingled with reverence [metum reverentia temperatum]; a fear occasioned by
such a person’s power, and a reverence arising from consideration of the causes,
which should be sufficient, even without the fear, to lead one to receive the
command on grounds of good judgment alone. (DJN, .vi., )
Modern commentators have reclaimed this conception for moral philos-
ophy by interpreting the superior’s ‘just reasons’ in terms of morally jus-
tifying and justified reasons, as they variously understand the latter.
In his influential neo-Aristotelian account, Horst Denzer explicates
the justness of the superior’s reasons in terms of man’s ‘rational and
social nature’ and the state’s role in cultivating or completing this nature.
Its role in perfecting man’s moral nature gives the state itself a natural
moral character: ‘For Pufendorf there are conditions attached to the fact
that the nature of man demands the state. The concept of nature must
be taken in its teleological sense, [meaning] namely that man strives for
perfection rather than indulging his inclinations and passions. The
natural character of the state is therefore the final consequence of
human nature’s capacity for cultivation’ (Denzer , ). For Denzer,
therefore, the superior’s reasons are just to the extent that his commands
order the kind of society in which man’s rational and social faculties may
be perfected, but not otherwise. On this basis, Denzer interprets
 Moral philosophy and political obligation 
Pufendorf ’s version of the ‘social contract’ as one that establishes recip-
rocal rights and obligations, between individuals possessing natural
rights to development, and a political sovereign who must be obeyed to
the extent that he develops the moral nature grounding these rights
(, , –).
In the most important of the neo-Kantian interpretations, J. B.
Schneewind construes the justness of the superior’s reasons not in terms
of the realisation of a natural good, but in terms of the autonomy of the
rational faculty responsible for issuing laws: ‘Pufendorf is here saying
that the good God intended us to achieve with our special nature is not
restricted to natural good. It must include a good indicated by the higher
aspect of our nature – reason and will’ (Schneewind , ). Stressing
the non-teleological character of Pufendorf ’s conception of entia moralia,
Schneewind treats the superior’s commands as anticipations of Kant’s
self-legislating reason, ascribing their justness to the ‘higher’ rational
part of human nature in which they originate. On this view, mere rec-
ognition of the higher rational source of the superior’s commands
should be enough to create the sense of obligation: ‘Here Pufendorf
seems to be suggesting that simple recognition that a law is a divine
command should awaken a motive for compliance in us’ (). As a
result, Schneewind treats Pufendorf ’s recourse to political sanctions as
the outcome of his failure to grasp how reason itself might impose polit-
ical obligations, ascribing this failure to Pufendorf ’s inability to recon-
cile moral entities and physical beings: ‘Obligation is a moral entity. As
such it has no causal power of its own. Desires, as part of our physical
nature, can cause us to act in space and time; but recognition of obliga-
tion gives us a consideration or reason for action that does not operate
in the field of force in which desires operate’ (). We have heard this
critique of Pufendorf before, of course, in Leibniz’s comment that: ‘If
reasons restrain even by themselves, why did they not restrain by them-
selves, before fear arose?’ (PW, ). Apparently, moral and political phi-
losophy could not solve the problem of how moral reason has force in
the political world until Kant formulated his doctrine of self-legislating
reason and our ‘reverence’ for it, thereby providing a final explication of
the ‘justness’ of the superior’s commands.
For all their subtlety and interest, neither of these readings captures
Pufendorf ’s construction of political authority. In fact both of them re-
import the categories of moral philosophy to a civil ethics from which
they have been expelled. For the ‘just causes’ warranting the superior’s
imposition of obligation are neither those provided by the telos of man’s
 Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy
rational and social nature, nor those flowing from a higher self-obligat-
ing aspect of his nature, ‘reason and will’. Rather, in the summary for-
mulation of the De Officio, they are the relations of vulnerability and
protection, need and care, linking beings seeking tutelage to an agent
possessing the power to provide it:
The reasons which justify a person’s claim to another’s obedience are: if he has
conferred exceptional benefits on him; if it is evident that he wishes the other
well and can look out for him better than he can himself; if at the same time he
actually claims direction of him; and, finally, if the other party has voluntarily
submitted to him and accepted his direction. (DOH, .ii., )

In keeping with their moral–philosophical outlooks, the neo-Aristotelian

and neo-Kantian accounts interpret the civil power’s justness in terms
of its moral superiority. But, while ruling out sheer force as a legitimate
source of political duties, Pufendorf simultaneously rules out moral
excellence: ‘We are of the opinion, consequently, that the right to lay an
obligation upon another, or, in other words, to command another and
to prescribe laws, arises not merely from strength alone, or even from
␷␲⑀␳␱␹␩ [superiority], or excellence of nature’ (DJN, .vi., ).
Moreover, despite Schneewind’s claims to the contrary, it seems clear
that the superior’s right to command through laws is indeed specifiable
in terms of a good independent of the laws themselves. This good,
though, is not the summum bonum of the perfection of man’s rational and
social nature, but something far more restricted – political security. We
may propose then that the just causes which, together with the power to
coerce, constitute superiority and obligation are grounded not in the
‘higher nature’ of man’s rational or perfectible being, but in a different
normative source altogether: namely, in the relations of dependency and
protection linking a being in need of security to one who is in a position
to provide it. For Pufendorf, it is not their conformity to a self-legislated
moral law or a self-perfecting moral community that justifies the supe-
rior’s commands. Rather they are justified by the fact and to the degree
that they are issued by an agent who claims and has been granted the
absolute right to govern others in exchange for the care and protection
that he offers them.
Pufendorf ’s construction of obligation should thus be seen as part of
his larger rescaling and reconfiguration of the relation between
transcendent rationality and civil governance, moral philosophy and
political jurisprudence. Through this construction he seeks to detach the
justification of civil governance from its moral–philosophical moorings
 Moral philosophy and political obligation 
– the person’s perfectible moral nature, self-legislating moral reason –
and to tie it instead to the concrete relations of dependency and protec-
tion established in order to achieve security. There can be little doubt
that this was Pufendorf ’s way of reconstructing academic ethics and pol-
itics in response to the period of confessional warfare and the subse-
quent political–jurisprudential desacralisation of civil governance. The
reconstruction of political obligation in terms of the provision of secur-
ity alone may be regarded as Pufendorf ’s way of building the historical
reality of murderous moral communities into the foundations of ethics
and politics, transforming the ‘is’ of the Thirty Years War into the
‘ought’ of a detranscendentalised ethics and secularised politics.
Pufendorf ’s programme remains obscured in modern Aristotelian and
Kantian commentaries because they are grounded in moral anthropolo-
gies – of the self-perfecting community and the self-governing rational
being – dedicated to maintaining the synthesis of moral and political
governance that he was intent on destroying. In order to recover
Pufendorf ’s conception of obligation the historian must therefore be
careful not to allow these rival anthropologies to infiltrate his historical
reconstruction. Historians who presume, for example, that in eschewing
the notion of self-legislated moral law Pufendorf ’s project collapsed into
political utilitarianism, are declaring their de-facto adherence to the
anthropology of self-governing rational being. But, as I have indicated,
this anthropology was explicitly repudiated by Pufendorf as inimical to
his desacralising programme. The same remarks apply to the presump-
tion that Pufendorf ’s conception of obligation was, or should have been
grounded in the Aristotelian anthropology of man’s self-perfecting ratio-
nal and social being. As we shall soon see in more detail, Pufendorf ’s con-
struction of obligation is grounded in its own moral anthropology. This
has little in common with the Aristotelian figuration of man’s socially per-
fectible moral nature or the Platonic image of his self-legislating rational
being. Instead, Pufendorf elaborates a quasi-Epicurean anthropology of
man as a being whose weakness (imbecilitas) dictates that he requires soci-
ability to survive, but whose vicious passions and divided mind erode soci-
ability and leave him prey to extravagant violence and mutual destruction
(DJN, .i.–, –; DOH, .iii.–, –). Pufendorf thus derives the
natural law norms of sociability solely from the need to achieve civil
peace, exclusive of the requirements to perfect man’s moral nature or
respect the enactments of his ‘higher’ rational being. This is the way he
sought to exclude moral theology and philosophy from the domain of
natural law. In doing so he conceives of a politics independent of all
 Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy
higher moral ends – purely in terms of the relations of obedience and
superiority required for the security of beings whose capacity for mutual
violence is no less definitive of them than their need for sociability.
Understood in this way, Pufendorf ’s construction of political obliga-
tion allows no space for the gap that Leibniz and Schneewind posit
between the superior’s ‘just causes’ and his ‘strength to threaten some
evil against those who resist him’. In deliberately rejecting the metaphys-
ical anthropology – and, with it, the division between man’s higher self-
legislating rational being and his lower sensuous inclinations and
desires – Pufendorf ’s natural law is untroubled by the split between
rational self-governance and instrumental coercion formulated within
this Christian-Platonic doctrine of man. In accordance with his
Epicurean anthropology, Pufendorf treats human nature as fundamen-
tally driven by rationally uncontrollable and socially dangerous passions.
Further, in keeping with his voluntarist repudiation of metaphysical
rationalism, Pufendorf treats human reason not as a higher self-legislat-
ing intellectual nature, but as a limited capacity for empirical knowledge
and deductive ratiocination: ‘Man’s nature, then, is so constituted that
the human race cannot be secure without social life and the human mind
is seen to be capable of ideas which serve this end’ (DOH, .iii., ).
Man possesses just enough reason to know that his passionate and dan-
gerous nature is incapable of attaining sociability through reason.
In explicating his conception of obligation Pufendorf indeed says that
‘a reverence arising from a consideration of the causes . . . should be
sufficient, even without the fear, to lead one to receive the command on
grounds of good judgment alone’ (DJN, .vi., ). But this is not the
articulation of a rational–moral source of obligation incommensurate
with the administration of fear. For the consideration of causes is under-
stood not in terms of philosophical reflection on self-governing rational
being, but in terms of political reflection on the debt of obedience
arising from the relations of guardianship and dependency, sub- and
super-ordination: ‘For no man can well avoid having respect for the one
from whom he has received many favours, and so if it appears that the
same person wishes me well, and can take better care for my future than
can I, and he also claims at the same time a right to direct my acts, there
is no apparent reason why I should wish to question his power’ (DJN,
.vi., ). It is the incapacity of human beings to accept political obli-
gation on the basis of such consideration – an incapacity arising from
the strength of their jealous and ambitious passions – that establishes the
continuity between justifying considerations and the power to coerce.
 Moral philosophy and political obligation 
Rather than representing a ‘Hobbesian’ principle ambiguously distinct
from the capacity for ‘rational’ consideration of the just causes, the
power to coerce which compensates for this incapacity actually forms a
continuum with such consideration. For man’s inability to obligate
himself through such consideration is itself one of the determinants
driving the institution of an office of sovereignty possessing the power
to coerce. The capacity to punish non-compliance, and the justness of
the causes for issuing commands, are thus conjoint determinants of the
superiority that creates obligation:
From what has been said, one must surely agree that mere strength is not
enough to lay an obligation on me at the desire of another, but that he should
in addition have done me some special service, or that I should of my own
accord consent to his direction . . . From these two sources, we believe, flows the
force of obligations, which, as generally understood, restrain as by an inner
bond the liberty of our will. But because the natural liberty of the human will
is not destroyed by any moral bond, and because also among the vast majority
of mortals the inconstancy or wickedness is so great that they prevail over these
reasons for command, something else is needed to control the wild passions of
men, with a greater force than a feeling of shame and an appreciation of what
is right . . . Now we feel that nothing could have such an effect, but the fear of
some evil to come, upon the breach of an obligation, from the hand of a
stronger person, to whose interest it was that there should be no departure from
that obligation. And so, in the final analysis, obligations get their stability from
force, and from the consideration that the one who desires to procure their
observance has so much power, either inherent in him or given him by others,
that he can bring some grave evil upon the disobedient. (DJN, .vi., –)
For Pufendorf, then, the normativity of political obligation – the justify-
ing ground for the superior’s commands – comes not from the impera-
tives of a rational nature that is good in itself, or, indeed, from a rational
and social nature that requires such commands for its perfection. Rather,
it comes from the relations of dependency and protection that human
beings have established on the basis of empirical knowledge of their pas-
sionate and destructive nature and in pursuit of the end of security.
There is thus no unbridgeable gap between just reasons and political
discipline for Pufendorf. This is in part because the reasons in question
arise from concrete political circumstances rather than self-legislating
Kantian reason. But it is in part because the ‘reasons’ – of vulnerability
and protection – legitimating the superior’s command of his subjects are
also those legitimating his use of coercion against them, should they fail
to obey. For, in basing the political pact on the chastened recognition of
their own incapacity for rational self-governance, the subjects not only
 Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy
give the sovereign the right to determine what is in the interest of their
collective security, they also give him the right to exercise a supreme
coercive power over them, whenever their self-interest threatens to
deviate from this collective one. It is not, therefore, that Pufendorf fails
to explain how moral entities can have effects in the physical world – how
reason alone can move the will. It is, rather, that this problem has no
meaning for him, being precluded by his self-conscious rejection of the
notion of man’s higher rational nature or self-legislating moral reason.
For Pufendorf, political duties are not grounded in transcendent moral
norms, but in norms of political discipline. These are norms immanent
to the historical circumstances in which the sovereign state emerged as
the bulwark against man’s limitless capacity for self-destruction and civil
mayhem. In short, the sovereign is not the moral superior of his subjects,
only their political superior.
The justness of the sovereign’s use of political coercion thus flows
neither from man’s failure to obey a moral law that should be respected
on rational grounds, nor from his failure to adhere to the law of a moral
nature that impels him to ‘strive for perfection rather than indulging his
inclinations and passions’. Rather, it comes from man’s chastened recog-
nition of his rationally ungovernable and permanently flawed passional
nature. It is this recognition – the knowledge that consideration of the
justness of the superior’s right to command will not by itself lead to obe-
dience – that allows Pufendorf to build political coercion into the offices
of sovereign and subject, thereby redefining the contours of political
right. The continuum joining the consideration of just causes to the
exercise of political coercion is thus provided not by man’s rational being
but by his passional nature. For it is in a series of progressively more pow-
erful ways of governing this fractious and violent nature that considera-
tion of the sovereign’s just causes for command joins forces with his use
of coercion, when consideration alone proves insufficient to secure com-
pliance. This means that political coercion acquires its legitimacy not as
a means of enforcing the self-governance that rational beings should be
able to exercise by and on themselves – the rationalist model that con-
tinues to tie civil authority to transcendent truth. Instead, coercion
acquires legitimacy as a means of enforcing the relations of dependency
and guardianship that human beings have imposed on themselves, via
the institution of civil sovereignty, as a means of achieving social peace.
As far as Pufendorf is concerned, the need for political coercion is not
just a temporary phenomenon, arising from the failure of rational self-
governance. Rather, it is a permanent and constitutive feature of politi-
cal right and of a civil state which will never ‘wither away’.
 Moral philosophy and political obligation 
To conclude this reconsideration of Pufendorf ’s conception of polit-
ical authority, we must return to the centre of our attention some-
thing that remains off-stage in moral–philosophical interpretations of
Pufendorf: namely, his ‘privatisation’ of salvation or moral regeneration.
We have already observed that Pufendorf ’s restriction of civil right to
the political relations required for social peace was reciprocally and
inseparably related to a second act of demarcation: his restriction of the
pursuit of moral regeneration to the non-political sphere of religious
faith or private moral striving. This partitioning of civil governance from
transcendent morality – whose crucial formulation is provided by the De
Habitu Religionis Christianae ad Vitam Civilem – was Pufendorf ’s central
response to the problem of religious civil war. If, as some critics have
claimed, it divorces political governance from transcendent morality
then it does so in order to place transcendent morality beyond political
enforcement. The religious neutrality of the state and the political neu-
tralisation of the church are the twin pillars of Pufendorf ’s natural law.
This larger partitioning of civil and spiritual governance needs to be
kept in mind when considering the nature of the continuum that
Pufendorf establishes between the just causes for the sovereign’s com-
mands and the use of coercion to enforce them. For, given that these just
causes refer only to the relations of dependence and protection required
for civil peace, then their enforcement never touches the pursuit of
transcendent morality and religion. This remains free of political coer-
cion precisely to the extent that it has been detached from the exercise
of civil power, which offers us a good pointer to the statist character of
Pufendorf ’s liberalism. From Pufendorf ’s viewpoint, in seeking trans-
cendent moral grounds for the exercise of political coercion – in self-
perfecting moral community or self-legislating rational being – moral
philosophers risk making transcendent morality politically enforceable.
As we have seen in our discussion of Leibniz’s theory of punishment and
his treatment of heresy, this was not a groundless fear.
We cannot appreciate the true character Pufendorf ’s reconstruction
of ethics and politics until we realise that he is no longer in the business
of attempting to derive political obligation via metaphysical reflection
on man’s rational and moral being. In fact his objective is to ensure that
this would no longer occur. Pufendorf was among the first to see that the
desacralisation of civil governance meant that individuals would have to
learn to accede to their civil duties independently of cultivating an ‘inte-
gral’ moral personality – a practice which would have to be restricted to
the domain of private spiritual striving. From now on human beings
would have to accede to their civil duties not through self-purifying
 Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy
recovery of a higher metaphysical being, but through empirical reflec-
tion on their violent historical nature, for whose governance they had
instituted a new moral persona – that of the citizen. In the system of
post-Westphalian states, political authority could have only one end –
security – and political obligation only one source: obedience to the
supreme power that provided it.
All attempts to justify obligation via a true philosophy of man’s ratio-
nal and moral being – attempts that grounded obligation in a self-per-
fecting moral community or a self-legislating rational being – would
therefore be inimical to the new disposition of civil governance and civil
duties. Such attempts refuse to accept Pufendorf ’s desacralising segre-
gation of the political subject from the subject of truth – the ‘civil
kingdom’ from the ‘kingdom of truth’ – and they continue to obscure
our understanding of this objective today. To reach this objective the
citizen had to be transformed from a person who accedes to his civil
duties through insight into moral truth to one who does so through
acceptance of his need for civil security. This could not be done without
removing metaphysical moral philosophy – neo-Aristotelian and neo-
Platonic – from academic ethics and politics and replacing it with a civil
philosophy suited to the moral comportment of the subject of the
deconfessionalised state. That is the fundamental task of Pufendorf ’s
natural law.
To understand the manner in which he carried out this task we must
come to terms with three fundamental features of this natural law, fea-
tures which are also decisive points of departure from metaphysical
moral philosophy. First, we must observe that for Pufendorf the bearer
of duties is no longer an integral moral personality or community
through which access might be gained to an ultimate rational or moral
ground for obligation. Rather, the bearer of duties has become the
‘imposed’ status or ‘office’, the entia moralia; and the duties attaching to
offices have no integrating source or form in such figures as the rational
being or the moral community. They take their shape instead from the
ends for which the offices have been imposed – pre-eminently from the
end of security. Second, as a result of this, human beings may not accede
to the natural law – that is, to the duties attaching to the ‘natural status’
imposed on them by God – through philosophical reflection on the ratio-
nal and moral grounds for this imposition. As human reason and moral-
ity are internal to the nature created by this imposition, man may and
can only deduce natural law through chastened observation of his
‘empirical’ nature and the conduct most likely to preserve it. Finally, this
 From moral personality to civil personae 
means that the pact through which man enters the ‘civil state’ is not a
means of enacting or perfecting his higher rational being. Rather, this
pact is the form in which human beings impose a new moral being on
themselves: the ‘compound moral person’ of civil sovereignty – the
citizen and the sovereign. In imposing a new ‘civil status’, the state-
forming pact institutes new personae and a new way of governing
liberty. As such, although it is reached in accordance with the natural law
goal of security, civil sovereignty is not effectively accountable to natural
law. For, as a result of the transformative powers of the pact, the sove-
reign is the only civil person possessing the capacity to decide the meas-
ures needed for social peace.
In discussing each of these features in turn, we shall build up an inter-
pretation of Pufendorf ’s natural law that is more in keeping with its his-
torical role as both instrument and outcome of the early modern
desacralisation of politics.

.       

The first chapter of the first book of Pufendorf ’s De Jure Naturae et
Gentium executes a short but fundamental expulsion of the Christian–
metaphysical concept of the person from the domain of civil ethics and
politics. Drawing on the Roman-law notion of persona as a duty-
bearing status, and the associated Ciceronian notion of ‘office’ (officium)
as the duty attached to a civil position, Pufendorf constructs a concept
of civil moral duty in terms of the conduct required by the occupancy
of a civil status. Wolfgang Röd has suggested that here Pufendorf may
have been drawing on the work of one of his teachers, Erhard Weigel
(Röd ; Röd ). For Weigel had sketched a (partially) convention-
alist account of social order in which moral norms are treated as arte-
factual ‘moral entities’ – Weigel also calls them entia civilia or civil entities
– instituted by human agreement for the purpose of securing social
order and cohesion (Weigel , –). In any case, in Pufendorf ’s
hands this construction was unexpected and unwelcome in many
Lutheran theology and philosophy faculties, rejecting as it did the
Christian metaphysics of the person root and branch.
Protestant neoscholastic metaphysics had construed the concept of
person in terms of the Aristotelian ontology of substances and acci-
dents. Here person is understood as the substance or ‘supposite’ of an
intellectual being (R. Schröder , ). But it is metaphysical
Christology which provides the seminal patterns for later philosophical
 Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy
conceptions of the unity of the person. In this setting, the pressure to
unify divided ‘offices’ (divine and human) and ‘states’ (of exaltation and
inanition) comes from the imperative of mediation and salvation, which
helps to explain the extraordinary importance of the ‘two natures one
person’ formula to all Christological debate during the seventeenth
century (Baur ; Sparn , –). In fact the conception of moral
personality in the early modern metaphysics of morals – the line
running from Leibniz through Wolff to Kant – may be regarded as a
series of elaborations of this soteriological conception of personal unity
(Kobusch ). Leibniz’s monadology, for example, may be treated as
a ‘secular’ improvisation on the Christological metaphysics of personal
unity; for, as a result of the division between their spontaneous apper-
ception and their passive sensing, the monads echo the neoscholastic
division of Christ’s divine and human natures, fuelling the same drive
for unifying mediation (Sparn ). Despite his ongoing attempts to
provide a definitive metaphysics of the Eucharist, Leibniz’s monadology
allowed him to shift the drama of mediation and salvation to the twin
natures of homo duplex, where the pursuit of saving unity could take place
as a philosophical spiritual exercise. Nonetheless, as we have argued,
given its Platonic–ascetic form, this philosophical pursuit of personal
unity retains a strongly religious character. In any case, rather than antic-
ipating the further ‘subjectivisation’ of the metaphysical conception of
the person – which would occur in Kant’s notion of self-legislative ratio-
nal being – Pufendorf ’s construction of civil persona or officium severs his
natural law from this entire line of development. The opening chapter
of the De Jure is the sundering blow.
Launching a corrosive intervention into the neoscholastic Weltans-
chauung, Pufendorf denies that the ontology of substances and attributes
has any relevance to the moral domain and the understanding of per-
sonhood, thus relegating it to the domain of natural or physical entities.
This marks the beginning of a remarkable anti-metaphysical tour de force,
in which he sets out to destroy the whole programme of deriving moral
duties from a moral nature embedded in the person and acceded to
through reflection on divine or transcendent reasons. Pufendorf ’s
central weapon is the distinction he draws between physical and moral
entities. Physical entities (entia physica) are created, and their properties
flow from the substances subtending them. Moral entities (entia moralia),
however, arise through ‘imposition’ (impositionis), and their properties
(moral duties) flow not from an essential moral nature (form, entelechy,
 From moral personality to civil personae 
soul), but from the purposes for which they have been superadded to
physical beings: ‘We seem able, accordingly, to define moral entities most
conveniently as certain modes, added to physical things or motions, by
intelligent beings, primarily to direct and temper the freedom of the vol-
untary acts of man, and thereby secure a certain orderliness and
decorum in civilised life’ (DJN, .i., ). Reason and morality thus do not
flow from an intelligible substance (‘rational being’) imbricated in the
order of being, but represent capacities for inventing and improvising in
relation to the circumstances and needs of man.
Pursuing his desubstantialisation of morality by a daring analogy,
Pufendorf comments that if physical things have their properties
through the manner in which their substances or supposites occupy
space, then moral entities – specifically moral persons (personae morales) –
exist through their occupancy of a particular state or status (statu), which
is the ‘space’ in which moral qualities and actions are possible. As the
mode of bearing a particular configuration of duties, status is either
natural or adventitious – the former being the status imposed on man by
God, the latter comprising those imposed on man by himself. But
Pufendorf is careful to point out that not even the natural status repre-
sents an unfolding of an ontological nature or essence, being rather the
mode God has willed to shape man’s conduct and govern his natural
liberty: ‘Hence the active force which lies in [moral entities] does not
consist in their ability directly to produce any physical change in any
thing, but only in this, that it is made clear to men along what line they
should govern their liberty of action, and that in a special way men are
made capable of receiving some good or evil and of directing certain
actions towards other persons with a particular effect’ (DJN, .i., ).
Pufendorf thus replaces the metaphysical conception of the person as
the substantial origin of all its offices and conditions with an account of
offices tied only to an instituted status or condition. This enables him to
reject the idea of duties unfolding from a single source of spiritual being
or intellectual reflection in favour of a conception of their multiple
origins in invented statuses. It is quite misleading, therefore, for Theo
Kobusch to interpret Pufendorf ’s conception of moral entity as if it were
a development of the neoscholastic conception of the person as moral
substance, bearing inalienable rights and duties, and set apart from
natural being only by its Kantian capacity for free self-determination
(Kobusch , –). Far from attempting to provide a moral–ontolog-
ical anchor for moral freedom and natural rights, Pufendorf ’s separation
 Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy
of moral from natural being is intended to divorce duties and rights from
all ontological foundations and salvific aspirations, grounding them
instead in imposed offices which originate in a civil rather than a meta-
physical order. As Haakonssen explains: ‘Officia in the broader sense are
thus not simply “duties”, as the term is normally rendered in English.
They are the offices of life which encompass clusters of specific duties
and rights, and we are bound to them by an obligatio, or moral necessity’
(Haakonssen , –).
In explicitly rejecting the neoscholastic and rationalist metaphysics of
natural law, Pufendorf uses this conception of moral offices in order to
displace the Platonic–Aristotelian conception of ‘universal justice’ –
understood as both the plenary form of the virtues and the recovery of
self-governing moral personality. Writing to his young admirer Christian
Thomasius on  July  he comments that: ‘If I can demonstrate that
they are only suited to a certain kind of republic [i.e., the Greek polis],
I regard it as a strong argument among rational people that one should
not set up morality in accordance with Aristotle’s eleven virtues. And in
general it is my opinion that one should institute and manage morality
not in accordance with virtues but in accordance with offices [officia].’
Reminding us of the rival moral anthropology underpinning this shift
from metaphysical virtues to civil offices, Pufendorf continues: ‘In any
case, Epicurean ethics is without doubt better than Aristotelian. But the
name of Epicurus is so hated by the idiots that one must fear that
Bileam’s horse would mount the pulpit and preach if one said anything
good of Epicurus’ (GW, , –).
Pufendorf leaves us in little doubt regarding the central objective of
his relegation of moral personality in favour of civil personae. He seeks
to secularise and pluralise the basic ethical tool used in the shaping of
moral comportments – the figuration of personhood. Cut loose from its
vertical integration in spiritual substance and rational being, and freed
from its salvific role in the ‘Christology’ of homo duplex, personhood could
be distributed horizontally across a variety of statuses imposed for the
ends of civil governance. The reconfiguration of moral personhood
arising from this transformation is so profound, and so counter to the
Christian–metaphysical inheritance, that the outrage it provoked in
early modern moral philosophers has only been stilled by the efforts of
their modern counterparts to re-absorb it into the metaphysics of
morals. For this reconfiguration allows Pufendorf to separate the philo-
sophical concept of the subject – as transcendental rational being – from
the civil conception of the person, as a comportment imposed for the
 From moral personality to civil personae 
bearing of obligations. In doing so it allows him to establish an ethics
and politics independent of the moral philosophical treatment of duties
in terms of self-conscious and self-governing moral personality.
Pufendorf ’s voluntarist anthropology thus precludes the kind of self-
relation programmed by Leibniz’s transcendental psychology. It denies
that individuals can accede to their moral duties through self-unifying
redemptive recovery of their inner imago Dei, rational being or moral per-
sonality, insisting instead that they must recognise their duties in the
array of offices or personae imposed on them for the purposes of civil
governance. By separating the concept of moral person from that of
human (rational) being, Pufendorf is able to argue that a single human
being may be the bearer of several moral personae – civil and ecclesias-
tical, commercial and familial, public and private – each with its own
duties arising from the purposes for which it was instituted (DJN, .i.,
–). Further, the obligations clustered around a given status or persona
need have no single unifying principle, arising instead from the variety of
civil ends terminating in the persona. Conversely, on the same basis,
many human beings may be represented by a single moral person, as in
the case of civil associations and states, where individuals subordinate
their particular wills to the will of the sovereign as a ‘composite moral
person’ (persona moralis composita), again instituted for a certain purpose,
here the achievement of social peace and security (DJN, .i., ).
In deriving obligations from multiple principles or ends lying outside
the individual in the officia of civil life, Pufendorf ’s civil anthropology
places the array of duties to which an individual might be subject
beyond the reach of a single integrating judgment to which they might
aspire. This detranscendentalising and pluralising of moral personhood
holds the key to the separation of civil and religious offices needed for
the governance of newly deconfessionalised states. Pufendorf ’s prime
purpose for arguing in this way is to deny that there is any transcendent
moral personality anchored in the nature of man – no moral or rational
being, no imago Dei, no Christian conscience – that might permit indi-
viduals to unify and rank all their offices from a single point of rational
insight. Moreover, in Pufendorf ’s central example of the illegitimate
unification of offices – the figure of the priest – we catch sight of the his-
torical circumstances driving this anti-metaphysical anthropology:
Also we should not forget, that, just as one person may at the same time be in
different states [pluribus statibus], provided only that the obligations accompany-
ing those states do not conflict, so the obligations attached to any one state may
in their parts be derived from different principles. Hence he who gathers the
 Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy
obligations flowing from any one principle, and omits all others, does by no
means immediately form a state [statum] to which no obligations can or should
adhere, save those which he himself recollects [meminit]. So he who has gath-
ered from the Sacred Scriptures alone the parts of the duty of priests [partes officii
sacerdotum], assuredly cannot deny that those priests are also obligated to
perform such duties as are required by the constitutions of individual govern-
ments [civitatum]. And so we also who are here treating merely of the duties of
man [hominis officia], which can be shown to be necessary by the light of reason,
do by no means maintain that any such state of man, which includes such obli-
gations alone [i.e., those ‘recollected’ from a single principle or source], ever did
exist, can exist, or should exist. (DJN, .i., –)
The duties attaching to a moral persona may arise from a plurality of
principles, and it is unacceptable for anyone – priests in the first instance
– to unify their duties using the method of inner self-reflection, as if the
obligations they were under had no external civil determinants. Those
neoscholastic theologians and rationalist philosophers who sought to
subordinate civil duties to the cultivation of a transcendent moral per-
sonality stood in the way of the pluralisation of offices required by life
in deconfessionalised states. In confessional society the inward cultiva-
tion of spiritual unity had its external correlate in the efforts of religious
intellectuals to subordinate all the spheres and duties of life to the relig-
ious or transcendental–moral. This moral unification of life had fuelled
the unbridled intensity of the conflicts between the different confessional
communities. The separation of religious and civil governance at the
level of the state was thus conditional on the secularisation and plural-
isation of personhood at the level of the individual.
Rather than representing a stage in the development of (Kantian)
moral philosophy, Pufendorf ’s anti-metaphysical anthropology should
thus be seen as directly engaging with specific religious and political
circumstances. Through his frontal assault on the paideia of metaphysi-
cal anthropology – through his rejection of self-formation via the inner
ascent to quasi-divine concepts of morality and justice – Pufendorf was
laying the groundwork for the separation of religious and civil govern-
ance that lies at the heart of his natural law. It should already be clear
that if the confessional theologian was the first target of this attack then
the metaphysical philosopher would be the next. For, no less than the
religious, the metaphysical sage is prone to determining his obligations
for himself, imagining that the duties of the philosopher have a single
transcendent source – in the conceptual contemplation of pure ideas –
to the exclusion or assimilation of the duties imposed by historically
existing governments.
 Transcendent reflection to chastened observation 

.                

  
Like Leibniz’s, Pufendorf ’s method of constructing or ‘knowing’ natural
law is deeply embedded in his moral anthropology. Pufendorf ’s concep-
tion of man as the bearer of imposed statuses or offices, however, is asso-
ciated with an intellectual method differing profoundly from Leibniz’s
exercise in transcendental rationalism. Drawing in part on the doctrine
of fallen man’s incapacity for transcendent knowledge, but more cen-
trally on his doctrine of the imposed nature of moral entities, Pufendorf
insists that the science of natural law may not be derived from insight
into theo-rational concepts or norms existing prior to the imposition of
laws.
Pufendorf ’s voluntarist insistence that ‘scientific’ knowledge of moral-
ity is possible without positing objective values – things considered good
or bad ‘in themselves’ without reference to the laws making them so – is
not simply an epistemological doctrine. In fact it is central to his strat-
egy for the civil ‘rescaling’ of natural law, providing the means of includ-
ing it in the same (‘imposed’) domain as the civil state’s positive law:
Now in order that this knowledge of natural law with which we are now con-
cerned, and which includes all moral and civil knowledge that is genuine and
solid [& quae genuinam ac solidam doctrinam moralem & civilem absolvit], may meet
the full requirements of a science, we feel that we need not declare, with certain
writers, that some things are noble or base of themselves without any imposi-
tion, and that these form the object of natural and perpetual law, while those,
the good repute or baseness of which depends upon the will of a legislator, fall
under the head of positive laws. (DJN, .ii., )
It is possible to have certain knowledge in the moral sciences, Pufendorf
argues, but such certainty is internal to the domain of knowledge created
by the a-rational imposition of laws: ‘For since good repute [honestas], or
moral necessity, and turpitude, are affections [qualities] of human
actions arising from their conformity or non-conformity to some norm
or law, and law is the bidding of a superior, it does not appear that good
repute or turpitude can be conceived to exist before the law, and without
the imposition of a superior’ (DJN, .ii., ). To suggest that the moral
quality of actions exists independently of God’s gratuitous imposition is
to ‘join to God some co-eternal extrinsic principle which He Himself
had to follow in the assignment of the forms of things’; and this is impos-
sible because ‘God created all things, man included, of His free will’ and
could have assigned ‘whatever nature He wished to this creature whom
 Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy
he was about to create’. Pufendorf accepts that there is such a thing as
natural good, which consists in the naturally beneficial powers contained
in man’s physical nature, and, indeed, all moral goods are based in
natural goods. The converse is not true however – that is, not all natural
goods are moral goods – because natural goods cross the threshold of
morality only via the imposition of some law aimed at governing man’s
natural liberty. Natural actions, including the acts constituting adultery,
theft, and murder, are thus morally indifferent as physical actions, and
acquire moral qualities only through the imposition of law (DJN, .ii.,
–).
The key to Pufendorf ’s detranscendentalising of moral and political
philosophy, therefore, lies in his voluntaristic rejection of transcen-
dent–objective moral norms. This does not mean, however, that his vol-
untarism constitutes a rival theory of moral truth to the rationalist one
championed by Leibniz and the Lutheran neoscholastics. For the effect
of Pufendorf ’s theological voluntarism is not to launch a (possibly) true
theory of man’s moral nature; rather it is to transform the manner in
which philosophers will accede to truth in this domain. If it is accepted
that man’s moral nature is a status imposed on him by God – and is not
a form of rational being shared with God’s – then man must come to
knowledge of the moral laws from within the confines of this
ungrounded ‘historical’ nature. Man must accept that the flawed and
vicious nature he possesses as a matter of fact is the only one relevant for
deducing of natural laws of morality, which must be laws governing a
creature with just this kind of nature. In other words, man must come to
knowledge of his ethical duties from within the confines of the nature
imposed to fit him for society with other men, rather than adopting the
viewpoint of a being privy to the reason or goodness out of which God
imposed this nature. Pufendorf ’s voluntarism thus forms part of an
ethical exercise designed to impel natural jurists to detranscendentalise
their discipline by turning from the contemplation of the transcendent
‘perfections’ shared with God to the observation of the historical flaws
immanent to humanity.
This is the intellectual-historical light in which we must view
Pufendorf ’s ‘deduction’ of the natural law in the third chapter of Book
 of the De Jure. This deduction is immediately preceded by Pufendorf ’s
version of man in his ‘natural condition’ (statu hominum naturali).
Pufendorf presents his account of man in the state of nature as exem-
plifying the empirical standpoint needed to derive the natural law from
chastened observation of the moral nature man actually has. In this
 Transcendent reflection to chastened observation 
regard his version is specifically opposed to the neoscholastic depictions
of the natural condition, which, in equating it with the Christian state of
innocence (status integritatis), orient natural law to the religious command-
ments governing man in his fallen condition. In relying on revelation,
Pufendorf argues, this account belongs in the domain of moral theology
and has no place in the ‘civil science’ of natural law (DSH, §§–,
–). Pufendorf thus refuses to construe the natural condition in
terms of the Christian conception of a state of innocence, defining it
instead through opposition to the civil state, as ‘that condition for which
man is understood to be constituted, by the mere fact of his birth, all
inventions and institutions, either of man or suggested to him from
above, being disregarded’ (DJN, .ii., ).
The content of Pufendorf ’s version of the state of nature does not, of
course, arise from observation in the sense of the modern empirical
natural sciences. In fact it derives from Epicurean and Stoic sources
compiled in the classic humanist manner; for Pufendorf ’s approach is
observational or empirical in an ethical rather than an epistemological
sense, dedicated to confining natural law to knowledge of a nature in
need of political rule rather than one capable of governing itself
through reason. In the summary version of the De Officio, Pufendorf thus
characterises natural man as a creature whose weakness (imbecilitas)
necessitates sociality for survival but whose ‘vices render dealing with
him risky and make great caution necessary to avoid receiving evil from
him instead of good’. Unlike the beasts, man’s appetites for sex and food
are limitless and impossible to satisfy. Moreover: ‘Many other passions
and desires are found in the human race unknown to the beasts, as, greed
for unnecessary possessions, avarice, desire of glory and surpassing
others, envy, rivalry and intellectual strife. It is indicative that many of
the wars by which the human race is broken and bruised are waged for
reasons unknown to the beasts’ (DOH, .iii., ). Man’s petulance, his
capacity for giving and receiving offence, combined with his extraordi-
nary capacity for violence, makes his natural condition a very dangerous
one, particularly when one takes into account the great divisions in
human beliefs and ways of life. In short: ‘Man, then, is an animal with
an intense concern for his own preservation, needy by himself, incapable
of protection without the help of his fellows, and very well fitted for the
mutual provision of benefits. Equally, however, he is at the same time
malicious, aggressive, easily provoked and as willing as he is able to inflict
harm on others’ (DOH, .iii., ).
Man’s life in the state of nature would thus indeed be miserable,
 Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy
unadorned, and short. It would not, however, be ungoverned by natural
law or bereft of friendship as a primitive form of sociality. This is
because man is indeed equipped by nature to know the natural law, even
if he is not equipped to govern himself in accordance with it. In provid-
ing the state of nature with this kind of disposition, Pufendorf is distin-
guishing his version of it from two others. First, he uses it to criticise
Hobbes’ naturalistic description of the state of nature as one of ungov-
erned war, and Spinoza’s parallel metaphysical account of the natural
state as one of radically conflicting individual rights arising from uncon-
trolled natural desire. Against these Pufendorf argues that even in the
state of nature humans possess a reason and will informed by natural
law. This gives rise to minimal obligations and rights – to preserve oneself
and not to harm others – which means that the natural state inclines to
peace, even though it is perpetually threatened by war through man’s
incapacity to adhere to these obligations in the absence of a superior
(DJN, .ii., –).
Second, Pufendorf ’s prime opponents, however, are the neoscholastic
natural jurists. By invoking the state of innocence as a bulwark against
Hobbes’ war of all against all, these metaphysicians claimed that man
was capable of governing himself through right reason, which means
that government (sovereignty) itself is a feature of man’s natural condi-
tion. Clearly Pufendorf ’s view of man’s incapacity for self-governance is
fundamentally opposed to this argument, but here he concentrates on its
unacceptable political consequences. To accept right reason as a princi-
ple of government in the state of nature would be to infringe the
supreme authority of the government that emerges with the transition
to the civil state; for right reason would then be ‘something superior even
to what is supreme’. As such it would undermine the sovereignty of civil
government, which consists in its capacity to rule over men ‘free from
any interference on their part’ (DJN, .ii., ). In short, both Hobbes
and his neoscholastic opponents fail to see that despite being natural in
contradistinction to civil, man’s condition in the state of nature remains
an imposed status – a mode of bearing duties instituted for the govern-
ance of his liberty. This means that the natural state is neither lawless
nor of itself capable of giving rise to civil sovereignty, which arises from
the imposition of a new kind of status or condition on man. We will
return to this last point in the following section.
Pufendorf ’s deduction of the natural law is thus meant to exemplify
how man as the bearer of an imposed moral nature can derive its
laws from the ‘inside’, through observation of what it takes to preserve
 Transcendent reflection to chastened observation 
a creature of the kind man happens to be. It comes as no surprise there-
fore that Pufendorf prefaces his deduction by remarking that the law of
nature can be obtained through straightforward observation of man and
the requirements of his nature:
There seems to us no more fitting and direct way to learn the law of nature than
through careful consideration of the nature, condition and desires of man
himself, although in such a consideration other things should necessarily be
observed which lie outside man himself, and especially such things as work for
his advantage or disadvantage. For whether the law was laid upon man in order
to increase his happiness or to restrain his evil disposition, which may be his own
destruction, it will be learned in no easier way than by observing when man
needs assistance and when he needs restraint. (DJN, .iii., )
On the basis of the Epicurean anthropology that supplies the content of
this observation, Pufendorf proceeds to derive the general form of
natural law in this way:
After the preceding remarks it is easy to find the basis of natural law. It is quite
clear that man is an animal extremely desirous of his own preservation, in
himself exposed to want, unable to exist without the help of his fellow creatures,
fitted in a remarkable way to contribute to the common good, and yet at all
times malicious, petulant, and easily irritated, as well as quick and powerful to
do injury. For such an animal to live and enjoy the good things that in this world
attend his condition, it is necessary that he be sociable, that is, be willing to join
himself with others like him, and conduct himself towards them in such a way
that, far from having any cause to do him harm, they may feel that there is
reason to preserve and increase his good fortune . . . And so it is a fundamental
law of nature, that ‘Every man, so far as in him lies, should cultivate and pre-
serve toward others a sociable attitude, which is peaceful and agreeable at all
times to the nature and end of the human race’. (DJN, .iii., –)
Pufendorf ’s deduction of natural law thus serves two interrelated
functions. First, in deriving the law from an ‘empirical’ nature that God
has gratuitously imposed on man, rather than from a rational nature that
man shares with the divine being, this deduction sloughs off all the
transcendental aspirations of ethics, leaving only the duty of cultivating
a peaceable deportment in the interests of civil peace. Second, by deriv-
ing the law from ‘observation’ of man’s ‘empirical’ condition, rather
than through philosophical abstraction to his higher rational being, the
deduction seeks to remodel the intellectual deportment – the mode of
conducting the intellect – through which civil duties are recognised. It
drops exalted philosophical self-reflection as the appropriate mode of
acceding to civil duties, replacing it with chastened recognition of the
obligations imposed in the interests of sociability. Given their centrality
 Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy
to Pufendorf ’s detranscendentalising of ethics and politics, each of these
functions requires further clarification.
In rejecting the idea that natural law flows from a rational nature that
man shares with God, and treating it instead as a rule for governing
an ‘empirical’ nature gratuitously and inscrutably imposed on him,
Pufendorf launches a frontal assault on the central doctrines of neoscho-
lastic natural law. To this end he divides those writers ‘who search for the
prototype of natural law in God himself ’ into two classes:
The one finds its prime origin in the divine will, and since this is in the highest
sense free, they conclude that the law of nature can be changed by God, nay, its
very opposite can be enjoined, just as is the case with positive laws. The other
maintains that it is based on the essential holiness and justice of God, so that
the law of nature expresses these attributes like a kind of ⑀␬␶␷␲␻␮␣ (copy)
[ectype]; and from this proceeds also the immutability of natural law, because
the justice and holiness of God reject all alteration and change. (DJN, .iii.,
)
The first position – unrestrained theological voluntarism – is flawed,
Pufendorf argues, because it fails to understand that while God is free to
create beings with any nature he pleases, once God has created a being
with man’s nature, he is not free to change the laws whose observance
preserves this being. God thus refrains from altering natural law not – as
the rationalists argue – because it binds the divine will to an unchange-
able metaphysical order, but because natural law is the means of main-
taining the being produced by God’s act of free creation (DJN, .iii.,
). But it is the second – ‘theo-rationalist’ – position that Pufendorf is
at greatest pains to attack; for, in regarding human nature and its law as
continuous with divine nature and its law, this view is inimical to
Pufendorf ’s treatment of natural law in terms of norms immanent to
man’s worldly empirical nature. Pufendorf deploys two related argu-
ments against this view. First he attacks it for vainly and impiously claim-
ing to judge divine justice and holiness by human standards. Then he
argues that it wrongly presumes a continuity between the legal obliga-
tions established among men and the willed imposition establishing
these obligations, which is a free creative act knowing no obligations
(DJN, .iii., ).
It is only apparently paradoxical that Pufendorf ’s own theological vol-
untarism issues in a fundamental de-theologisation of natural law. For
the result of viewing man’s moral nature as gratuitously imposed by God
is that one cannot inquire into the theo-rational grounds of the moral
 Transcendent reflection to chastened observation 
laws governing this nature. Such laws must therefore be treated as wholly
immanent to the ‘observable’ or ‘empirical’ moral nature accessible to a
being lacking all transcendental–rational insight; rather than as ‘eternal
truths’ or ‘moral necessities’ common to human and divine reason and
permitting man’s participation in the latter. Conversely, we have already
observed that in grounding natural law in transcendent reasons common
to man and God, metaphysical rationalism is responsible for a profound
theologisation of natural law; for in doing so it invokes a model of ratio-
nal being – as the intellection of the intelligibles prior to their devolution
into the world of the senses and their utilities – whose prototype is the
divine mind and whose beneficiary is the metaphysical clerisy.
Pufendorf ’s attack on the central emblems of neoscholastic and
rationalist legal metaphysics – the figures of the status integritatis and the
imago Dei – is thus integral to his voluntarist detranscendentalising of
ethics. Pufendorf rejects utterly the doctrine that man can or may accede
to his natural law duties by burnishing the image of divine justice and
holiness in his own person. The reason is clear: human justice and good-
ness arise from acting in accordance with imposed laws but, as the
untrammelled source of this imposition, God’s will is just and holy in a
quite different and incommensurate way (DJN, .iii., –). Hence,
while God has created man to be just, human justice is not continuous
with divine; and, while man is destined for society with God in another
world, divine society cannot be the model for the societies of this world.
The anti-scholastic intent of Pufendorf ’s theologically derived volun-
tarism is made clear in some off-the-record remarks that he addressed to
Thomasius in a letter written in April . These remarks arise in the
context of Pufendorf ’s response to his young admirer’s plans for his own
natural law work – the Institutiones Jurisprudentiae Divinae that would
appear in . Here, it will be recalled, Thomasius was in part defend-
ing Pufendorf ’s natural law against Valentin Alberti’s neoscholastic
attack, which makes it all the more significant that Pufendorf should
congratulate his young follower for scrutinising the doctrine of the status
integritatis:
Among other things, my esteemed sir, it pleases me greatly that the same [work,
i.e., the Institutiones] explains the theory of the incorrupt state [status integri].
Because if this [theory] is distinctly outlined in accordance with the hypothesis
of our theologians, human life receives such a different shape from that of
today, that our natural laws would make no sense for it. And because most parts
of our law distinguish the two human institutes, absolute sovereignty and
 Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy
human government [nempe dominum et imperium humanum], whether and how far
they would have obtained in the state of incorruption is very hard to determine
. . . My esteemed sir otherwise does well if he avoids all conflict with the theo-
logians and its accompanying retaliation, and maintains merely that holy Velten
[Valentin Alberti] errs beyond doubt, and wishes to introduce a mixture that is
against all reason. (GW, , )
In rendering natural law immanent to man’s worldly empirical nature
– in excluding all recourse to his divine imaginal nature – Pufendorf thus
aims to restrict moral and political philosophy to the horizon of conduct
required for the maintenance of civil peace. If natural law reaches no
further than the preservation of man’s sociability, and if moral respon-
sibility reaches no further than the external performance of acts
required by law, then moral and political philosophy must be restricted
to public actions imputed as good or bad, just or unjust in accordance
with the rules of social peace. In this way Pufendorf disconnects his
version of natural law from all concern with a justice higher than the
maintenance of external social security; and, as we have seen, he
removes his natural law sociality from all concern with a goodness higher
than that attaching to external action in accordance with the law. In
short, Pufendorf disconnects civil ethics from the pursuit of holiness,
whether in the explicitly theological form of the neoscholastic pursuit of
the imago Dei, or in the implicitly theo-rational forms of Leibniz’s meta-
physical ascent to the ‘pure’ concept of justice.
It is, however, the second aspect of Pufendorf ’s detranscendentalising
of morality – his refusal to accept that natural law is acceded to via prin-
ciples of reason and goodness common to God and man – that was most
destructive of seventeenth-century academic moral philosophy, and
remains so in relation to today’s versions. For, by insisting that moral
norms be derived from and for an impaired worldly nature lacking all
transparency to transcendent reason, Pufendorf is attempting to restrict
the forms of philosophical reasoning themselves to the horizon of civil
peace.
Not even the comparatively benign theo-rational conception of
natural law offered by Lambert Velthuysen escapes Pufendorf ’s stric-
tures in this regard. Pufendorf seizes on Velthuysen’s comment that:
‘The supreme right of God over His creatures is made known to the
natural reason by those principles which form among men the founda-
tion of natural law and equity.’ Such a view is untenable, Pufendorf
argues, because it confuses the absolute right exercised by God in impos-
ing man’s moral nature with the ‘hypothetical’ (immanent, relative)
 Transcendent reflection to chastened observation 
rights and obligations arising among men as a result of this imposition.
For Pufendorf, this confusion arises from the assumption that God’s
actions are subject to the same laws as man’s. Velthuysen had argued that
‘God should of necessity consider natural laws to be just, the order of
this universe being established and constituted as it now appears to the
eyes of every man.’ He had supported this by commenting: ‘Because all
things which we can picture in our minds always have a ␴␹⑀␴␫␯ or rela-
tion, arising from the intrinsic nature of the thing, which cannot by
sound judgment be separated from the thing.’ In criticising this attempt
to show the transcendent rationality of natural law, Pufendorf com-
ments that God himself is not subject to the moral necessity of natural
law since ‘with Him there can be discovered no necessity other than that
which he derives from the divine pleasure’. Further, there is no intrinsic
moral relation or quality attaching to things, and thereby giving man
natural knowledge of divine law, ‘since things do not have such a nature
and accompanying relation of themselves, but only at the will of the
Creator, and the decision of His will cannot properly be called a law’.
He thus concludes:
Thus the reason why, among men, a favour obligates one to gratitude, and why
a violation of agreements, savagery, pride, and contumely can never be lawful,
is because God has appointed for man a sociable nature, and so long as this is
untainted, what is agreeable to it is reputable [honesta], and what does not agree
with it is unlawful and base. But this does not imply any right common to God
and men, or any endowment or ␴␹⑀␴␫␯ [relation] of things which is not based
upon the divine will. (DJN, .iii., )
The depth and scale of Pufendorf ’s programme for detranscenden-
talising moral philosophy now becomes clear. It is not just neoscholastic
moral theologians who fall beneath the wheels of Pufendorf ’s jugger-
naut but, by implication, the entirety of rationalist moral and political
metaphysics – to the extent, that is, that it continued to derive natural
law duties through reflection on principles of reason and goodness
common to God and man or man and the cosmos. For Pufendorf ’s
central argument is that man has to accede to his natural law duties via
a contingent nature that offers him no continuity with or insight into the
rational and moral nature of its creator.
The depth of Pufendorf ’s voluntarism – his insistence that the cer-
tainty of man’s moral knowledge occurs inside the moral and epistemo-
logical universe created by arbitrarily imposed laws – holds the key to his
criticism and transformation of Grotius’ construction of natural law.
Despite Grotius’ insistence on the normative pre-eminence of sociability,
 Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy
his famous rationalist formula in the Prolegomena to De jure belli ac pacis –
that natural law would be valid even were God not to exist – is, as Tierney
argues, a direct echo of the neoscholastic natural law (Tierney ,
–). It is precisely at this point that Pufendorf parts company with his
honoured predecessor. Grotius goes astray, Pufendorf argues, when he
claims that we can test the goodness of natural laws themselves by seeing
whether the actions they prescribe agree with ‘sound reason’ or man’s
‘rational and social nature’. This cannot be done, firstly, because sound
reason in moral affairs always assumes the existence of such laws and, sec-
ondly, because man’s moral nature is no less the result of gratuitous impo-
sition than the laws it is supposed to justify. There is, therefore, no way of
ascribing an absolute goodness to legislated actions by discerning their
agreement with a nature that is ‘good in itself ’ or carries the seeds of its
own perfection in the Aristotelian manner. Rather, the goodness of such
actions is only ‘hypothetical’ – that is, good relative to a nature whose own
goodness is a function of its imposition for the governance of conduct
(DJN, .ii., ). Despite first appearances, then, the fact that Grotius is
prepared to entertain the conjectural independence of natural law from
divine command is a sign of his residual attachment to the transcenden-
tal–rationalist line. Conversely, by treating natural law as the gratuitous
expression of the divine will, Pufendorf is actually breaking with this line.
For in doing so he renders natural law immanent to moral offices that
betray no trace of the higher rational nature that has imposed them,
thereby treating man’s moral nature as an empirical phenomenon to be
managed in accordance with the pragmatic rules required for its sheer
preservation. The appeal to divine will as the inscrutable source of moral
nature is Pufendorf ’s way of removing the transcendent–rational
justifications from morality and natural law.
Pufendorf ’s deduction of natural law from man’s need for sociability
does not, therefore, operate in the standard ‘teleological’ manner. It is
not an attempt to justify moral norms by showing that they are neces-
sary to realise or perfect a natural good. In observing his need for social-
ity man is only observing his moral end from within the limits of his
worldly nature. In recognising that he must conform to the laws of soci-
ability required for his worldly flourishing, man is not deducing their
necessity from a good known independently of them. Rather he is
observing their utility for a nature that we take to be good because it
forms the moral horizon for our ethical judgments. ‘Right reason’ is thus
not a procedure for deriving the law from a rational or moral end known
independently of the law, but an attempt to conduct the intellect along
 Transcendent reflection to chastened observation 
the moral path formed by a gratuitously imposed nature and law:
‘Therefore the law of nature may be called the dictate of right reason
only in the sense that the mind of man has the faculty of being able
clearly to understand, from the observation of his condition, that he
must of necessity order his life by that law, and at the same time to search
out the principle whereby its commands can be convincingly and clearly
demonstrated’ (DJN, .., ). The question of why man finds
himself in his needy–vicious condition – the question of what lies
beyond the ethical horizon formed by the laws of man’s worldly
flourishing – is not open to reason.
So profound is this rejection of rational justifications for natural law
that it even applies to the principle of utility. Pufendorf indeed advances
the utility of natural laws as the condition of our knowing them, yet he
denies that this constitutes a rational justification for them. The relevant
remark runs: ‘But, although by the wisdom of the Creator the natural
law has been so adapted to the nature of man, that its observance is
always connected with the profit and the advantage of men, and there-
fore also this general love tends to man’s greatest good, yet, in giving a
reason for this fact, one does not refer to the advantage accruing there-
from, but to the common nature of all men’ (DJN, .iii., –). Neo-
Aristotelian and neo-Kantian commentators cite this passage as
evidence that Pufendorf (partially) refused the utilitarian conception of
natural law in favour of one investing it in a nature ‘good in itself ’
(Denzer , ; Schneewind , ). But this represents a miscon-
strual of the passage’s intent. Pufendorf refuses utility as a rational
justification for natural law not because he accepts the notion of an abso-
lutely (teleological or deontological) good nature, but because he denies
that human beings are capable of providing any kind of (transcendent)
rational justification for natural law, including a utilitarian one.
We have already seen Pufendorf taking Grotius to task for purporting
to justify natural law by testing it against man’s moral nature. Such a pro-
cedure is impossible not because this nature or its imposition is ‘good in
itself ’, but because it has been arbitrarily imposed on us by a superior.
The imposed character of man’s moral nature means that while he can
deduce natural law by observing what it takes to preserve his nature, he
cannot offer a rational or moral justification for the law through rational
insight into the goodness of this nature; for, as we have seen, man’s sense
of goodness arises from the arbitrary imposition of this nature and is
therefore internal to it. The goodness of natural law, and the advantage
man derives from it, meet not in a reason he shares with God but in the
 Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy
nature imposed on him at God’s pleasure. It is not belief in God that
holds goodness and utility together, though. Rather, it is recognising that,
as a result of moral reason’s immanence to a gratuitously imposed moral
nature, man has no choice but to call ‘good’ that which allows a creature
with this kind of nature to survive and flourish. Man can deduce the
natural law by observing its utility for attaining the sociality required for
his preservation. He cannot know, however, that the preservation of his
nature is a good intended by God. For God’s acts are not bound by
(human) ends and man’s sense of the good is internal to the nature arbi-
trarily imposed on him, although natural religion dictates that he should
treat this imposition as sign of God’s providence. Man must therefore
derive his own understanding of natural law by observing its utility for
his sociable nature. At the same time he must eschew all attempts to treat
this derivation as revealing the reason for God’s imposition of this
nature, which must be treated as gratuitous and inscrutable.
The difficulty that moral philosophers – modern and early modern –
have in coming to terms with Pufendorf ’s deduction of natural law is
that they treat it as another attempt to provide a philosophical
justification for ethics. It is, however, something almost diametrically
opposed to this interpretation: namely, an attempt to show that ethical
duties can and must be acceded to independently of philosophical
justifications. Moral philosophy purports to accede to natural law duties
through purifying reflection on a nature that connects man to a higher
rational and moral being – to the perfect ends man shares with God, to
the order of things that harmonises him with the cosmos, to the holy
moral law of his own intellect. For Pufendorf, however, man must accede
to such duties through sobering recognition of a nature that requires
mutual assistance but threatens mutual destruction. Only thus can he
avoid the self-exalting delusion that his duties arise from the dignity of
his rational and social being, accepting instead that they come from the
requirements of preserving his civil nature through restrained sociabil-
ity with other men. In short, the persona of the (metaphysical) moral
philosopher is an inappropriate model for the deportment of the decon-
fessionalised citizen.

 .                                      
Pufendorf ’s reconstruction of the scope of natural law duties and of the
mode of acceding to them has profound consequences for his concep-
tion of political authority or the state. We have seen that by treating
 Political subjecthood and civil sovereignty 
man’s natural state as an imposed status Pufendorf construes the law of
sociality as a purely this-worldly rule of security, disconnected from all
higher rational and moral law. In doing so, he clears the way to treat the
civil state not as the expression of man’s rational and moral being but as
the result of a new willed imposition, the sovereignty pact. In agreeing
to impose the status of civil sovereignty on themselves, men do not con-
struct the political state in accordance with a rational and moral nature
they share with God or reason. They were doing so on the basis of a dan-
gerous and contingent nature that can be reshaped through sovereignty
in pursuit of security. As we shall see, the ‘absolute’ character of
Pufendorf ’s conception of political authority – his insistence that a
supreme or sovereign power must be exercised independently of the
moral judgments of those over whom it is exercised – is not well under-
stood by modern commentators, particularly those whose calling as
moral philosophers commits them to the primacy of individual moral
judgment. But then neither do these commentators understand the
manner in which Pufendorf ’s absolutism harbours a ‘liberal’ conception
of religious toleration.
Pufendorf construes the political state as a human artifice imposed by
men on themselves as an instrument of this-worldly security. This con-
struction fits well with our account of the larger historical task that he had
undertaken: the fashioning of a civil philosophy capable of comprehend-
ing the desacralisation of the state that had already occurred at the level
of law and politics. Pufendorf ’s undertaking was fundamental as it
involved overturning the way in which existing natural law doctrine –
neoscholastic and rationalist – organised the relations between the indi-
vidual’s religious, ethical, and political obligations. His strategy is to
reshape these relations around the figure of a fundamental agreement or
pact whose form and outcome accord with natural law without being
rationally or morally prefigured by it. At the heart of Pufendorf ’s account
of the civil state or status lies his conception of the political pact as the
willed imposition of a moral entity, civil sovereignty. This pact is analo-
gous to God’s gratuitous imposition of man’s natural state or status and,
like it, provides a means of governing man’s natural liberty through the
imposition of new moral persona on him. In fact it is the imposed char-
acter of the civil state that holds the key to its secularised – desacralised
and detranscendentalised – form. In creating civil sovereignty as a new
‘compound’ moral entity, consisting of the citizen (subject) and the sove-
reign (ruler), the compacting individuals are in fact transforming the basis
on which they exercise their liberty and accede to their obligations.
 Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy
Centrally, in agreeing to enter the civil state in accordance with natural
law, individuals give up their capacity to decide whether henceforth the
state is being governed in accordance with natural law. For Pufendorf, this
holds the key to uncoupling civil from religious governance, the rule of
the sovereign from the rule of conscience.
Pufendorf ’s reconstruction of civil sovereignty is focused in Book 
of the De Jure Naturae et Gentium. He begins in his usual manner, by clear-
ing away the alternative accounts of the state offered by Hobbes and by
anti-Hobbesian neoscholastic political theology – here represented by J.
F. Horn’s De Civitate. In claiming that in the state of nature ‘natural laws
are silent’, Hobbes argues that the state arises not from the need for
sociality but from the pursuit of individual advantage and the struggle
for supreme power, which goes to the strongest individual. This means
that individuals must give up their natural rights on entering the civil
state, which gives political right immunity against the destabilising
appeal to natural rights. According to Hobbes’ Protestant–Aristotelian
opponents, however, natural law itself gives rise to the state. As the law
of a rational and sociable being whose capacities can only be perfected
in the state – the zoon politicon – neoscholastic natural law assumes a
‘natural’ teleological development of the civil from the natural state,
thereby grounding political right in natural rights.
Against Hobbes, Pufendorf reactivates the arguments of the second
chapter of Book . These, it will be recalled, are designed to show that
humans are indeed aware of the natural law in the state of nature and
attempt to conform their conduct to it, even if only a few succeed in
doing so. Sovereignty should thus not be regarded as a prize going to the
most powerful in the universal war (DJN, .i., –). Once again,
though, it is Hobbes’ neoscholastic opponents who are Pufendorf ’s real
target. He is particularly concerned to combat Horn’s version of the
Aristotelian doctrine that the state arises from man’s rational and social
nature, at the behest of natural law, as the means of perfecting this
nature. Against this doctrine Pufendorf argues that while man is indeed
commanded to sociability by the law of his nature, his fractured mind
and fractious passions mean that he is not naturally adapted to the
public-spirited and peaceable role of the citizen: ‘Nay, rather, no animal
is more fierce and uncontrolled than man, more prone to vices which are
calculated to disturb the peace of society’ (DJN, .i., ). A further
reason ‘why the mere law of nature cannot encompass the peace of
mankind’ is that man’s natural liberty is such that his judgments cannot
be made to agree through the exercise of individual reason. Deliberation
 Political subjecthood and civil sovereignty 
on man’s nature and its ‘permanent advantage’ may indeed point to the
need for civil sovereignty. Few, however, are capable of such deliberation
– the pursuit of personal gain giving rise to a chaos of judgments regard-
ing man’s true good – which means that human reason is not the source
of the agreement that leads to the state: ‘But since reason alone, as it is
found in individual men, is unable to compose such great differences,
some sort of agreement of opinions must be sought by a different course’
(DJN, .i., ). What this course is will soon become apparent.
While man’s natural condition gives rise to the desire for sociality –
and in fact to such lower forms of society as the family and the clan – it
does not of itself give rise to the civil state, as for this a certain comport-
ment is required, consisting in ‘trust and pacts’. The source of the
restrained comportment attending political society is, however, not
readily understood by those living within it. In a striking observation,
animated perhaps by his sense of how quickly the horrors of the Thirty
Years War were being forgotten, Pufendorf comments of states: ‘Their
force is not realised by children or the unlearned, or their advantages by
those who have never experienced the losses consequent upon their non-
existence. This the reason why the former, because they do not under-
stand the nature of a civil society, cannot enter into it, while the latter,
because ignorant of its advantages, give no heed to it, or at least live in
it in such a way as not to value its excellence.’ In fact the latter group
themselves remain political children, and their insouciance regarding
the conditions of their pacified existence suggests what it is that compen-
sates for the immaturity of their natures: ‘Therefore, all men, being born
as infants, are by that fact unsuited to civil society, and most of them
remain so all their lifetime, while it is discipline, not nature, that fits a
man for such a society’ (DJN, .i., ).
This indicates the course by which men will reach the agreement that
gives rise to civil society or the state. If it is discipline and not nature that
gives rise to the peaceable and public-spirited deportment of the citizen,
then Aristotelian political theologians such as Horn are wrong to claim
that the state is the realisation of man’s rational and sociable being. It is
not only early modern Aristotelians, however, who will fall victim to
Pufendorf ’s interposition of discipline as the condition of political sub-
jecthood. In attempting to interpret Pufendorf ’s own conception of this
state as the instrument of man’s moral realisation, modern moral phi-
losophers suffer collateral damage. In this regard we can recall Denzer’s
argument that in Pufendorf the ‘concept of nature must be taken in its
teleological sense . . . that man strives for perfection’ so that: ‘The natural
 Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy
character of the state is thus the final consequence of human nature’s
capacity for cultivation’ (Denzer , ). We can also take note of
Simone Zurbuchen’s similar claim that for Pufendorf: ‘As the most
perfect human community . . . the state is natural in the sense that it
belongs to the completion of humanity’ (Zurbuchen , ). In fact,
this is precisely the teleological account that Pufendorf is at pains to
reject, commenting in his essay De Statu Hominum Naturali (On the Natural
State of Men) of  that such a view ‘presupposes a kind of civil state
wherein citizens are without any fault and wickedness, when in fact states
are a sort of remedy for human imperfection’ (DSH, § , ).
The imperfection for which states are a remedy is not the immaturity
of an essential endowment or teleological ‘nature’, but an incapacity
that shows up in relation to an imposed purpose. Man, says Pufendorf,
can be brought to the status of the citizen in the same way that a horse
can be taught to prance, a parrot to talk, a field to bear crops and a hill-
side vines – that is, not through the teleological realisation of a natural
capacity that is good in itself, but through the disciplined transformation
of natural capacities in accordance with an imposed end (DJN, .i.,
–): ‘Yet no one is so ignorant as not to recognise how ill-adapted are
the characters of most men to this end [of peaceable public-spirited cit-
izenship]. To few is it given to meet all the requirements of a good
citizen; most men are restrained by the fear of punishment, and remain
their life long poor citizens and non-political creatures’ (DJN, .i.,
).
For Pufendorf, then, man is not a political animal in the Aristotelian
sense of requiring the state to perfect his rational and social being.
Rather, he is so in the starker and more restricted sense of having a
nature capable of being disciplined to the end served by the formation
of states – security:
It is sufficiently clear from all this in what sense then man can be called a polit-
ical animal: Not because there resides in each and every one a natural aptitude
to act the part of a good citizen, but because at least a part of mankind can by
nature be fitted to that end, and because the safety and preservation of
mankind, now become so multiplied, can be secured only by civil societies. Into
these, nature always intent upon its own preservation, impels men to enter, just
as also it is the first fruit of civil society, that in it men may accustom themselves
to lead an orderly life. (DJN, .i., )
It is not through the cultivation of man’s rational and moral nature
therefore that nature composes individual wills to that agreement by
which they enter civil society, but through a quite different kind of instru-
ment – the discipline of mutual fear: ‘Therefore, the real and principal
 Political subjecthood and civil sovereignty 
reason why the fathers of families left their natural liberty and under-
took to establish states, was in order that they could surround themselves
with defences against the evils which threaten man from his fellow man
. . . [A]gainst those ills with which man in his baseness delights to
threaten his own kind, the most efficient cure had to be sought from man
himself, by joining men into states and establishing sovereignty’ (DJN,
.i., ).
We are now better placed to understand Pufendorf ’s account of the
pacts through which men leave the state of nature and enter the civil
state. These consist not in a rational agreement and exchange of rights
and obligations between two natural individuals – the people and the
sovereign – but in a series of fear-driven decisions that results in the crea-
tion and imposition of a new status or moral person. For a state to be
possible there must be a body of men large enough to defend itself
against other groups, and these men must be able to agree on the best
means of their common defence. The divided and fractious nature of
men’s minds, however, means that mutual consent alone will not be
sufficient to allow them to reach and adhere to such an agreement (DJN,
.ii., –). Unlike bees, men are incapable of the natural harmon-
isation of their political wills and, despite what the philosophers say, men
are incapable of arriving at such a harmonisation through ‘the dictates
of sane reason’ having ‘fully subdued all their passions and base lusts’.
‘Surely’, says Pufendorf, ‘those men erect states upon shifting founda-
tions, who show too great respect for men’s moderation and weigh all
other men, and especially the vile mob, upon the scales of their own
probity’ (DJN, .ii., ).
In fact, given the two evils threatening man’s pursuit of political secur-
ity – the diversity of his inclinations and the torpor of his will – the only
way to achieve and maintain the state-forming agreement is via the con-
stitution of a single artificial will equipped with the power to compel the
performance of civil duty: ‘The first of these evils may be cured by
uniting the wills of all in a perpetual bond, or by so constituting affairs
that there will be for the future but one will for all in those matters which
serve the end of society. The second may be alleviated if some power be
established which is authorised to inflict upon those who hesitate before
the common advantage some present evil and such as will impress itself
upon their senses.’ In striking contrast to all those who attempt to ground
sovereignty in a ‘general will’ – Althusius, Rousseau, Kant – Pufendorf
insists that the sovereignty pact is not the expression of an actual or ideal
union of wills: ‘Now a union of wills cannot possibly be encompassed by
the wills of all being naturally lumped into one, or by only one person
 Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy
willing, and all the rest ceasing to do so, or by removing in some way the
natural variation of wills and their tendency to oppose each other, and
combining them into an abiding harmony.’ This union is rather the
result of the fear-driven agreement of all individuals to subordinate their
wills to a single agency of political decision: ‘But the only final way in
which many wills are understood to be united is for every individual to
subordinate his will to that of one man, or of a single council, so that
whatever that man or council shall decree on matters necessary to
common security, must be regarded as the will of each and every person’
(DJN, .ii., ). In the same way, a sovereign power ‘as may be feared
by all’ is created when all individuals have obligated themselves to use
their strength only at the behest of a single man or council.
This is the light in which we must understand Pufendorf ’s account of
the two pacts and one decree that give rise to the state. It is in the crucial
first pact – sometimes misleadingly called the ‘social’ pact – that individ-
uals agree to enter the state by subordinating their political wills to a
single individual or council. This pact is followed by a decree deciding
whether the form of government will be monarchical, aristocratic, or
democratic – that is, whether the sovereign power will be administered
by a prince, a council of nobles, or an assembly drawn from the people.
This decision having been taken, sovereignty is then conferred on some
individual or council through a second pact in which ‘the rulers bind
themselves to the care of common security and safety, and the rest to
render them obedience, and in which there is that subjection and union
of wills, by reason of which a state is looked upon as a single person’
(DJN, .ii., ).
The key to understanding Pufendorf ’s conception of the formation of
civil sovereignty is that he regards it not as the realisation or execution
of a natural capacity but as the invention and imposition of a new moral
entity or status. Pufendorf rejects the idea that sovereignty pre-exists the
state-forming pact – residing in the individual’s natural freedom and
power or in God’s majesty – treating it instead as a creation of the pact
itself. By agreeing to subordinate their wills to that of a single individual
or council in exchange for the security pledged by the latter, the assem-
bled individuals create civil sovereignty as a new ‘compound moral
person’. This composite moral personality consists of the persona of the
citizen defined by the duty of obedience, and the persona of the sove-
reign defined by the duty of care and protection. While it is true that in
imposing this new moral entity on themselves men act in conformity
with the law of nature – which always seeks man’s preservation – they
 Political subjecthood and civil sovereignty 
do so not in accordance with the laws of their rational and social being,
but out of fear and exigency, which compels them to transform their
being in pursuit of security.
Pufendorf is now free to reject all attempts to derive sovereignty from
some source higher than or independent of the pact that forms it. His
central targets are Hobbes’ account of sovereignty arising via individu-
als ‘donating’ their natural sovereignty (freedom and strength) to the
Leviathan, and Horn’s opposed view of it originating in a transfer of a
metaphysical sovereignty from God to the prince who rules by divine
right. According to Pufendorf, in viewing civil sovereignty as arising
from the donation of natural freedom and rights, Hobbes is forced to
posit a non-reciprocal pact in which the people is extinguished as bearer
of natural rights, all of which pass over to the sovereign who therefore
exercises them unconditionally. For a reciprocal pact might allow indi-
viduals to reclaim their donation, thereby functioning as justification for
rebellion. Still, despite sympathising with Hobbes’ fear of rebellion –
arising, Pufendorf suggests, from his experience of religious civil war –
Pufendorf regards Hobbes’ conception of sovereignty as fundamentally
flawed. What Hobbes fails to understand, argues Pufendorf, is that sov-
ereignty – a single and supreme locus of political decision and power –
is not something that individuals possess in the condition of natural
freedom, but something they create and impose in the agreement that
gives rise to the civil condition. There is no need therefore to posit a non-
reciprocal pact in which the people is extinguished as a bearer of natural
freedom and rights, because freedom is not the condition or ‘quality’ by
virtue of which they enter the pact or by virtue of which the sovereign
is obligated to them: ‘And yet when a free people transfers sovereignty to
a king, that people does not cease by natural death, nor is the obligation
of the king founded upon that quality of the people whereby it is under-
stood to be free, but whereby it will thereafter continue to be a group of
citizens subject to one man’s sovereignty’ (DJN, .ii., ).
The property of individuals relevant to the pact and foundational for
political obligation is not their natural freedom and rights – as attributes
of their rational and moral or irrational and desiring being – but their
need for security, arising from their partially sociable but mutually
destructive nature. Political obligation arises from the fact that, with the
first pact, individuals delegate their capacity for self-defence to another,
agreeing in doing so that the sovereign alone should decide the best
means to this end, and that he should have absolute power to coerce
those who subsequently dissent from his decisions. The personae of
 Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy
citizen and sovereign thus do not pre-exist the first agreement. Rather,
they are imposed by it, as a means of transforming the mode in which
men will govern their liberty in pursuit of security. Citizens and ruler
thus do not enter the second pact as bearers of natural freedoms and
rights that must be traded off to produce sovereignty – and may later be
reclaimed – but as bearers of the reciprocal duties of obedience and pro-
tection that compose civil sovereignty as a moral person: ‘When I subject
myself to a prince, I promise him obedience, and stipulate for myself
defence, while the prince in accepting me as a citizen promises me
defence and stipulates from me obedience. Before that promise, neither
of us was under an obligation, at least not a perfect one, I to obey him,
or he to defend me’ (DJN, .., ).
Commenting on the distinctiveness of Pufendorf ’s political pact in
this regard, James Tully has remarked: ‘Therefore, unlike doctrines of
corporate popular sovereignty, the people, although it possesses unity,
never possesses supreme authority and so cannot be said to “delegate”
it to a ruler and repossess it if the ruler breaks the agreement’ (Tully ,
xxxiii). There is thus little support for Denzer’s argument that Pufendorf
rejects Hobbes’ one-pact model because it fails to allow for a reciprocal
exchange between citizen and sovereign as natural-rights-bearing
persons (Denzer , –). As far as Pufendorf is concerned, the
complementary duties of the citizen and sovereign – to obey and to
protect – are artefacts of the agreement that allows individuals to enter
the civil status by providing them with new personae. As a result, the
complementarity of these two kinds of obligation is such that ‘the legit-
imate power of a king and the duty of citizens exactly correspond, and
we emphatically deny that a king can lawfully command anything which
a subject can lawfully refuse. For a king cannot command anything more
than agrees, or is supposed to agree, with the end of instituted civil
society’ (DJN, .., ). Hobbes’ problem is that his conception of
the people’s rights and freedoms is too natural – that is why he is so con-
cerned with destroying them.
The arguments that Pufendorf deploys against Hobbes are even more
devastating, however, when applied to the latter’s neoscholastic oppo-
nents. For if sovereignty does not pre-exist the formation of states as a
natural condition of individuals, then it is nonsensical to regard it as pre-
existing the state as a metaphysical substance inherent in God or the
order of being. Pufendorf is thus by turns scathing and mocking of
Horn’s account of civil sovereignty devolving from divine majesty – an
account which sees political agreements among men as providing merely
 Political subjecthood and civil sovereignty 
the empirical occasion for the attribute of divine sovereignty to flow into
a king. This view of sovereignty as a divine right ‘tears to shreds all the
conventions and fundamental laws which are agreed to between kings
and subjects, touching the administration of sovereignty’ (DJN, .iii.,
). More fundamentally, it fails to understand that sovereignty is a
moral entity instituted by human agreement, not a metaphysical sub-
stance emanating from the divine. Quoting Horn’s assertions that God
‘pours it [sovereignty] forth directly upon kings after their election by the
people’, and that sovereignty is a ‘creation of God, so that no other crea-
ture in an equal or superior kind of causation, nor from any innate prin-
ciple, has made any contribution to the institution of this type of
administration’, Pufendorf comments that making such statements ‘only
betrays a crass ignorance of moral matters’. He then continues in a more
sarcastic vein:
Now if a man will consider this more deeply, he will see that such men as
Hornius have conceived majesty to be a physical entity, which, upon being
created by God, wanders about over the world with no home or resting-place
until it lights upon a king, who has been selected by a people, and invests him
with its august splendour. And such a man will surely be in difficult straits if he
should be pressed as to whether that majesty, before it finds a seat in some king,
is substance or accident, and if the latter, how it can exist without a subject.
Furthermore, when was it created, at the beginning of the world, or later? Is
there also but one majesty in the entire world, bits of which are distributed to
individual kings? Do different kings have their own special and entire majesty?
When a king dies does his majesty perish with him? Or does it survive him, sep-
arated like the soul from the body, or finding by a kind of metempsychosis a
dwelling in a new king? . . . But it is idle to inquire about the immediate cause
of majesty, or supreme sovereignty, abstractly considered, since it exists only in
a concrete form. (DJN, .iii., –)
Lying behind this piece of boisterous anti-metaphysical invective is of
course Pufendorf ’s entirely serious argument that civil sovereignty is an
artefact of human agreement aimed at achieving a purely this-worldly
security. As we have seen, lying at the heart of this argument is his treat-
ment of civil sovereignty as imposed by individuals in accordance with
the natural law end of security. This imposition gives rise to duty-bearing
personae unknown in the natural condition, the citizen and the sovereign
– personae incapable of carrying moral or religious norms into the civil
condition, where they might be used for or against the state. This recon-
struction of sovereignty in terms of the fear-driven imposition of new
political personae is the condition of Pufendorf ’s desacralisation of pol-
itics and the state. For it is the means by which he detaches the exercise
 Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy
of sovereignty from all claims to political authority lying beyond that
required for the worldly end of the state – security – and from moral and
religious claims in particular.
Pufendorf ’s construction of political authority is thus equally inimical
to popular-sovereignty conceptions and to divine-right theories. If sove-
reignty is not the expression of supra-political capacities and rights, then
it cannot reside in the people, whether in accordance with the ‘pessimistic’
doctrine of Hobbes, or the ‘optimistic’ ones of Althusius, Rousseau, and
Kant. For the same reason, however, sovereignty cannot not reside in God
or the metaphysical order of being, thence being transferred to princes.
In viewing sovereignty as the mode of realising a moral capacity originat-
ing in an extra-political domain, both popular-sovereignty and divine-
right theories sacralise the state. Conversely, in treating sovereignty as an
artificial deployment of supreme political power – rooted in social danger
and created by fear-driven pacts – Pufendorf ’s construction of political
authority is dedicated to desacralising the state. Clearly this reconstruc-
tion is no less inimical to the efforts of modern moral philosophers to treat
the sovereignty pact either as an agreement between natural-rights-
bearing moral persons or as the general will that arises from the rational
harmonisation of all particular wills. For Pufendorf, it is ‘discipline, not
nature, that fits a man for such a society’.
Pufendorf ’s reconstruction of the concept of sovereignty gives rise to
three striking and far-reaching transformations in our understanding of
the state and political authority. First, as Tully has argued, it leads to the
separation of sovereignty – as the supreme unified locus of political deci-
sion and power – from government, as the particular form in which sov-
ereignty is administered (Tully , xxxiii–xxxv). Pufendorf thus argues
that, to the extent that they are all capable of managing a supreme and
unified exercise of political decision, then each of the three forms of
government – monarchy, aristocracy, democracy – is an appropriate
bearer of sovereignty: ‘The capacity and inclination of one or more men,
who exercise sovereignty by their own right, or as it is delegated to them,
do indeed affect or modify the administration, but in no way the form of
a state’ (DJN, .v., ). If the sovereign power is an artefact of the
political pact, and is not donated to government by its natural or meta-
physical bearer – God, the king, the people, the general will – then neither
monarchy, nor aristocracy nor democracy is its natural expression.
Hence despite the fact that each of the forms of government is subject to
the forms of incompetence characteristic of the different ruling persons
or groups, none is inherently more or less legitimate than the others.
 Political subjecthood and civil sovereignty 
Pufendorf thus rejects Horn’s claim that monarchy is the naturally
legitimate bearer of (divine) sovereignty by remarking that the people,
having created sovereignty by agreement, are surely free to bestow it on
a council or assembly if they choose. In fact this causes Pufendorf to
modify the temporal differentiation of his two pacts, observing that if
sovereignty does not pre-exist the first pact then it may be regarded as
being created and conferred at the same time:
We realise, of course, that election is properly and exactly but a form of secur-
ing sovereignty, and yet nothing appears to prevent a certain person from being
selected, and sovereignty, now first coming into being, from being conferred
upon him by one and the same act. For surely it is childish to hold that in moral
things, when some right or moral quality is said to be conferred upon another,
it must first have existed somewhere in separate form. Nay rather, it is clear to
all that rights and other moral qualities come about by pacts from a mutual
agreement of wills. (DJN, .iii., )
By parity of argument, however, neither can democracy be said to be
the naturally legitimate form of government; for here too sovereignty
does not pre-exist the state, in the moral sovereignty of the people.
Moreover, even though it is physically drawn from the people, a demo-
cratic assembly is (or should be) an autonomous moral person, and
therefore cannot be understood as the people governing themselves. For,
to the extent that it governs absolutely and in the interests of security,
then the assembly occupies the persona of sovereign, while the people
continue to have the single obligation of obedience to the sovereign
(DJN, .v., –).
In short, Pufendorf ’s separation of civil and moral sovereignty allows
him to adopt a detached and pluralistic view of the relation between
state and government, refusing all attempts to idealise any particular
form of government as the naturally legitimate bearer of (moral) sove-
reignty. Once the state has been reconceived in terms of its political
function – the maintenance of security through a unified and irresistible
deployment of political authority – then any form of government exer-
cising sovereignty in this manner may be regarded as legitimate. In fact,
Pufendorf is not concerned with (morally) legitimate and illegitimate
forms of government, only with regular and irregular forms of state: ‘We
hold that the regularity of states lies in this: that each and every one of
them appears to be directed by a single soul, as it were, or, in other words,
that the supreme sovereignty, without division and opposition, is exer-
cised by one will in all the parts of a state, and in all its undertakings’
(DJN, .., ).
 Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy
The second, no less striking consequence of Pufendorf ’s reconstruc-
tion of sovereignty is that it sequesters government from the moral
judgment of individuals. It is perhaps here that the ambivalence of
Pufendorf ’s relation to Hobbes shows through most clearly. For, unlike
Hobbes, Pufendorf insists that natural law judgments are operative in
the natural state and that natural law informs law-making in the civil
state. Pufendorf agrees with Hobbes, however, that it must not be left to
the individual judgment of subjects to determine whether the sovereign
is legislating in accordance with natural law: ‘[T]he question is not,
which is of greater value, the person of the king or the entire people . . .
but whether, in view of the fact that civil sovereignty has been invented
for the profit of all, the decision as to how to secure that end resides in
those who have subjected their will to the will of the king, or in him to
whose judgment and conscience the government has been entrusted’
(DJN, .vi., ). For Pufendorf, only the sovereign is in a position to
make this judgment, which he does in accordance with the fundamen-
tal end of the state – security. Under circumstances threatening the exis-
tence of the state, the sovereign will even be justified in infringing some
of the citizen’s natural law rights – for example, sacrificing some to war
– to the extent that this is in the long-term interests of public safety.
Clearly Pufendorf assumes that the dictates of natural law and those
of ‘reason of state’ will generally coincide in the sovereign’s duty to make
civil law in accordance with natural law. In fact he seeks to hold these
together by treating public safety as both the end of natural law – ‘the
reason for which states were founded’ – and the end governing the sov-
ereign’s commands, even though these are beyond all effective moral
and legal accountability. The difficulty with this solution is that the
concept of sovereignty entails that only the sovereign can decide
whether his actions are in fact in accordance with public safety or the
security of the state. Some commentators treat this apparent tension as
indicative of Pufendorf ’s inability to integrate the doctrines of natural
law and reason of state (Meinecke , –; Krieger , –;
Denzer , –). Others, as we have noted, regard Pufendorf ’s
natural law as too normative to contain a fully autonomous or ‘utilitar-
ian’ conception of politics (Dreitzel ).
In light of the preceding interpretation, however, it is possible to
propose that none of these accounts manages to clarify the issue. In fact
the power of decision that Pufendorf ascribes to the state comes not from
a theory of sovereignty or Staatsräson super-added to his doctrine of
natural law, but from the manner in which he construes the natural law
 Political subjecthood and civil sovereignty 
pact itself. We have seen that Pufendorf treats this not as a rational agree-
ment between two moral persons but as a pact between individuals to
create two unequal personae, the subject and the sovereign. It is as a result
of this creation that citizens may not judge and dissent from the sover-
eign’s commands, to the extent that prima facie these agree with the end
of the state. For the fundamental condition of this end being realised is
that individuals give up this power of judgment. It as at this point that
Pufendorf renders natural law immanent to the exercise of sovereignty,
thereby opening the doctrine of natural law to the theories of ‘absolute’
(secular) sovereignty elaborated by Bodin, Arnisaeus, and Conring.
The tension in Pufendorf ’s account of the relation between sove-
reignty and natural law judgment arises therefore from the fact that he
must posit the latter as a condition of pacts being made and adhered to,
while simultaneously treating the pact as annulling the individual’s right
henceforth to make such judgments regarding the sovereign’s civil laws.
The decisive factor here, however, is not any putative capacity individu-
als might have to govern themselves but something quite different:
namely, security, which is ‘the intention or thought with which men
made up their minds to establish states’. Pufendorf continues:
Therefore, it is held that no more power was voluntarily bestowed upon that
prince than what a man of reason may judge to make to that end [of security];
although what may at any particular moment work to that end is a matter for
decision not for those who do the transferring, but by him on whom that power
was transferred. Therefore, the supreme sovereign can rightfully force citizens
to all things which he judges to be of any advantage to the public good. (DJN,
.vi., )
Consequently, while denying Hobbes’ assertion that civil-law commands
are themselves the source of the individual’s moral sense – as this sense
is present in the natural condition – Pufendorf nonetheless accepts
Hobbes’ unflinching doctrine that it is seditious for individuals in the
civil state to make their obedience to the sovereign conditional on their
knowledge of good and evil:
Yet in another sense the thesis of Hobbes can be allowed, if, that is, good and
evil be taken as that which does or does not work to the advantage of the com-
monwealth. For then that is surely a seditious opinion that ‘the knowledge of
good and evil’, that is, of that which is good or evil, advantageous or disadvan-
tageous to the state, ‘belongs to individuals’. That is, that each individual is
empowered to pass judgment as to the aptitude of the means which a prince
orders to be undertaken so as to secure the public good, with the effect that the
obligation of each person depends upon that judgment. (DJN, .i., )
 Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy
For, if this were the case, then the civil state would cease forthwith, con-
ditional as it is on the mass of individuals giving up their right to deter-
mine the best means of their common security to a single individual or
council. If the desacralisation of political authority entails withdrawing
the state from the sphere of moral judgment, then it also entails with-
drawing moral judgment from the sphere of the state.
Finally, if Pufendorf ’s reconstruction of political authority thus
renders the state absolute in the political arena, then it simultaneously
gives birth to a ‘liberal’ sphere of extra-political rights and freedoms.
Those commentators who imagine they see the ‘germ of totalitarianism’
in Pufendorf ’s desacralising of politics could not be wider of the mark.
For, as we have already observed, this secularising of politics was accom-
panied by a no less powerful privatising of religion. If Pufendorf ’s
uncoupling of civil governance from transcendent morality renders the
state absolute in the political domain, then it simultaneously precludes
the exercise of political power in the moral domain. Civil society,
Pufendorf argues in the De Habitu Religionis Christianae ad Vitam Civilem
(), was not instituted for the end of religion – to achieve man’s sal-
vation and eternal happiness – but solely for the end of worldly security
(DHR, § , –). It is therefore improper for any state to make civil rights
and duties contingent on the fulfillment of religious rights and duties;
just as it is unacceptable for the civil authority to be opposed on relig-
ious grounds (DHR, § , –). For civil duties depend only on the com-
mands of the civil sovereign, issued for the end of civil peace, and limited
to man’s external conduct in civil life; while religious duties depend only
on the laws of God, issued for man’s eternal felicity, and concern only
his inner spiritual condition. The civil sovereign may not, therefore,
command man’s inner religious life, unless this issues in conduct threat-
ening to the republic, whereupon it ceases to be religious.
Leibniz’s iconic unity of reason and power, the sage and the prince,
thus finds its mirror inversion in Pufendorf ’s insistence that the teacher
and the prince represent distinct and mutually exclusive offices. On the
one hand, drawing on his spiritualistic Lutheranism, Pufendorf argues
that the teacher’s relation to his students is characterised by love and
emulation, to the exclusion of all coercion and all dogma, thereby allow-
ing them to seek saving truth in complete freedom, just as Christ taught
the disciples in the primitive church (DHR, §§ –, –). On the other
hand, on the basis of his own ‘statist’ natural law, Pufendorf confines
political authority to the personae of the subject and ruler, bound
together by asymmetrical duties of unconditional obedience and abso-
lute command, in so far as the ruler remains indifferent to saving truth
 Political subjecthood and civil sovereignty 
(DHR, §§ –, –). Pufendorf thus reconfigures the relation
between the pursuit of transcendent saving truth and the exercise of civil
governance by consigning each to different statuses or zones of ‘moral
space’ – the ‘kingdom of truth’ and the ‘civil kingdom’:
The kingdom of Christ therefore is a kingdom of truth, where he, by the force
of truth, brings over our souls to his obedience; and this truth has such power-
ful charms, that the kingdom of Christ needs not to be maintained by the same
forcible means and rules by which subjects must be kept in obedience to the civil
powers. And for the same reason, there need not be established a particular state
in order to propagate and preserve truth, no more than it is necessary to set up
a separate commonwealth where philosophy and the other sciences are to be
taught. (DHR, § , )
Pufendorf ’s disarticulation of civil power from transcendent truth
thus precludes the possibility of an ‘unlimited’ or total society, in which
all areas of life, unified by their common dependence on God’s univer-
sal justice, are equally open to governance. Instead, he effects the funda-
mental ‘liberal’ separation of political and religious life. He does so,
however, not to protect individual freedom from the state, but to render
the state ‘absolute’ in the political domain, by establishing that neutral-
ity to religion which signifies the expulsion of the church from the state
apparatus. This is the ‘authoritarian’ basis of Pufendorf ’s construction
of a zone of liberal religious freedoms.
We may agree with Döring, therefore, that Pufendorf ’s conception of
toleration is politically based and of limited scope, with Pufendorf refus-
ing to extend toleration to the Catholic church, on the grounds of its
refusal to accept the state’s religious neutrality (Döring ). This does
not mean, however, that Leibniz’s conception of an ecumenical faith
grounded in transcendent reason would support a more liberal form of
religious freedom. On the contrary, as we have seen, in continuing to
make political authority conditional on transcendent truth, Leibniz is
tempted to make such truth politically enforceable. Conversely, in
extending the state’s power by rendering it indifferent to transcendent
truth, Pufendorf had opened a domain of liberal rights – the domain of
conduct incapable of threatening the republic – which could be further
expanded. This expansion was undertaken by Pufendorf ’s most famous
follower, Thomasius, whose arguments for the toleration of various
heresies contrast sharply with Leibniz’s views in this regard.

The scale and significance of Pufendorf ’s reconstruction of moral and

political philosophy should now be apparent. In order to detranscen-
dentalise practical philosophy, in accordance with the desacralising of
 Pufendorf ’s civil philosophy
political governance, Pufendorf had to re-invent it. It was to this end that
he sought to replace the Christian–metaphysical cultivation of moral
personality with a pluralised conception of offices, distributed in civil
space in accordance with the ends of civil life. This also led Pufendorf
to reject the moral–philosophical mode of acceding to civil duties – via
the individual’s self-recovery of their higher rational and moral being –
in favour of a chastened recognition of the conduct that best serves a
social being in need of security. Finally, this need to reconstruct ethics
led Pufendorf to construct political sovereignty not as the means by
which man perfects his natural being, or expresses his rational being in
the political sphere, but as the means by which his moral nature is trans-
formed in accordance with the end of civil security. Pufendorf argued
that the detranscendentalising of morality and politics was conditional
on excluding neoscholastic and rationalist moral philosophy from the
domain of civil ethics. We must observe, however, that three centuries
after Pufendorf ’s campaign latter-day versions of this kind of philoso-
phy maintain dominant positions in the humanities academy – a domi-
nance felt most immediately and most ironically in the hermeneutic
assimilation of Pufendorf himself to the agendas of neo-Aristotelian
and neo-Kantian moral philosophy. Still, this dominance notwithstand-
ing, the question of the success of Pufendorf ’s reconstruction of aca-
demic ethics and politics remains open. For it is not immediately clear
whether the power of modern moral philosophy is confined to the aca-
demic sphere itself, where its sway might be treated as symptomatic of
the ‘privatisation of religion’ that attended the desacralisation of poli-
tics. Alternatively, it might be that Pufendorf ’s desacralising strategy was
never completely successful, and that the governmental means of isolat-
ing the exercise of civil authority from the pursuit of moral truth have
proved far more fragile than Pufendorf hoped. In discussing these pos-
sibilities we turn to two very different kinds of philosopher: Christian
Thomasius, sometimes described as Pufendorf ’s greatest disciple, and
Immanuel Kant, who was responsible for passing the metaphysics of
morals and politics into the ‘modern’ period.
    

Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics

.    
Christian Thomasius (–) was the leading exponent of
Pufendorfian civil philosophy in late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-
century Protestant Germany. Given that he was also a famous – or noto-
rious, depending on one’s viewpoint – anti-scholastic educational
reformer, and considering the standing he achieved as an academic, cul-
tural commentator, and jurisconsult to the Brandenburg-Prussian state,
one of the most puzzling aspects of Thomasius is his current relative
obscurity. Until very recently, in the Anglophone academy the signifi-
cance of his multifaceted work has been known only to a handful of spe-
cialists (Barnard ; Barnard ; Beck , –; Haakonssen
; Schneewind , –). The appearance of important new
studies by younger scholars suggests that this situation might be chang-
ing (Ahnert ; Hochstrasser ; P. Schröder ). Even in
Germany however Thomasius has been described as ‘forgotten’ (W.
Schmidt ). It is true that the Germanists of the s claimed him
as a hero of the Frühaufklärung, yet Frank Grunert’s bibliography suggests
that serious attention to Thomasius’ jurisprudential, political, and
ethical work is largely a post-war development, picking up momentum
during the seventies and eighties (Grunert ; Grunert a). It is
likely that this renewed interest in Thomasius, and in early modern
natural law and practical philosophy more generally, has been driven by
German moral philosophy’s post-war concern to recover an ethical basis
for politics (Dreitzel ; Dreitzel ). This, as we shall see, turns out
to be a somewhat ironic light in which to view a political jurist whose
prime concern was to find a political basis for ethics.
There are several reasons for Thomasius’ relative obscurity in the
modern period. In the first place, unlike Pufendorf ’s, Thomasius’ works
did not receive European-wide dissemination in the late seventeenth and
early eighteenth century. Here several contributory factors come into

 Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics
play. Most of Thomasius’ works were written in German rather than
Latin, which made them less open to translation and dissemination than
Pufendorf ’s accomplished Latinity. Pufendorf was also earlier in the
field than his follower, publishing the definitive civil reconstruction of
natural law in his De Jure sixteen years before Thomasius’ Institutiones
Jurisprudentiae Divinae of . These factors combined to secure the
translation and dissemination of Pufendorf ’s natural law into other
Protestant European countries which were seeking a solution to the
problem of confessional conflict via some form of desacralisation. Jean
Barbeyrac’s French translations of Pufendorf ’s De Jure () and De
Officio () – intended to make the new civil ethics and politics avail-
able to the Huguenot Diaspora – and Gershom Carmichael’s related
annotation of the De Officio () for teaching duties in the Scottish
Enlightenment, point up the more localised cultural setting within which
Thomasius’ works circulated: Protestant Germany (Mautner ;
Moore and Silverthorne ; Othmer ). Basil Kennet’s English
translation of the De Jure () and Andrew Tooke’s of the De Officio
() – no doubt feeding into English debates over the ‘religious ques-
tion’ – tell a similar story. This does not mean, however, that Thomasius’
work was narrow or provincial. On the contrary, his decision to lecture
and write in German, like Barbeyrac’s to translate Pufendorf into
French, was governed by the desire to expand the audience for civil phi-
losophy. Both men sought to reach beyond the Latinate readership of
the universities – which they regarded as mired in scholasticism and con-
fessionalism – in order to address other vernacular publics, especially the
politici and administrative nobility, many of whom were not inured to
Latin. Nonetheless, the fact that Thomasius’ works were not translated
into other national languages in the early modern period helps to
explain why they remain untranslated today.
The second reason for Thomasius’ comparative obscurity is more
intrinsic, arising from the difficulty of clarifying his intellectual relation
to Pufendorf and an associated ‘unevenness’ in his intellectual positions.
In our earlier discussion of the Preliminary Dissertation that he prefixed to
his Institutiones, we have already taken note of Thomasius’ own account
of his conversion to Pufendorfian natural law. In experiencing the full
desacralising force of Pufendorf ’s arguments, Thomasius took sides in
the intellectual civil war that was unfolding between civil and metaphys-
ical philosophy. Further, in dedicating himself to the study of politics and
German Staatsrecht – while nonetheless remaining committed to a pietis-
tic form of Lutheranism – Thomasius was heir to a mix of ‘statist’ juris-
prudence and spiritualistic theology very similar to Pufendorf ’s
 Introduction 
intellectual sources. Nonetheless, there are important differences in the
manner in which the two thinkers configured and used their common
sources.
As jurisconsults, both men belonged to the stratum of gelehrte Räte or
academic advisors to government, in which university duties were rou-
tinely combined with political ones. Without renouncing his pedagogi-
cal interests and activities, Pufendorf ’s life carried him from the
academic to the political end of this career spectrum – as can be seen in
his roles as privy councillor, secretary of state and royal historian at the
court of Charles XI of Sweden (–), and then as court historian
and judicial privy councillor at the Brandenburg-Prussian court
(–) (Döring , –; Döring ). Despite his occasional
forays as a practising advocate and his own role as a judicial adviser to
the Brandenberg-Prussian court, Thomasius’ activities were concen-
trated at the academic end of the spectrum, in his role as a founding law
professor in Brandenburg’s new University of Halle. Established by the
Hohenzollerns in , as an institution for the training of jurists and
clergy independent of the orthodox Lutheran universities, Halle pro-
vided Thomasius with a relatively safe haven from which to launch a
programme of academic-cultural reform that was broadly in keeping
with Hohenzollern Religionspolitik (Hammerstein ; Schindling ).
From here he could conduct a remarkable one-man campaign to dis-
mantle the neoscholastic curriculum and replace it with one suited to
forming the future jurists and statesmen of a deconfessionalised princely
territorial state.
If his intense engagement with the problem of cultural pedagogy gave
Thomasius’ civil philosophy a different emphasis to its Pufendorfian
model, then his version was also set apart by an associated difference in
intellectual and theological emphasis. Both writers drew on Lutheran
theological voluntarism – the doctrine of the will’s dominance of reason
and reason’s consequential incapacity for thinking transcendent ideas –
as a means of attacking metaphysics and admitting statist civil sciences
to the ethical domain. We have already suggested that Lutheran volun-
tarism was the source of an important parting of the ways in German
academic culture. For while the insistence on the inaccessibility of the
divine attributes to human understanding supported a strong separation
of revealed and natural knowledge, this could be used for two quite
different purposes. On the one hand, Lutheran fideists like Daniel
Hofmann, and later the Halle Pietists with whom Thomasius was asso-
ciated, could use it to attack neoscholastic metaphysics in order to defend
a spiritualistic theology; that is, a theology grounded in a biblicistic
 Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics
inwardness hostile to all metaphysical and rational theology (Brecht
; Sparn ). But, on the other hand, the separation of revealed
and natural knowledge and rejection of metaphysical rationalism could
also be used to secure the intellectual autonomy of ‘empirical’ sciences,
as Arnisaeus had done in his ‘instrumentalist’ political science, and
Pufendorf in his ‘empiricist’ reconstruction of natural law. Unlike
Pufendorf, in his early natural law work Thomasius remained in transi-
tion between these two anti-metaphysical strategies. In the Institutiones of
, Thomasius thus attacks the metaphysical confusion of theology
and philosophy in order to provide a secular foundation for natural law.
Yet he also uses this attack in order to admit positive biblical command-
ments, as compensations for the incapacity of natural knowledge,
thereby deviating from Pufendorf ’s strict exclusion of revealed Christian
law from the domain of natural law. The transitional character of
Thomasius’ thought in this regard accounts, perhaps, for its greater
unevenness in comparison with Pufendorf ’s – an unevenness that sees
him oscillating between a number of different intellectual and theolog-
ical positions during the s. We will return to these issues below.
If, however, Thomasius’ transition to a detranscendentalised natural
law was less clear cut and elegant than Pufendorf ’s, Thomasius none-
theless contributed something important to his mentor’s agenda.
Pufendorf had indeed realised that for the desacralisation of civil
governance to succeed it would be necessary to sever the configuration
of civil duties from the cultivation of Christian moral personality. We
have seen, moreover, that he made a fundamental contribution to this
programme through his relegation of the unified Christian–metaphysi-
cal concept of the person in favour of the pluralised construction of civil
personae. It was Thomasius’ achievement, however, to recognise the
depth of the academic-cultural transformation that would have to take
place if Pufendorf ’s projected pluralisation of civil personhood were to
take root in the educational institutions where young Protestant jurists,
officials, and statesmen acquired their intellectual deportments. These
were the circumstances in which Thomasius developed his Affektenlehre –
or doctrine of the passions. Through this moral therapeutics he sought
to take over Pufendorf ’s voluntarist and pluralist conception of civil
‘offices’, while simultaneously grounding this conception in a paideia of
passional restraint capable of displacing the intellectualist paiedeia of
Protestant neoscholasticism.
As we noted in our Introduction, Thomasius’ Preliminary Dissertation
to the Institutiones contains a good biographical pointer to the larger his-
torical significance of his programme. In attacking Alberti’s heresy
 Introduction 
allegation against Pufendorf, Thomasius identifies the two central
errors of his neoscholastic opponents. In making this charge, which
depends on the metaphysical doctrine that divine and human justice
form a single order, Alberti was applying moral–theological categories
in the domain of civil jurisprudence, where they have no business.
Further, in doing so, he was usurping ‘the power and right to declare
someone a heretic [which] belongs to no private person – even if they
were great and famous – but only to the prince’, who would himself be
best advised not to use it (PD, § , –). In these remarks we can discern
the central characteristic and driving force of Thomasius’ programme.
This lies in his recognition of the historical complicity between the
merging of the theological and civil sciences in scholastic metaphysics
and the merging of religious and political authority in confessional
society (Döring b). This recognition in turn holds the key to under-
standing the relation between the two wings of Thomasius’ remarkable
programme: on the one hand, his cultural–pedagogical campaign to
replace metaphysical scholasticism with an ‘eclectic’ array of civil sci-
ences and a privatised religion of faith and grace; and, on the other, his
political–jurisprudential campaign to strip all civil power from the relig-
ious estate, transferring this power wholly and solely to the secular sove-
reign territorial state (Dreitzel ; Wiebking ). For Thomasius,
these campaigns formed the dual wings of a single programme of
deconfessionalisation because, perhaps more clearly than any of his
contemporaries, he saw that the catastrophic linkage between the exer-
cise of political authority and the pursuit of holiness had been forged
in the theology and philosophy faculties of the confessional university.
Thomasius thus saw the struggle between metaphysical rationalism
and civil voluntarism as something far more consequential than a clash
between rival theories of moral being. He realised that, in programming
the ethical regimen through which young intellectuals relate to them-
selves and accede to their duties, these doctrines gave shape to different
deportments of the person, different kinds of moral being. In particular,
by training young intellectuals to accede to their civil powers and duties
through self-sanctifying insight into true faith or pure reason, the meta-
physical rationalism of Schulphilosophie gave rise to an intellectual deport-
ment inimical to the governance of deconfessionalised states. For this
mode of governance required that individuals accede to their civil duties
on the basis of their status as subjects of the desacralised Rechtsstaat.
Here, though, we reach the third and least tractable of all the
difficulties confronting modern attempts to understand Thomasius. For,
as we have already observed in our Introduction, since Kant the history
 Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics
of moral philosophy has been written as if metaphysical rationalism and
civil voluntarism were indeed nothing more than conflicting ideas or the-
ories, destined to be reconciled in Kant’s final discovery of the categori-
cal imperative – a pure thought giving rational law to the will. In treating
the metaphysics of transcendent insight and the ‘civics’ of political
command as the partial viewpoints of a single moral subject – thereby
setting the scene for their reconciliation in the person who commands
themselves through transcendent insight into the moral law – post-
Kantian philosophical history renders itself incapable of comprehend-
ing the historical struggle between metaphysical and civil philosophy. For
this was not a struggle within the moral person, open to resolution via a
self-reflexive moral philosophy. It was a contest between rival cultu-
ral–political groups locked in a bitter struggle to control and configure
the cultural institutions in which different moral personae were fash-
ioned. So great, though, is the obstacle posed by post-Kantian philosoph-
ical history to our understanding of Thomasius, that it demands a
dedicated discussion.

 .                     

For those of us living in ‘liberal democratic’ states, where the problems
of social pacification and social discipline have receded behind the edu-
cational, health, welfare, disciplinary, and electoral systems that con-
tinue to solve them, it requires a major effort of historical understanding
to come to terms with the cultural and political circumstances in which
Thomasius elaborated his version of civil philosophy. In this regard, we
should recall Pufendorf ’s comment regarding the state: namely, that
those ‘who have never experienced the losses consequent upon [its] non-
existence . . . because ignorant of its advantages, give no heed to it, or
at least live in it in such a way as not to value its excellence’ (DJN, .i.,
). Thomasius was confronted by circumstances in which the emer-
gent princely territorial states, operating within the Empire as a federa-
tion of independent political enterprises, were still centrally preoccupied
with the post-Westphalian problems of social pacification, deconfession-
alisation, and state-building, looking to the universities for the jurispru-
dential, political, cultural, and economic expertise that might help solve
them. The challenge to historical understanding posed by this difference
between Thomasius’ circumstances and our own becomes insurmount-
able, however, if liberal democracy is joined to the telos of post-Kantian
history of philosophy, written in terms of the progressive reconciliation
 Thomasius and the history of moral philosophy 
of intellectualism and empiricism, rationalism and voluntarism. For
under these conditions Thomasius’ programme only becomes visible to
the extent that it anticipates or deviates from a single normative line of
historical development: the reciprocal emergence of democratic society
and philosophical truth, joined in the trope of a society of rationally self-
legislating individuals.
Werner Schneiders’ Naturrecht und Liebesethik; Zur Geschichte der praktis-
chen Philosophie im Hinblick auf Christian Thomasius (Natural Law and the Ethic
of Love: On the History of Practical Philosophy with Reference to Christian
Thomasius) is the most important and influential study of Thomasius to
date, and one from which I have learned much. Nonetheless, despite its
wealth of insights, this study remains too heavily indebted to the proto-
cols of post-Kantian philosophical history to free Thomasian civil phi-
losophy from the web of misunderstanding spun around it. For all his
efforts to show Thomasius’ independent importance, Schneiders fails to
do justice to the conflictual cultural context of Thomasius’ intellectual
programme, placing him instead within the history of moral philosophy
which, in turn, remains a history of the struggle to reconcile rationalism
and voluntarism. As a result, Thomasius’ central preoccupation – his
concern to develop a statist political jurisprudence of church law
(Staatskirchenrecht) – is marginalised by Schneiders’ account. In fact it
finally settles into its accustomed post-Kantian place, as a symptom of
the ‘failure’ to reconcile voluntarism and rationalism, coercive law and
self-governing morality. In briefly negotiating Schneiders’ account, we
will find a way to relocate Thomasius outside the history of moral
philosophy.
Schneiders sets his story of Thomasius’ splitting of law and morality
or jurisprudence and moral philosophy against the teleological backdrop
provided by a philosophical–historical account of their original
harmony. According to Schneiders this harmony was first forged in the
patristic synthesis of natural law – as a body of universal rational rules
of moral and social conduct – and the philosophico-theological tradi-
tion of Caritas ordinata, or well-ordered love (Schneiders , –). This
harmonisation of natural law and moral philosophy was in turn depen-
dent on the prior synthesis of the two philosophical theologies that fed
into the teaching of Caritas ordinata: the doctrine of Platonic eros which
conceived knowledge of God in terms of the adept’s ascent of the hier-
archy of being through self-purifying intellectual love; and the Christian
agape doctrine, centred in the command to love the supreme being as
the key to salvation (–). Ignoring Thomasius’ own view that such
 Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics
syntheses amount to a ‘mish-mash of theology and philosophy’,
Schneiders treats Augustine’s version as reconciling natural law and the
ethic of love, jurisprudence and moral philosophy – just, indeed as Riley
does (). For this, Schneiders argues, allowed the Platonic hierarchy,
ascended through intellectual love of God, to be superimposed on the
ontological order of the cosmos established by divine natural law. The
Augustinian synthesis thus provided love with a ‘right’ or ‘just’ order –
supplementing sheer affect with a normative-cognitive dimension –
while simultaneously supplying the formal order of natural law with a
moral content: love of God and one’s neighbour (Schneiders ,
–). It simultaneously permitted the ascetic or therapeutic ars of
Platonic erotics to undergo a theoretical sublimation, by grounding them
in a rational theology of the moral order, or a philosophical theory of
the moral law (–).
Transposed into the Schneiders’ philosophical history, it is not surpris-
ing that Thomasius’ entire jurisprudential, pedagogical, and political
programme is made to turn on his moral philosophy, principally on
two works: the Einleitung zur Sittenlehre (Introduction to Ethics, ) and
the Ausübung der Sittenlehre (Practice of Ethics, ). Schneiders regards
Thomasius’ use of the concept vernünftige Liebe or ‘reasonable love’ in the
Einleitung as a late blooming of the Caritas ordinata tradition. In continuing
to affirm man’s capacity to conform his will to a rational knowledge of
‘just love’, this concept maintains the priority of moral theory over moral
therapeutics and, with it, the priority of moral philosophy over positivist
jurisprudence (, –). The disintegration that Schneiders sees
occurring with the Ausübung of  is therefore marked by the autonom-
ising of Thomasius’ therapeutics of passional self-restraint, now wholly
oriented to the achievement of inner tranquillity independent of rational
knowledge of the good (–, –). Under these circumstances law
can no longer attempt to enact the ‘loving justice’ originating in individ-
ual moral consciousness and becomes, by default rather than design, a
purely external discipline serving the end of civil order – a development
that Schneiders locates in Thomasius’ late natural law work, the
Fundamenta Juris Naturae et Gentium of  (–). Cut loose from moral
theory by a voluntarist doctrine of the pre-eminence of the will over
reason, and giving succour to a statist doctrine of the pre-eminence of
public security over individual reason and rights, it appears that
Thomasius’ Affektenlehre shattered the original harmony of law and moral-
ity, leaving us moderns with only the shards: a practice of private ethical
therapy, and a system of public legal coercion.
 Thomasius and the history of moral philosophy 
At this point, however, we should pause and take stock of the fact that
we have passed through the post-Kantian looking-glass. In the world
that Schneiders sketches for us on the other side, Thomasius’ separation
of law and politics from the metaphysics of morals has lost its historical
anchorage in the campaign to desacralise the culture and politics of the
early modern state. Instead, it floats before us in the distorted and anach-
ronistic form of a philosophical mistake: the positivist divorce of ethical
practice from moral theory, political governance from individual self-
governance. It is time to restore our sense of historical perspective.
In the first place, the Caritas ordinata doctrine encountered by
Thomasius and Pufendorf was not a manifestation of an early-Christian
synthesis of natural law and the Platonic love-ethic. Rather, as we
learned from our discussion of Leibniz and the neoscholastic natural
jurists (..), this doctrine was a product of the early modern conflict
between civil and metaphysical natural law. In fact it was elaborated by
such metaphysical jurists and theologians as Placcius, Veltheim, Prasch,
Rachel, Alberti, and Leibniz expressly to attack the ‘profane’ line of
natural law running from Grotius through Pufendorf to Thomasius
(Schneider ). Far from representing some sort of quasi-timeless
wisdom, the doctrine and discipline of a self-purifying ascent of the
ladder of being to the vision of God’s just love – at whose apex Leibniz
could pronounce Justitia est caritas sapientis – was in fact elaborated to
combat Pufendorf ’s rival civil derivation of duties. This, we recall,
derives political obligation from the rules required to preserve civil
peace, and was intended to uncouple law and politics from moral phi-
losophy.
The historical genesis and role of the early modern Caritas ordinata doc-
trine are revealed in an attack on Thomasius’ Affektenlehre, published in
 by someone using the nom de guerre of ‘an old theologian’. According
to this critic, in focusing on the governance of the passions Thomasius’
doctrine removes the self-purifying pursuit of holiness from natural law,
thereby allowing even statists and atheists to qualify as ethical:

So, firstly, it does not suffice for a complete Christian ethics to know how to dis-
cipline the affects – in which Herr Thomas[ius] claims the whole of ethics con-
sists – because occasionally the utterly un-Christian statists and atheists are
capable of this in a quite masterly way. But ethics also includes the doctrine of
the highest good and true felicity, whose attainment is the principal reason for
teaching and learning ethics. Further, the theory of the virtues (through which
true happiness is attained) should also illuminate a man’s immortal soul with the
brilliance of the true light of virtue, and implant there these virtues so that the
 Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics
soul may turn to God – [the God] from whom these virtues came and whose
grace and holy dwelling they lost through original sin – again ascending to
reunite with him, once more able to appear worthy and capable before God.
Just as among the pagan philosophers Plato had recognised and taught that the
true felicity consists in union with God. Because of this and other excellent doc-
trines he was called the Divine Plato. Then if I have God, so I certainly have / That
which will eternally delight me. Namely, the highest good, the highest pleasure, and
the highest tranquillity of the soul. (KTS, –)

Even in Leibniz’s rendering – focused in the claim that civil duties

should be derived from the sage’s enlightened insight into the theo-ratio-
nal conception of justice – the role of this doctrine was to defend the
right of Protestant moral theologians and philosophers to provide moral
norms for the exercise of civil power. Its abstract beauty notwithstand-
ing, the Caritas ordinata doctrine was in fact a theo-rationalist weapon of
resistance to the detranscendentalising of ethics and the desacralising of
politics. It was wielded in a ferocious and uncompromising manner by
‘Christian philosophers’ intent on preserving the civil authority of the
clerical–academic estate. Thomasius thus encountered the historical
reality of the doctrine of ‘just love’ in Alberti’s heresy allegation against
Pufendorf, and in the machinations of a phalanx of enemies – Alberti,
Johann Benedict Carpzov (the younger), and Carpzov’s brother Samuel,
pastor to the Saxon court – who succeeded in having the court ban
Thomasius from lecturing on theological topics, effectively depriving
him of his livelihood and compelling him to leave Leipzig for Halle in
 (Grunert b; Lieberwirth ).
It compromises the neutrality of scholarship therefore if the
formal–theoretical character of the Caritas ordinata doctrine is allowed to
function as the telos of philosophical history or as a norm of historical
judgment; for this leads Thomasius’ self-conscious rejection of this doc-
trine to be seen as a philosophical mistake, as a deviation from the true
history of moral philosophy. By identifying this normative doctrine with
the priority of moral theory over ethical culture – and by treating
Thomasius’ rejection of it as the source of the ‘fragmentation’ of moral-
ity and law – Schneiders fails to understand the actual role of formal the-
orisation in neoscholastic metaphysical natural law. Here, as we have
seen, formalisation is itself a type of ethical culture, tying the intellec-
tual purity of concepts to the moral purity of the one who is to think
them (.., ..). As for the ‘old theologian’, so for Leibniz and the neo-
scholastic natural jurists, formalising abstraction is a means of groom-
ing the purified or illuminated intellectual deportment required for
 Thomasius and the history of moral philosophy 
intelligising the pure ideas from which empirical ethics, law, and politics
are supposed to devolve.
Thomasius’ explicit rejection of formal moral theory must therefore
be seen as symptomatic of a conflict between two autonomous intellec-
tual cultures: namely, the civil philosophers’ regimen of passional self-
restraint – grounded in their Epicurean anthropology of the rationally
uncontrollable affects – and the metaphysicians’ culture of intellectual
self-purification, grounded in the Christian–Platonic anthropology of
the body-darkened senses. In his depiction of reason and the senses, the
‘old theologian’ is doing no more than invoking the figure of homo duplex
and thus setting the anthropological scene for an exercise in contempla-
tive self-purification: ‘Reason which has not been enlightened by God is
a false, deceptive light . . . bears a fleshly cast and is darkened by the
cloud of fleshly affects. It looks only to its own honour, praise and inter-
ests, through which man . . . becomes fickle and volatile’ (KTS, ). For
all its greater philosophical sophistication, Leibniz’s construction of
rationalist enlightenment is an improvisation on the same anthropolog-
ical theme and self-formative culture: ‘The divine perfections are con-
cealed in all things, but very few know how to discover them there.
Hence there are many who are learned without being illumined,
because they believe not God or the light but only their earthly teachers
or their external senses and so remain in the contemplation of imper-
fections’ (Lm, ; Gu, , ).
As we have noted in our discussion of his Foreword to Grotius, far
from failing to master this Christian–Platonic anthropology, Thomasius
was fully conversant with it as a ‘secret theology’, dividing its practition-
ers into the orthodox, who used it to formalise doctrine, and the esoter-
ics, who used it to practise a secret form of spiritual direction: ‘The
orthodox in fact [descend] from refining Platonic disputations regarding
the divine being, the esoterics though from the Platonic doctrine regard-
ing the end of true wisdom: namely, union with God through the way of
purification and enlightenment. So everything leads either to idle spec-
ulation or enthusiasm and, thereby, simple active Christianity is forgot-
ten’ (VG, ). Further, as we shall soon see in more detail, Thomasius was
acutely aware of the role of Christian–Platonic anthropology in con-
structing concepts of justice common to the divine and earthly realms.
Ascribing to this Christian metaphysics of law precisely the mixing of
theological and civil sciences he held to be complicit with the blurring of
religious and civil discipline in confessional society, Thomasius repudi-
ated it as unsuited to the formation of the young politici of a desacralised
 Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics
state. In failing to grasp this historical state of affairs, and in marginalis-
ing Thomasius for not grounding his positive ethics and jurisprudence
in a pure moral theory, post-Kantian history of philosophy provides
an uncanny echo of the original attacks made on Pufendorf and
Thomasius by their self-exalting metaphysical opponents.
We are now in a position to reformulate Thomasius’ relation to the
history of moral philosophy. Accepting for argument’s sake the meta-
physical conception of moral philosophy – as the discipline responsible
for uncovering the norms of moral conduct in formally theorised moral
concepts or laws – we can say that, far from failing to realise this concep-
tion through the unripeness of his time or intellect, Thomasius analysed
and repudiated it, as formative of an intellectual deportment unsuited
to those charged with the political–jurisprudential governance of civil
society. Rather than deviating from the history of metaphysical moral
philosophy, Thomasius’ civil philosophy collided with it, encountering it
as an obstacle to the secularisation of culture and politics. Moreover, he
located its weak point at precisely that place where metaphysical specu-
lation doubled as confessional enculturation: its formation of an intel-
lectual deportment that tied the performance of civil offices to the
pursuit of moral purity. Thomasius’ partitioning of law and morality –
his programme for expelling neoscholastic metaphysics of morals from
the teaching of jurisprudence and the operation of the law – was thus
not something he fell into by default, after dropping out of the true syn-
thesis of law and the love-ethic achieved by the metaphysics of Caritas
ordinata. On the contrary, it was something that he spent his life working
towards, gradually configuring the right array of civil sciences and
ethical disciplines required to form jurists capable of separating their
civil and religious duties – this being the pluralistic deportment to which
neoscholastic and rationalist metaphysics were jointly inimical.
Thomasius’ appearance in post-Kantian philosophical history – where
he personifies a process of cultural fragmentation triggered by the failure
to develop a transcendental moral philosophy – thus masks a quite
different reality: a programme of cultural secularisation and pluralisa-
tion triggered by philosophy’s failure to detranscendentalise itself.
If, then, we are to begin to understand the historical reality of
Thomasius’ deconfessionalising programme, we must forgo the frame-
work of post-Kantian philosophical history in its entirety. This must be
replaced with one capable of comprehending the way Thomasius used
the intellectual resources and social position to which he was heir, to deal
with the volatile religious and political circumstances in which he found
 The attack on metaphysical scholasticism 
himself. Rather than treating Thomasius as a minor figure in a tradition
of moral philosophy that he strenuously repudiated, we shall explore
four lines of inquiry that position him as a major force in the politi-
cal–jurisprudential deconfessionalisation of early modern society. First,
we shall observe that if Thomasius launched a campaign to destroy
metaphysical rationalism and the neoscholastic curriculum – replacing
it with an eclectic education in the civil sciences – this was because he
regarded the intellectual deportment it formed as one inimical to the
civil–pluralist comportment required by the young jurists and statesmen
of a deconfessionalising state (.). Second, in discussing the role of
Thomasius’ Affektenlehre in his reconstruction of the academic curricu-
lum, we shall concentrate on its role as an alternative paideia to the meta-
physical anthropology of neoscholasticism. This was one intended to
replace the ‘monkish’ intellectualism of metaphysical scholasticism with
a culture of self-restraint suited to the plurality of civil sciences the
young jurists would study, and the plurality of offices they would occupy
as advisers to the territorial sovereign and as citizens of the secular state
(.). Third, we shall show that in the domain of natural law, Thomasius’
Affektenlehre, while indeed offering a voluntarist alternative to metaphys-
ical rationalism, nonetheless impeded the uncoupling of jurisprudence
from moral philosophy, functioning instead as a new (detranscendental-
ised) moral-philosophical foundation for natural law (.). Finally, we
shall see that this uncoupling took place not in Thomasius’ natural law
but in his political jurisprudence or Staatsrecht, specifically in his
Staatskirchenrecht or political jurisprudence of church law, which was
Thomasius’ central preoccupation and formed the cutting edge of his
deconfessionalising programme (.). These are the four areas that now
lie open for exploration.

 .                   

Despite their good spirit and general informativeness, those accounts of
Thomasius’ educational reforms couched in terms of his enlightened
attitudes, his defence of intellectual freedom, and his concern for his stu-
dents’ moral welfare can hardly do justice to the scope or trenchancy of
Thomasius’ programme to abolish the neoscholastic curriculum and
assemble a new one in its place (Schubart-Fikentscher ). Thomasius’
programme was driven neither by his solicitude for his students, nor by
any adherence to ‘enlightenment rationality’ – he remained resolutely
hostile to metaphysical rationalism – but by his acute sense of the role of
 Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics
Protestant neoscholasticism in the culture and governance of the con-
fessional state. Thomasius probably acquired or at least honed this
awareness during his time at the University of Frankfurt an der Oder in
Brandenburg where, concerned by the standard of teaching at their
home university of Leipzig, his father Jacob had sent him to study law
(Lieberwirth , ). Gerhard Oestreich has argued that the aca-
demic culture of late-seventeenth-century Frankfurt was informed by
a mix of Cartesian philosophy, Lipsian–neo-Stoic political science,
Grotian natural law, and moderate Arminian Calvinism – in fact just the
combination of statist civil science and spiritualist theology informing
Thomasius’ version of civil philosophy (Oestreich ; Thieme b).
From this perspective, Leipzig’s reigning Protestant scholasticism –
intellectually grounded in Protestant Schulmetaphysik and institutionally
anchored in the power bloc of the theology and philosophy faculties –
must have seemed particularly offensive to Thomasius’ emerging politi-
cal and religious sensibility. Certainly, by the time the disaffected prodi-
gal returned to Leipzig in  he was armed with a programme for the
root and branch extirpation of this neoscholastic curriculum. After a few
years practising as an advocate, he joined the university as a Privatdozent
and proceeded to publicise this programme in a series of lectures, dis-
putations, and essays – later collected in the Kleine Teutsche Schriften (Shorter
German Writings ) – and in the Introductio ad Philosophiam Aulicam of
, translated into German as Einleitung zur Hof-Philosophie (Introduction
to Court Philosophy) in . If the lectures and essays sketch a wide-
ranging and far-reaching reconstruction of the arts–law curriculum,
designed to produce a propaedeutic suited to the formation of political
jurists, then the Hof-Philosophie leaves us in no doubt regarding the source
of the corruption that had ruined the academic sciences – the discipline
of metaphysics. If, in Thomasius’ eyes, the mixing of theological and
civil sciences in metaphysics had led religion into a speculative dogmat-
ics lacking all inward ethical power, then it had also corrupted law and
politics by implicating them in the miscegenation of religious and civil
authority that characterised the confessional state.

.. Dismantling the scholastic curriculum

The lectures and essays produced by Thomasius between  and 
– in which he threw down the gauntlet to Leipzig neoscholasticism and
sketched his new curriculum – are programmatic rather than systematic
works, by turns far-sighted and combative, satirical and mordant.
 The attack on metaphysical scholasticism 
Nonetheless, they were dedicated to reshaping the institutional culture
in which systematic scholarship was produced, and they remain serious
and intellectually challenging works. At their centre lies Thomasius’
acute sense of a relationship that those of us coming after Kant have the
greatest difficulty in comprehending: the relation between the elabora-
tion and transmission of particular philosophies and sciences (on the one
hand) and the formation of particular kinds of intellectual deportment
in and through this elaboration and transmission (on the other). The
prime focus of Thomasius’ concern in this regard was the neoscholastic
philosophical preparation students underwent before entering the three
higher faculties; for he regarded this preparation as wholly unsuited to
the formation of future jurists and state officials.
The character of Thomasius’ concern with his students’ philosophi-
cal preparation is signalled in the essay Wie ein junger Mensch zu informieren
sei (How a Young Man is to be Educated, ), whose sub-title runs:
‘Christian Thomas makes a proposal to university students in which he
sets out how, within a three-year period, he intends to educate a young
man – who has decided to uprightly serve God and the world in civil life
and to live as an honest and gallant man [honnet und galant homme] – in
philosophy and the particular parts of jurisprudence.’ Observing that
the university consists of the faculties of law, medicine, and theology,
‘under which philosophy is an instrument of the higher faculties, or at
least should be’, Thomasius indicates the philosophical disposition
suited to future jurists: ‘Therefore I also demand as my auditors such
individuals as do not take the mere shell of philosophy as their final goal
– and following the erroneous pagan doctrine seek their highest good in
speculation – but such as strive to turn their philosophy to the real benefit
of the human race’ (KTS, ).
Setting theology to one side – commenting only that he regrets its sec-
tarian controversies and its use of philosophy as an instrument –
Thomasius passes quickly over medicine, confessing his ignorance of
this noble art but remarking that he regards it as an ethical rather than
a scientific discipline. On reaching his own domain of jurisprudence,
however, he pauses to reflect that he has long found the philosophical
preparation given to his students unsuited to their future calling, and that
as a result:
for several years I have reflected on how I might provide that necessary instru-
ment, philosophy, in a form that one could use in jurisprudence, and [I have]
required as the type of my future auditors such individuals who have resolved
to cultivate philosophy to the degree that it is capable of establishing particular
 Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics
benefits in civil life and especially in jurisprudence. This is so that through the
propositions of philosophy [Welt-Weisheit] they will be enabled to honestly apply
their understanding and will to the needs of humanity, to support the general
peace, and to skilfully serve the commonwealth in whatever political offices it
determines. (KTS, –).
In fact Thomasius published some of the fruits of this reflection the
year before, in his essay Von den Mängeln der aristotelischen Ethik (On the Defects
of Aristotelian Ethics, ). Here he provided an acerbic analysis of the
limits of neoscholastic moral philosophy, at the same time outlining the
new arrangement of disciplines that he was assembling as a post-confes-
sional arts degree for jurists. Thomasius begins by arguing that for young
men to acquire the manners and knowledge required for prudent partic-
ipation in the affairs of life and the state, three conditions must be met:
it is necessary first that a young man seek a certain ground for exploring the
truth; next that he learn to conform his morals to the laws of virtue; and finally
he must apply himself to understanding the state of human affairs and the
republic in which he finds himself. Because in so far as men live in the world,
they live bound to each other in an orderly fashion in a civil society, and have
to observe in this condition not just the duty that binds them to the whole
human race, but also their duty to the commonwealth in which they live. They
are incapable of doing both obediently, though, unless they have already
cleansed their understanding of the common errors and are knowledgeable of
the society in which they dwell . . . (KTS, )
Aristotelian practical philosophy serves none of these purposes,
according to Thomasius. In the first place it is incapable of making
young men virtuous and for this reason does not deserve the name of
practical philosophy. A discipline worthy of the title habitus practici (prac-
tical competence) should actually form the capacity for moral action. It
is not enough for this discipline to teach a young person ‘something of
himself and his nature, [and] how capable these are of understanding
the action in question’. Rather, ‘it is above all necessary that it display
the means and manner through which a natural ability can be put to
work’ (KTS, –). Academic practical philosophy is quite incapable of
functioning in this way. On the one hand – bogged down in disputes over
the summum bonum, taught to youth in the form of metaphysical exercises,
proceeding from a cataloguing of the eleven virtues to a classification of
the species of justice – Aristotelian moral philosophy reduces to a set of
technical terms and axioms lacking all edifying power: ‘I hope therefore
that I do no injustice to Aristotelian ethics when I say that it is as inca-
pable of leading a young man to the path of virtue as a gouty foot is inca-
pable of carrying a lame man across a river’ (KTS, ). On the other
 The attack on metaphysical scholasticism 
hand, through its mixing of theology and philosophy, Aristotelian meta-
physics can claim a cultural authority that threatens the political order,
giving birth to such dangerous hybrids as ‘Christian logic’, ‘which has no
other use than to show ill-mannered individuals how they can oppose
the territorial sovereign under the cover of a hypocritical religiosity’
(KTS, ).
As a result, says Thomasius, displaying a characteristic mix of self-
promotion, intellectual audacity, and political bravado, he will redress
the defects of Aristotelian moral philosophy by developing an alterna-
tive ethics. We will reserve our discussion of Thomasius’ ethical disci-
pline for the following section, contenting ourselves for the moment with
the claim through which he signalled its distinguishing feature and so
outraged the ‘old theologian’, namely: ‘That ethics is nothing other than
a teaching and instruction in how a man should govern his affects, in
order to render them incapable of impelling him to something that
would be against the law’ (KTS, ). Thomasius also tells his auditors that
his lectures will clarify the nature of the affects and their relation to
reason, and will teach ‘the kind of general rules a man must observe to
hold his affects in check’ (KTS, ). In short, Thomasius was proposing
to remedy the practical incapacity of Aristotelian moral philosophy with
an ethical therapeutics. This discipline would relegate the intellectualist
anthropology and quasi-religious discipline of metaphysical ethics in
favour of a passional anthropology geared to a practice of self-restraint
– an Affektenlehre.
Secondly, argues Thomasius, Aristotelian practical philosophy is no
less inappropriate as a means of informing students as to the nature of
the political state and the duties they owe to it. Here, the important thing
is that future jurists and statesmen be instructed on the present post-
Westphalian condition of the German Empire, particularly with regard
to its relation to the emergent territorial states and their sovereigns. In
using Roman natural law categories and Aristotle’s typology of state-
forms to construe the Empire as a type of state – a respublica mixta – neo-
scholastic political theory is completely unsuited to this task. This
construal – maintained, we may observe, by Leibniz and the neoscholas-
tic natural jurists – is both empirically inadequate to the Empire’s actual
existence as a federation of states, and politically inappropriate, in
favouring a society of Imperial estates over the emergent system of sove-
reign territorial states. Displaying his own grounding in Conring’s civilis
prudentia and Pufendorf ’s natural law, Thomasius declares that neoscho-
lastic political and legal theory must be replaced by the teaching of a new
kind of political law or Staatsrecht. This would be a political jurisprudence
 Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics
informed by ‘Monzambano’s’ (Pufendorf ’s) empirical history of the
Empire’s actually existing political organisation, and oriented to the now
dominant political reality of the sovereign territorial state (KTS, –).
Exemplifying the new historical form of jurisprudence that he sought
to introduce into the university – and in fact anticipating the history of
early modern jurisprudence given by such modern historians as Martin
Heckel – Thomasius argues that German Staatsrecht derives not from
metaphysical concepts of justice common to the sage and God, but from
a quite different order of reality: the history of the Reformation, the
religious wars of the sixteenth century, and the Thirty Years War in par-
ticular. It was in this context that deconfessionalised political–jurispru-
dential principles were gradually assembled, in order to provide
statesmen with an agnostic juridical framework capable of containing
the fractious doctrines and passions of the warring confessional estates
(KTS, –). Emerging as the instrument of this statist deconfessional-
isation of society, the new political jurisprudence was constitutionally
disposed towards the reality of the system of independent sovereign
states established by the Treaty of Westphalia. If, therefore, the rising
generation of jurists and statesmen were to understand the nature of the
states in which they lived, they would have to have to be taught German
Staatsrecht. They would also have to master Pufendorf ’s account of the
Empire as a state that was ‘irregular’ or lacking the defining character-
istic of the state: supreme sovereignty, or the concentration of all the
powers and capacities necessary for the security of the state and its citi-
zens in a single locus of decision and action (KTS, –).
As Notker Hammerstein has shown, Thomasius’ historical approach
to the study and teaching of Staatsrecht is representative of a more general
alliance between the disciplines of law and history that was displacing
the deductive framework of metaphysics and Roman law (Hammerstein
; Hammerstein ). This transformation played an important role
in Thomasius’ reconstruction of academic practical philosophy. In fact
Thomasius proposes that philosophy or arts faculties should continue
teaching ethics, politics, and oeconomics, but in a quite new way. Rather
than approaching these disciplines through the portals of metaphysics,
which led to their being regarded as applied branches of moral philos-
ophy, students would be introduced to them via the discipline of history,
which allowed the disciplines an eclectic independence. Through the
study of sacred and profane history, and especially through the study of
the history of philosophy – the discipline that Thomasius’ father had
cultivated in search of a restraining context for rationalist metaphysics –
 The attack on metaphysical scholasticism 
students would learn to approach the different parts of practical philos-
ophy in terms of their historical contexts and objectives (KTS, ).
History thus began to emerge as the great disciplinary alternative and
rival to metaphysics. It did so by treating historical phenomena as empir-
ically autonomous, rather than as temporal manifestations of a priori or
theo-rational ideas, thereby playing a decisive role in the detranscenden-
talising of philosophy. Situated in the curriculum in this way, the civil sci-
ences were no longer to be seen as devolved branches of the theory of
being, in either the neoscholastic or Leibnizian manner. Instead, they
were to be taught in the ‘eclectic’ manner, as autonomous historical
undertakings, each with its own methodological conditions and practi-
cal ends.
It was against this backdrop that Thomasius could introduce his ver-
sions of the main branches of practical philosophy. His ethics, we have
noted, would be one divorced from the metaphysics of intellectual self-
governance, grounded in the quasi-biological passions it was meant to
shape and control, and oriented to a practical end – inner tranquillity –
to be achieved by the discipline (KTS, –). For its part, politics was
to be taught not as a branch of ethics – in terms of the prince’s role in
executing God’s will, or in terms of the state’s role in perfecting man’s
moral nature – but as a discipline for managing the state as an empiri-
cal–historical entity. In a manner reminiscent of Arnisaeus and Conring,
Thomasius argues that political science should focus on how states are
maintained and what it is that destroys them; the role of different forms
of government in realising the sovereign interests of the state; the
benefits and harms of good and bad clergy to the state; the contribution
of manufacture and trade, and so on. As a further dimension of this
practical political pedagogy he promises to teach his students a type of
political prudence (politische Klugheit) – providing them with the means to
control their emotions and compose their demeanour in threatening
public circumstances, while simultaneously penetrating the dissimula-
tions of others with whom they are conversing or negotiating (KTS,
–). Thomasius’ outline of the oeconomics curriculum, though, is far
less advanced, reflecting both the limited development of this discipline
and his limited interest in it (KTS, –). Oeconomics is treated partly
in terms of practical advice to the students on the prudent management
of their financial affairs, and partly via the rules of the prince’s ‘state-
housekeeping’ (Haushaltungskunst) – conforming to Brückner’s argument
that economics had not yet emerged as a fully independent discipline
focused on knowing and managing the national economy (Brückner
 Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics
, –). Finally, Thomasius proposed to add a fourth discipline to
practical philosophy – one for which the German language had no word
but which the Latins called decorum and the French politesse or galanterie.
Introduced as a distinct ethical domain alongside morals (honestum) and
law (justum), decorum contains the rules for managing conduct that is
neither commanded nor forbidden, but is nonetheless necessary for the
maintenance of civilised life. The rules of decorum derive from the
manners and mores of those persons whose way of living is most
esteemed, the gens du court in particular. Decorum teaches students how
to avoid incivility and impudence, to cultivate winning ways and
manners, and to engage in peaceable social intercourse with those whose
religious or moral beliefs they may not share (KTS, ).
The prime casualty of this reconstruction of the philosophical curric-
ulum is, of course, the discipline of metaphysics. As the linchpin of phil-
osophical confessionalism and the confessional university, neoscholastic
metaphysics is the bête noir of Thomasius’ deconfessionalising pro-
gramme. Schulmetaphysik both stationed the civil sciences on the lower
rungs of the ladder of being and compelled university students to accede
to their civil duties via the speculative ascent of this ladder. Thomasius’
curricular and pedagogical reforms were thus intended completely to
dismember university metaphysics – reassigning its ontological role to
history, relegating its ethics in favour of his Affektenlehre, denying it any
role in politics, and expelling it from theology – leaving only its carcass
to be picked over by logicians in search of useful categories. Thomasius
would settle for nothing less than the utter destruction of metaphysics,
in order to make way for a philosophical propaedeutic that would train
students in the ethical discipline required to govern themselves and in
the civil sciences required to govern the state.
Nonetheless, Thomasius’ reform of the arts curriculum was not gov-
erned by a simple substitution of social utility for metaphysical truth. By
treating it in this way, some commentators have sought to explain
Thomasius’ statism as the product of yet another philosophical error: his
sacrifice of transcendental norms capable of judging the state to an all-
embracing political utilitarianism (Schmidt-Biggemann a, –). In
fact Thomasius’ prime philosophical concern was not the substitution of
utility for truth but a quite different one. He was concerned with the
utility – in the broad sense of contributing to ‘human flourishing’ – of
different modes of acceding to truth. In other words, Thomasius’ fun-
damental concern was not to defend a true philosophy, but to describe
and criticise particular ways of acceding to philosophical truth in terms
 The attack on metaphysical scholasticism 
of the intellectual deportments to which they gave rise. In fact, in
approaching philosophy via an historical description of the intellectual
deportments it formed, Thomasius was playing the trump card in his
reconstruction of the arts curriculum: the historicisation of metaphysics
itself. This is the task that he essayed in the Hof-Philosophie of .

.. Historicising metaphysics

Rather than anticipating nineteenth-century utilitarianism, the Hof-
Philosophie represents the fusion of two distinctively early modern intel-
lectual currents. First, it draws on the historical approach to scholastic
metaphysics developed by Thomasius’ ‘blessed father’ Jacob, in his
Schediasma historicum of . An adherent of the classic Lutheran
dualism of revealed and natural knowledge, Jacob Thomasius objected
to the rationalist collapsing of this division in (Scotist) Aristotelian meta-
physical ontology. For this led to God being treated as a sub-species in a
hierarchy of being open to the human intellect, rather than as the
‘highest analogum’ for a reality the intellect could not know directly.
Thomasius senior sought to rectify this error by providing a history of it
(Santinello , –). Tracing its origins to the Chaldean and early-
Greek dualisms of God and matter, good and evil, Jacob viewed the phil-
osophical ‘sects’ – Aristotelian, Platonic, Stoic, Epicurean – as attempts
to reconcile the dualisms, treating neoscholastic metaphysical ontology
as the most recent such attempt. In a footnote to the Institutiones, the son
enumerates the errors which his father had discerned in the neoscholas-
tic metaphysicians:
They err when they make intelligence into a species of theoretical disposition
[habituum theoreticorum], which happens because they concern themselves too
little with practical principles. They err in confusing ontology with metaphys-
ics. [They err] In excising the theory of God from metaphysics, shifting it to a
special discipline, namely pneumatology. [They err] In presenting their modern
metaphysics as wisdom, because it is nothing more than a dictionary of various
terms, which either has no uses or else very bad ones. [They err] In that, in
pneumatology, they treat of angels and of human souls separated from the body
. . . They err when they treat the moral disposition [habitus morali] or moral virtue
[virtute morali] as if it were indistinguishable from a free disposition [wilkührlichen
habitu] and once again the forget the art [the ars ethica]. (IJD, .., fn ‘r’, )
At the same time, the Hof-Philosophie is also informed by the kind of
anti-metaphysical civil philosophy to be found in Renaissance civic
humanists such as Mario Nizoli(us) (Dreitzel , –). This current
 Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics
of civil philosophy combined a nominalist rejection of universals and
metaphysical abstraction with an empiricist epistemology, framing both
within a rhetorical conception of logic and language as instruments of
civil communication (Nizolius ). In fusing his father’s anti-sectarian
history of metaphysical ontology and the Renaissance ‘civic–nominal-
ist’ critique of metaphysics, Thomasius’ Hof-Philosophie emerged as a
powerful anti-metaphysical tract. By focusing on its sectarian merging of
theology and philosophy, Thomasius was able to diagnose university
metaphysics as a danger to both private piety and public civility.
Thomasius begins the Hof-Philosophie with a history of philosophy
whose central function is to provide a genealogy of the contemporary
struggle between the neoscholastic philosophia Christiana and the eclectic
civil philosophy of Grotius and Pufendorf (Hochstrasser , –).
Following closely in his father’s footsteps, Thomasius characterises
pagan philosophy in terms of its erroneous treatment of God and the
world, and good and evil, as co-eval principles (EHP, –). Not only
does this doctrine mark pagan philosophy’s difference from Christian
monotheism, it also indicates the original miscegenation of theology and
philosophy whose offspring was ‘sectarian philosophy’. Defined by
opposition to eclectic philosophy, sectarian philosophy signifies an ille-
gitimate natural (philosophical) appropriation of revealed (theological)
truths, giving rise to intellectual authoritarianism, discipleship, and intol-
erance of other philosophies. Thomasius’ history of philosophy is thus
not so much a history of ideas as a history of philosophical sectarianism
as a particular way of acceding to ideas.
Without attempting to capture the detail of this history we can
observe that Thomasius identifies the patristic period as the moment at
which pagan (Stoic and Platonic) philosophical sectarianism penetrated
Christian theology. It is the Platonising fathers in particular – Origen,
Chrysostom, Augustine – who are held chiefly responsible for this cross-
breeding, giving birth to the hybrid discipline of metaphysics and, with
it, the type of sectarian speculative theology that has brought great dis-
turbance to religion and civil society (EHP, –). Transmitted to the
middle ages in the form of the great scholastic systems, this sectarian
philosophy has given rise to such recent forms as the ‘papist’ Aristotelian
moral philosophy that mixes theology, philosophy, and Roman jurispru-
dence in misshapen texts that purport to discuss justice and law (EHP,
–). It was against this intolerant confessional philosophy that the
excellent Hobbes entered the field in England. But it is Grotius and
Pufendorf – those ‘two heroic men’ – who have led the renewal of moral
 The attack on metaphysical scholasticism 
philosophy. In grounding natural law in man’s need for a sociable life in
this world – rather than in his supposed insight into divine ideas – they
have paved the way for a restrained and non-sectarian eclectic philoso-
phy (EHP, –). Here we can see an early sketch of the history of
natural law that would inform the Foreword to Grotius.
Thomasius’ history of philosophy is thus one that identifies scholastic
metaphysics as the key modern form sectarian philosophy, characteris-
ing it in terms of an undesirable spiritual and civil comportment. This
is the dogmatic zeal that arises when matters of faith are espoused in the
form of philosophically demonstrable doctrines, requiring adherence to
the truth of a particular master or sect: ‘Experience and history both
teach that this sectarian philosophy . . . has provided innumerable occa-
sions for great disturbance in the church and the state’ (EHP, ). For its
part, eclectic philosophy is also advocated principally as a mode of intel-
lectual conduct, rather than as a doctrine or theory. This mode,
however, is grounded in a confession of the limits of human intellect,
which prevents us from treating any philosophy as the absolute truth. It
takes place as a restrained exercise of the freedom to choose among
various philosophies in accordance with the benefits they bring to man
and the commonwealth (EHP, –).
Having constructed the history of philosophy as a history of sects,
Thomasius proceeds to historicise the concept of philosophy itself (EHP,
–). He begins by noting the variety of meanings given to the term.
Some have used it to refer to all wisdom no matter what its principles,
including revealed theology. Others, though, have defined it in opposi-
tion to theology, restricting it to knowledge gained via natural reason.
Some, defining it in opposition to law and medicine, have identified phi-
losophy with the arts. Yet others, though, have restricted it to the liberal
arts alone. Finally, those who oppose philosophy to logic or mathemat-
ics do so in order to identify it with metaphysics or theology. Adhering
to this last meaning, the Platonic and Aristotelian sects and their neo-
scholastic heirs have attempted to make metaphysics into the essential
form of philosophy, construing it as the ‘art of arts’ and ‘science of sci-
ences’, but only by treating it as the means of acceding to divine being
or ‘being as being’. This only displays the sectarian confusion of theol-
ogy and philosophy in their teachings (EHP, –).
Thomasius uses the multiple meanings of philosophy to justify its
operational construal – as the discipline taught under this name in ‘our
academies’ – thereby defining it in opposition to law, medicine, and
theology and treating it as inclusive of the liberal arts (EHP, ). He then
 Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics
proceeds to configure this empirically defined field via a series of theo-
retical and methodological distinctions. Theology is distinguished from
the other academic sciences both by its end – eternal felicity as opposed
to civil welfare – and by its mode of cognition: revelation as distinct from
natural knowledge. Philosophy is, then, distinguished from the other
‘rational’ sciences of medicine and (natural) jurisprudence, as they have
autonomous ends – the health of the body and the soul – whereas phi-
losophy is contributory to these ends and is hence an instrumental
science (EHP, ). This allows Thomasius to characterise philosophy as:
‘that intellectual and instrumental disposition [habitus intellectualis und
instrumentalis] which considers God, his creatures, and the natural and
moral conduct of men in the light of reason, and which investigates the
causes of their conduct for the benefit of the human race’ (EHP, ).
If his history of philosophy is intended to show the temporal origins
of scholastic sectarianism, then Thomasius’ methodological demarca-
tion of philosophy is meant to reveal the intellectual grounds of this
undesirable deportment. As in the later Foreword to Grotius, Thomasius
locates these grounds in the mixing of two fundamentally distinct prin-
ciples of cognition – revealed and natural knowledge – which is reflected
in the alliance between the theology and philosophy faculties in the con-
fessional university. This mixing takes two forms: ‘When arguments for
things whose knowledge depends on the light of nature are derived
instead from the principle of revelation’, and, ‘When arguments for the
secrets of faith are drawn from the principles of reason’ (EHP, ).
Scholastic theology must bear the blame for the latter confusion, which
has been the cause of ‘the many religious troubles which have continued
from the beginning of scholastic theology until our time’ (EHP, ).
University metaphysics, though, must take responsibility for the former
which, although not as harmful, has nonetheless blurred the borders
between philosophy and theology. This has given rise to the monstrosity
of a ‘Christian philosophy’, characterised precisely by the attempt to
derive philosophical doctrines from revealed truths or to elucidate the
latter using philosophical means. These attempts have produced such
hybrids as the metaphysical distinction between essence and existence –
the notion that dogness exists independently of dogs – ‘which does not
come from the Holy Ghost’. Further, they have led to such monstrosities
as a ‘Christian physics’ and a ‘Christian ethics’, the former purporting
to explain the common creation of matter, the latter original sin, both of
which are matters of faith not reason (EHP, –).
Having shown the historical consequences of the sectarian mixing of
 The attack on metaphysical scholasticism 
philosophy and theology, and argued the need to confine philosophy to
the ends of man’s worldly happiness, Thomasius notes the broad con-
tours of his delimitation of the philosophical domain:
With the description of philosophy I have signalled that its end is the flourishing
of the human race: that is, temporal happiness. Through this description, first,
philosophy will again be separated from theology and, second, it will be denied
that the final end of theoretical philosophy is aimed at a pure contemplation –
because [theoretical philosophy] must also be rendered subordinate to those
activities that reach [only] to the flourishing of the human race, which Seneca
had already recognised in his time. (EHP, –)
Despite Thomasius’ comment that the princes themselves have decreed
the separation of philosophy and theology, this delimitation does not
mean that he is proposing the state control of philosophy in the interests
of social welfare; for he argues that academic work should be free of
political control, to the extent that it does not jeopardise civil peace.
In fact, through his history of philosophical sectarianism and his
account of the confusion of revealed and natural principles of knowl-
edge in scholasticism, Thomasius was attempting to achieve a desacral-
isation of philosophy analogous to Pufendorf ’s secularisation of natural
law. He uses the end of worldly happiness to exclude contemplation of
pure truth from civil philosophy, in the same way that Pufendorf uses
worldly security to exclude the theo-rational contemplation of pure
justice from civil jurisprudence – although, apparently, with less success.
Thomasius’ aim is thus not to teach a true philosophy backed by the state,
for that would be more philosophical sectarianism. Rather, it is to trans-
form the manner in which intellectuals would accede to philosophical
truth. Thomasius uses his history of philosophical sectarianism to reveal
the relation between philosophical doctrine and intellectual deportment.
Then he establishes the horizon of civil happiness in order to repudiate
those doctrines and deportments which purport to transcend this
horizon through access to a pure contemplative truth shared with God.
This is the manner in which Thomasius approaches neoscholastic and
Cartesian metaphysics in the Hof-Philosophie, discussing their anthropol-
ogies, conceptions of truth, and logical doctrines in terms of his history
of philosophical sectarianism and his desacralising separation of philos-
ophy from theology. Without attempting to capture the detail of this dis-
cussion, we can observe that Thomasius’ overall endeavour is to replace
the Platonised Aristotelianism of rationalist metaphysics with a natura-
listic anthropology of the passions and an eclectic mix of humanist logic
and Stoic epistemology.
 Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics
In the domain of anthropology, for example, he rejects the privileging
of the intellect entailed in Platonic and Aristotelian teaching that, as a
fragment of the divine intellect, the human soul consists in thought and
controls the body through reason (EHP, –). The Christianising of
this doctrine by the neoscholastics – who treat the body as that which dis-
tinguishes men from intellectual angels – only compounds the original
pagan mixing of theology and philosophy, by drawing philosophical
conclusions from Scripture. According to Thomasius, Descartes’ con-
ception of the mind as an incorporeal ‘thinking substance’ derives from
the same sectarian sources. Moreover, he criticises Descartes’ use of
radical doubt as a means of demonstrating this conception, arguing that
it is impossible to exclude reference to the body in accounting for thought
(EHP, –). In place of this intellectualist anthropology, Thomasius
sketches a civil Epicurean one. Here, the soul (Gemüth) is embedded in the
body by the sensory pathways that are the cause of thought, and it is tied
to society by language, whose propositional schemata organise thought
in a form suited to civil communication (EHP, ff ). Logic thus has no
relation to ontology and should be treated rather as an instrument for
teaching ‘prudence in thought’, by tying rational judgment to the social
communication of this judgment (EHP, –). Similarly Thomasius
rejects the ‘pagan’ (neo-Platonic) conception of truth as the soul’s partic-
ipation in divine intellection of the forms, or recovery of the ideas it pos-
sessed prior to its descent into the body. In its place he defends a
Epicurean-Stoic and Eclectic conception of truth as the correspondence
between the soul’s propositional schemata and the empirical states of
affairs conveyed through the senses (EHP, –). We can also observe
that he rejects Descartes’ attempt to derive the immortality of the soul
from the incorporeality of its substance, treating this as a misguided
attempt to provide a philosophical proof for a matter of faith (EHP, ).
In rejecting the anthropology, logic, and epistemology of both neo-
scholastic and Cartesian metaphysics, Thomasius was engaged in an
undertaking far more consequential than a dispute within academic phi-
losophy. Through his history of philosophical sectarianism and his anal-
ysis of the blurring of philosophical and theological modes of
knowledge, Thomasius was attempting to reshape academic philosophy
as a whole, from the viewpoint of its role in an emergent deconfession-
alised state and civil society. His interventions are thus focused not in dis-
puting particular truths, but on transforming the formative disciplines
and institutional order within which truths were configured and acceded
to.
 Detranscendentalising ethics 
Thomasius’ Hof-Philosophie is thus intended to forestall the integration
of academic disciplines into a metaphysical hierarchy, and to destroy the
pedagogy that saw students acceding to their civil sciences and duties
through the contemplative ascent of this hierarchy. Only through such a
fundamental dismemberment of the neoscholastic curriculum would it
be possible to eliminate the metaphysical assimilation of the civil sciences
to moral philosophy. This would allow politics and jurisprudence to stand
as independent historically based disciplines, and it would reduce philos-
ophy to the status of a preparatory training in the liberal arts. Without
this radical detranscendentalising of philosophy, Thomasius argues, the
deconfessionalisation of society could not take place. For the state’s
future jurists and politicians would be corrupted by a discipline that
tempted them to orient their duties and decisions to an horizon that lay
beyond civil happiness and, in doing so, denied them the restrained and
pragmatic demeanour required by their civil office. If this desacralising
of philosophy were to succeed, therefore, the students would have to be
provided with an alternative to the intellectualist ethos that sutured them
to the neoscholastic curriculum and, through it, to confessional society.
Thomasius sought to provide this alternative in the form of a therapeu-
tic for the passions.

.          

We recall the brash manner in which Thomasius announced his ethical
programme at the University of Leipzig in the late s, upbraiding
Aristotelian moral philosophy for its failure to make young men virtu-
ous, and promising to remedy this defect via a lecture series based on this
premise: ‘That ethics is nothing other than a teaching and instruction in
how a man should govern his affects, in order to render them incapable
of impelling him to something that would be against the law’ (KTS, ).
In the event, Thomasius’ forced departure from the Lutheran University
of Leipzig, engineered by his scholastic opponents, meant that this ethics
was elaborated at the University of Halle in Mark Brandenburg, whose
Calvinist ruling house was more open to non-orthodox ethical and polit-
ical doctrine. This was the setting in which Thomasius published the
Einleitung zu der Sittenlehre (Introduction to Ethics, ) and Ausübung der
Sittenlehre (Practice of Ethics, ). Despite their respective titles, the
Ausübung represents less the application of the Einleitung’s moral theory
than its supersession, on the grounds of its unsuitability for sustaining an
ethical practice. Here, therefore, I will be concentrating on the Ausübung,
 Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics
as the ‘mature’ formulation of Thomasius’ Affektenlehre which, as we shall
see in the following section, fed directly into his late natural law doctrine.
In the running commentary on the Einleitung that accompanies the
opening chapters of the Ausübung, Thomasius locates the defects of his
earlier work in its account of the relation between reason and the will.
When writing the Einleitung, says Thomasius, he had accepted the
common doctrine of the moral philosophers: namely, that bad conduct
is the product of the reason presenting erroneous ideas of good and evil
to the will, which then acts on them. Now, though, he wishes to treat the
will as the more powerful of the two capacities of the soul. In possessing
its own fundamental predispositions – to prestigious imitation and
impulsive action – it is the will that determines the disposition of reason,
giving rise to conduct uncontrollable by reason (ASL, –). The reason
for this change of view lay in Thomasius’ acceptance of the doctrine that
man is a fundamentally passional rather than rational creature, acting
not on the basis of ideas of good and evil, but driven by ‘love’, or the
desire to obtain future pleasure or avoid threatening pain. If Pufendorf
had sought to detranscendentalise ethics through his doctrine of
imposed moral offices, then Thomasius would locate man’s incapacity
for rational self-governance elsewhere – in the autarchy of the passions.
Thomasius thus signalled his departure from all forms of rationalist
moral philosophy; that is, all doctrines in which reason governs the will
through its discernment of the ideas of good and evil. Committing
himself instead to a thoroughgoing ethical voluntarism, he locates the
difference between good and evil within the passional configuration of
the will itself, in the form of the difference between two kinds of desire,
vernünftige and unvernünftige Liebe. These terms are sometimes translated
as rational and irrational love, but are perhaps better rendered as rea-
sonable and unreasonable love, in order to capture Thomasius’ basic
focus on the difference between tempered and unrestrained desire. From
reasonable love flows tranquillity of soul or peace of mind (Gemütsruhe),
the end of Thomasius’ ethic and the source of all virtues; from unrea-
sonable love, turbulence of soul, the source of all vices.
From now on let us therefore look for the origin of all errors and all misery in
the human will, so to speak. We will find it there immediately, in the simplest
manner, because all truth is simple. Tranquillity of soul is the greatest happi-
ness and its mother and daughter are reasonable love . . .
Why should we hesitate [to say it]? The well-spring of all good is love. The
well-spring of all misery is love. Be he composed as he will, a man cannot be
without love for a moment, because there is no moment in which a man does
not wish for something as good, or desire and wish its continuation.
 Detranscendentalising ethics 
But these two loves must possess different, in fact contradictory, natures,
because they cause such contradictory effects. The well-spring of all good is rea-
sonable love, so the well-spring of all evil must be unreasonable love. And here
you have the origin of universal unhappiness, unreasonable love. In fact here
you have universal unhappiness itself: namely, disturbance of the soul. (ASL,
–)
Despite its affiliation to Stoic ataraxia, Thomasius’ Gemütsruhe is not an
a-social condition characterised by indifference to and withdrawal from
worldly desires. In fact, the peace of mind achieved through reasonable
love holds the key to tranquil relations with others, making it into the
repository of the sociable virtues – friendliness, truthfulness, modesty,
peaceableness, and patience – to which the individual accedes through
restraint, purity, industriousness, and courage (ASL, –). Conversely, the
mental agitation arising from the uncontrolled desires of unreasonable
love is the mother of all the social vices – ferocity, vengefulness, licence,
envy, and malice – making it into the source of social disorder.
Arguing that without an account of the affects it is impossible for a
teacher to help his students diagnose and restrain their ruling passions,
Thomasius comments that this is a neglected and uncertain area, appar-
ently combining medical therapy, moral philosophy, and rhetoric (ASL,
–). This situation is not helped by the existence of several doctrines
of the passions, all differing over a series of basic questions: what should
be included in a typology of the affects; whether the affects are good,
evil, or indifferent; whether they can be expunged or merely restrained;
whether man shares them with the beasts (ASL, ). Thomasius then pro-
ceeds to develop his Affektenlehre via a comprehensive discussion of the
main doctrines of the passions – Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Epicurean,
and Cartesian. His prime targets, however, are Descartes’ account of the
‘passions of the soul’ and the Christian–Platonic treatment of the body–
soul relation in neoscholastic pneumatology; for these were the central
academic sources of the intellectualist moral anthropology that his pas-
sional anthropology was dedicated to combating.
It is generally agreed, says Thomasius, that affects consist in move-
ments of the soul, be these inclinations (actions) or reactions (passions).
Descartes, though, lodges these affects in the understanding rather than
the will, which seems paradoxical when one considers such affects as
love, fear, and hope. The prime reason for Descartes’ intellectualist treat-
ment of the affects lies in his treatment of wonder as an affect, in fact as
the fundamental affect, occurring prior to the distinction between good
and evil, and grounding all the other affects in a fundamental feeling of
astonishment at things not yet known (ASL, ). This leads Descartes to
 Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics
treat the understanding as the seat of a self-generated affect – wonder –
which, as both a cognition and a feeling, is also a disposition of the will,
arousing desire and action. In proceeding in this manner, Thomasius
argues, Descartes fails to distinguish thinking something from willing it
or, more generally, the actions and passions of the understanding which
have their seat in the brain, from those of the will, which are seated in
the heart:
From this consideration though it necessarily follows that the action and passion
of the will differs by nature from human thought. Hence when Descartes says
Homo dum vult, cogitat – man thinks when he wills something – he is right in so
far as thinking and willing are unified in the human soul . . . but not when he
joins other philosophers in proposing that willing and thinking are a single
thing, or more precisely: that willing consists in thinking. Because thinking
belongs only to the understanding. (ASL, –)
Descartes is therefore wrong to make thought into the essential charac-
teristic that distinguishes man from animals: ‘Because the inclination
and drive of the will is a much nobler power of the human soul than the
thinking of the understanding, in which form however [the will] is gen-
erally completely overlooked by the pagan philosophers and their follow-
ers in the universities, or else [it is] mixed with the understanding and its
thinking’ (ASL, ).
Despite his claim to superior scientific knowledge of the brain and
heart – seats of the understanding and will – Thomasius’ constant
concern throughout his discussion of intellectualist anthropology is not
with its truth or falsity as such, but with the intellectual deportment to
which it gives shape. He thus argues that while wonder is a demeanour
suited to undertaking intellectual inquiry, it should not be treated as the
essential human affect, thereby representing man as a being who governs
himself and lives his life through reason (ASL, ). Any philosophical
anthropology that does this – including that in his own Einleitung zur
Vernünft-Lehre – is suited only to the improvement of the understanding,
not to the governance of man’s moral conduct (ASL, –).
While Thomasius spends a good deal of energy attacking Descartes’
moral psychology in these terms, his prime target remains the neoscho-
lastic – Christian–Platonic and Christian–Stoic – doctrines that locate
the affects in the body by opposing them to the mind or spirit. As we have
already observed, Thomasius’ opposition to the metaphysical anthropol-
ogy of homo duplex is also grounded in his analysis of the kind of relation
to the self to which it gives rise. By treating them as corporeal drives
common to men and beasts, and by opposing them to a capacity for
 Detranscendentalising ethics 
rational self-control lodged in man’s intellectual or spiritual substance,
this intellectualist anthropology characterises the affects as intrinsically
evil, marking them out for complete eradication through rational con-
templation of the good (ASL, –). Not only is this way of relating to
the self vain and fantasmatic, it results in an inappropriate ‘monkish’
civil demeanour. By the same token, Thomasius’ construction of a ‘nat-
uralistic’ anthropology of the passions is also governed by the end of
deportment-formation. If Thomasius opposes the neoscholastic view of
the affects as the fleshly source of evil, treating them instead as morally
indifferent, that is because he is programming a different way of relating
to the self, aimed at forming a different kind of intellectual demeanour.
This is the appropriate light in which to view Thomasius’ doctrine
that such affects as anger, patience, fear, and courage arise in part from
the sensory stimulation of the blood and brain fibres, and in part from
the ruling passion or temperament of the individual who receives these
stimuli. The final shape of the affects is thus determined by whether the
person’s temperament is governed by reasonable love or by one of the
three unreasonable loves or ruling passions: ambition (Ehrgeiz), concupis-
cence (Wollust), or avarice (Geldgeiz) (ASL, –). Here, rather than
attempting to offer a ‘scientific’ or naturalistic explanation of morality,
Thomasius is providing a voluntaristic means of detranscendentalising
its culture. If the affects arise in man’s nature as a passional being, they
can be neither good nor evil in themselves, acquiring their moral char-
acter instead depending on whether they give rise to tranquillity and the
sociable virtues or agitation and the unsociable vices: ‘From this it
follows, though, that the inclinations of the soul in general are indifferent
– that is, neither good nor evil – with regard to their kinds, but are either
good in so far as they lead us to tranquillity or evil in so far as they lead
us to disturbance’ (ASL, ). By positing the moral indifference of the
affects, Thomasius detaches ethics from all concern with the soul’s
transcendent goodness or evil, allowing it to be reconfigured as a disci-
pline for managing ‘external’ conduct in civil life. This, as the ‘old the-
ologian’ noted with disgust, gives rise to a less purist and less Christian
ethics, for ‘the utterly un-Christian statists and atheists are capable of
this [management] in a quite masterly way’ (KTS, ).
The immediate objective of Thomasius’ detranscendentalising
reconstruction of ethics was to transform the manner in which those
undergoing academic moral education would relate to and cultivate
their moral selves. Thomasius’ passional anthropology forms the core of
a paideia designed to impel students to renounce the ‘rationalist’ sense of
 Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics
themselves as intellectual beings capable of governing themselves
through a supranatural thinking of pure ideas. The condition of
Thomasius’ students adopting the proper moral relation to themselves
is that they begin by recognising themselves as beings whose conduct is
irretrievably governed by some combination of ambition, lust, and
greed; for only then can they renounce all false intellectual pride and
accept the need for constant monitoring and restraint of their desires in
accordance with the ends of personal and civil tranquillity.
At the same time, this Epicurean anthropology also programmes the
spiritual exercises required to form a self capable of governing its
conduct in this manner. If conduct is driven by the passional con-
figuration of the will, then it is vain to propose the complete extirpation
of the affects through contemplative exercises in intellectual self-
purification aimed at rational autonomy. Rather, the task of ethical dis-
cipline must be to dampen and moderate the affects. The violent
passions will be restrained not through sudden rational insight into the
idea of the good, but through the gradual and constant moderation of
the desires for honour, pleasure, and wealth, with a view to arriving at
the tranquil, sociable desire of reasonable love:
This [disturbed] condition of man is certainly very evil. If he does not wish to
ruin his nature though, his return from these agitated and extraordinary move-
ments [of the soul] to calm and orderly ones can only be attained through a
series of steps. Someone suffering from gout will only gradually regain the use
of his limbs. And someone who has been dazzled will only be the more so by
normal light, unless he is exposed to it by degrees. It is therefore necessary that
one passes from extraordinary and agitated movements of the soul to peaceful
ones via less agitated ones. (ASL, –)
Finally, through this anthropology Thomasius also separates the
ethical self-cultivation of reasonable love from the (Christian–Platonic)
pursuit of salvation. Here, as Thomas Ahnert shows, Thomasius locked
horns with those neoscholastics like Johann Ludwig Prasch, who posited
a continuum between reasonable love and the Christian love that lifts
man from his corrupt state (Ahnert , –). By accepting their
corrupt state and renouncing the self-purifying ascent to the contempla-
tion of pure goodness and justice, Thomasius’ students would be
impelled to seek a more modest and useful object for their ethical labour.
Through recognition of themselves as creatures whose ambition, lust,
and greed are ineradicable – hence in constant need of monitoring and
restraint – they would forgo the vain pursuit of rational autonomy and
 Detranscendentalising ethics 
gear their ethical striving instead to the cultivation of a worldly civility
and tolerance. This was the deportment suited to their offices as servants
and citizens of a desacralised state. From now on moral philosophy
could aspire to be nothing higher than a governance of the passions
through the passions, to be achieved through naturalistic recognition of
their tranquil and agitated states, thereby setting ethics within the limits
of this-worldly civil conduct.
Seen in this context, Thomasius’ abrupt turn from the ethics of self-
restraint to the theology of grace in the final chapter of the Ausübung
would appear to be anomalous. Historians of moral philosophy have
seized on this apparent about-face as indicative of the philosophical
inadequacy of Thomasius’ supposed attempt to provide a voluntaristic
and naturalistic justification for morality. Mixing their own normative
analysis of Thomasius’ philosophical failure with biographical anec-
dotes of his ‘pietistic crisis’ of the mid-s, these historians treat the
fideistic turn of the final chapter as symptomatic of Thomasius’ alleged
failure to provide a properly rational foundation for his ethics. In Werner
Schneiders’ formulation: ‘Because Thomasius . . . had further developed
a voluntarism that proclaimed the priority of the will over the under-
standing and the dependence of the understanding on the will, he found
himself confronted, through disillusioning personal experience, by the
aporia that thought ruled by an evil will must be incapable of recognis-
ing its own evil and the true good, and, through this knowledge, improv-
ing the will’ (Schneiders , n.p.). According to Schneiders, this
intellectual and personal crisis was responsible for Thomasius’ turn to
the Pietist doctrine of divine grace at the end of the Ausübung, in a des-
perate effort to compensate for man’s incapacity to improve his own will
on the basis of rational insight into the good.
Once again, however, approaching early modern civil philosophy
from a post-Kantian perspective leads to a serious misunderstanding of
the form in which Thomasius detranscendentalises ethics and the histor-
ical circumstances in which he did so. At one level, it is evidently not true
that Thomasius’ elevation of the will over reason left him incapable of
recognising good and evil and, thereby, of improving the will. After all,
we have just seen him teaching his students that those affects are evil that
lead a person away from inner tranquillity and sociable relations with his
fellows, while those are good that lead toward this tranquillity and soci-
ability (ASL, –). Moreover, elsewhere in the Ausübung, Thomasius
converts this rule into an elaborate diagnostic grid, laying out the various
 Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics
combinations of the ruling passions and their accompanying vices, in
order to equip his students with the means of recognising and moderat-
ing their own bad desires (ASL, –).
This, of course, is not the level of analysis with which today’s moral
philosophers are concerned. For them Thomasius’ failure arises from his
alleged inability to offer a formal or theoretical justification for the goals
of personal and civil tranquillity that underpin his ethics. This would be
the kind of justification that Kant offers, when he insists on the neces-
sity of finding a principle whose goodness resides not in the ends to
which it leads – because then we must seek the goodness of these ends
ad infinitum – but in merely being beheld. It should already be clear,
however, that Thomasius cannot fail to discover this kind of justification
because he is actively not seeking such. As is signalled in the Ausübung’s
subtitle – ‘On the therapy [Arzenei] for unreasonable love and the self-
knowledge required by it’ – Thomasius’ objective is to provide his stu-
dents with a moral therapy rather than a moral theory. His aim is not to
teach them how to provide a speculative justification for the goodness of
personal tranquillity and civility. Rather, it is to equip them with an
ethical regimen through which they could conduct themselves in a
serene and civil manner, thereby transforming the ethics seminar into
the locus for a practice of secular spiritual direction or psychotherapy.
As Schneiders himself comments: ‘Generally speaking, the goal of the
theory of affects was the transformation of man through the regulation
or mastery of these affects’ (Schneiders , ).
Thomasius’ Affektenlehre is thus not an ethical practice lacking a formal
theorisation of the good. Rather, it is an ethical culture that regards such
formal theorisation as symptomatic of an alternative and undesirable
kind of ethical culture: one that purports to govern the self through con-
templative access to the concept of the good, but that gives rise to an
uncivil intellectualism. Like Pufendorf ’s description of man’s denuded
and vulnerable natural condition, Thomasius’ account of this creature’s
volatile affect-driven nature is presented not as an object of theoretical
reflection but as an occasion for chastened recognition. In this setting it
would be idle to enter into a theoretical dispute over the validity of
Thomasius’ presentation of evil in terms of the uncontrolled desires for
honour, sensuous pleasure, and wealth. For the function of this presen-
tation is to induct his students into a particular way of relating to and
conducting themselves: namely, as beings whose ruling passions require
constant monitoring and control in order to attain the inner restraint
 Detranscendentalising ethics 
required by public civility. Dorothee Kimmich argues that Thomasius’
Epicurean anthropology and cosmology are intended to encourage indi-
viduals to turn away from the pursuit of higher knowledge in order to
cultivate a self capable of meeting life’s blows and vicissitudes with inner
calm and fortitude (Kimmich , –). Thomasius’ development
of a voluntarist Affektenlehre is indicative not of his failure to offer a formal
theorisation of the good, but of his self-conscious rejection of the intel-
lectualist anthropology and demeanour involved in such theorisation,
and of his turn to an ethics of self-care and self-control.
The abrupt shift to the fideistic theology of grace and moral rebirth
that occurs in the last chapter of the Ausübung is thus not a symptom of
a desperate attempt by Thomasius to compensate for his lack of a formal
theory of morality. Rather, in its very abruptness, it signifies his way of
constructing the relation between the naturalistic ethics that he has elab-
orated in the body of the Ausübung, and the salvation that he expects his
students to pursue in a different place and capacity. Once again
Thomasius’ target is the rationalist moral philosophy taught in the uni-
versities. For, he argues, despite Luther’s teaching on the enslavement of
the will to the affects, and on the need for grace to achieve moral reno-
vation, Protestant theology and philosophy faculties have continued to
harbor the ‘papist’ doctrine that man might become regenerate through
moral philosophy itself:
So I believe that one could clearly show how, in the moral philosophy of both
kinds of Protestant university [Lutheran and Calvinist] . . ., students are taught
such principles – regarding the sufficiency of the natural capacities for the
attainment of a virtuous life – as allow if not a gross then at least a subtle papism
to take root in their hearts. After this they use the natural and sharp-tongued
pride in their subtlety for nothing other than to gloss over themselves and their
doctrines with many quibbling explanations, while damning others whom they
accuse of heresy. From this it comes about that one in fact writes and disputes
against Spinozism, Stoicism and Pelagianism, throwing around the charge of
heresy – in other words making a mountain out of a molehill when it comes to
others’ opinions but remaining unaware of the beam in one’s own eye. (ASL,
–)

Thomasius leaves us in no doubt that in his view this speculative and

intolerant blurring of ethics and theology arises from the intellectualist
doctrines of Cartesian and Aristotelian moral philosophy taught in
Protestant universities. In giving reason command over the will, this phi-
losophy ridiculously overestimates man’s capacity for autonomous
 Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics
action, such that: ‘in the process of human conduct the will sits as if on
a throne, and after consigning the sensuous desires to evil, while preserv-
ing reason from that fate, always determines itself to good or evil
through free choice’ (ASL, ).
Thomasius responds to this overestimation of man’s moral autonomy
with two counter-pointed observations. On the one hand, he argues:
‘that the natural capacity of a man to restrain his desire is very poor and
limited, therefore quite unable to remove man from his disturbed state
and bring him to the true happiness of spiritual tranquillity and reason-
able love’. On the other hand, however, this does not mean that one
should despair of the more modest programme of ethical restraint that
he has just outlined: ‘nonetheless, the reasonable propositions regarding
the moderation of the affects given in the preceding chapters [of the
Ausübung] must not be completely lost sight of ’ (ASL, ). This is the
context in which Thomasius introduces his argument regarding
the incapacity of the affect-driven will to know and govern its own evil,
formulating it in a manner virtually identical to Schneiders’ later criti-
cism: ‘We have extensively shown above that with man the will rules the
understanding, not the understanding the will. And because that which
rules in his will is evil, and yet the understanding takes it for good, how
can the understanding obtain the powers to stigmatise its ruling nature
and hold it for bad? From where will it derive the attention to notice
this?’ (ASL, ). The purpose of this argument, though, is not to destroy
the anthropological basis of his Affektenlehre, which Thomasius continues
to regard as appropriate for natural or philosophical ethics. Instead, it is
to show the inadequacy of philosophical knowledge as such for the
process of moral regeneration or the attainment of salvation; for these
lie beyond man’s natural reason and will in the domain of revelation,
faith, and grace.
Rather than reflecting a personal epistemological crisis precipitated by
his passional voluntarism, Thomasius’ use of the doctrine of man’s
moral and intellectual incapacity thus represents a self-conscious intel-
lectual strategy. Its purpose is to effect the radical separation of philo-
sophical ethics and moral theology, in fact creating a gulf between ethical
self-cultivation and the pursuit of holiness that would defy all attempts to
bridge it via intellectualist metaphysics. In short, at the conclusion of the
Ausübung, Thomasius uses the incapacity doctrine to preclude philosoph-
ical or natural theological pursuit of salvation, thereby establishing the
border between his student’s civil and religious deportments:
 Detranscendentalising ethics 
Now when the man who is stuck in his misery, and recognises that he is inca-
pable of practising the means [of ethical restraint] given in the preceding chap-
ters . . . becomes ever more really convinced of his misery and incapacity, then
one might easily think that he would find little pleasure in that but must neces-
sarily become downcast, and that philosophy or moral philosophy could not
comfort him. But this shows all the better that one must not hold the proposi-
tions of the preceding chapters in contempt. Because they show us how the
human affects should be restrained, even if at the same time leading us to see
that this could not occur through our natural capacity, but that we must wait for
this capacity and for the consolation of our sadness from a higher and holier
science . . . Where, then, moral philosophy runs out, there divine wisdom sup-
plies its lacks and defects. Moral philosophy goes no further than to allow man
to recognise his bestial condition, and to lead him from there to the condition
of humanity. How, though, he should be led from humanity and mere reason
to true Christianity, that is shown by the Holy Scriptures with the help of divine
grace. (ASL, –)

Thomasius’ Affektenlehre may thus be regarded as a paideia designed to

forestall the pursuit of salvation through metaphysical moral philosophy,
replacing this with a therapeutics of passional restraint oriented to per-
sonal tranquillity and civil peace. In keeping with his role as a pedagogue
and his campaign to overturn the scholastic curriculum, Thomasius
developed his Affektenlehre in order to augment Pufendorf ’s magisterial
destruction of Christian moral personalism. He sought a paideia that
might combat the enculturating power of Protestant scholasticism, while
yet delivering the pluralisation of offices required by Pufendorf ’s decon-
fessionalising programme. In the Ausübung this is achieved by the civil
voluntarism of the ethical therapeutic – which required Thomasius’ stu-
dents to engage in a discipline of self-restraint reaching no higher than
inner calm and outer decorum – supplemented by the fideist voluntar-
ism of the final chapter. Between them, the two voluntarisms shatter the
metaphysical continuum between civil ethics and religious morality, by
treating civility and salvation as the ends of two distinct personae – the
man and the Christian.
In dissolving the intellectualist moral philosophy responsible for uni-
fying the theological and civil sciences, Thomasius’ Affektenlehre explodes
the unified treatment of religion, ethics and political jurisprudence that
characterised the metaphysics and pedagogy of Protestant scholasti-
cism. The discipline through which Thomasius sought to reconfigure the
relations between these domains, in a manner suited to a deconfession-
alised civil society, was natural law. In the elaboration of his natural law,
 Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics
however, Thomasius’ Affektenlehre would turn out to be a mixed blessing.
For, while it offered law students access to a restrained civil persona
suited to their calling, it also threatened to interpose a new moral foun-
dation for civil governance, thereby muddying Pufendorf ’s elegant
uncoupling of political jurisprudence from moral philosophy, the exer-
cise of civil from moral authority.

 .       
Although moral voluntarism plays a key role in the Institutiones
Jurisprudentiae Divinae of , it was not until he came to write the
Fundamenta Juris Naturae et Gentium of  that Thomasius made his
Affektenlehre central to his construction of natural law. Rather than being
a fully independent work, however, the Fundamenta is a rectification and
reworking of the Institutiones. It consists of a new framework for natural
law – provided by the Affektenlehre – followed by a series of chapters, cross-
referenced to their counterparts in the Institutiones, and containing
detailed instructions to students for the emendation of the earlier doc-
trines. If we are to discuss the role of Thomasius’ anthropology of the
passions in the Fundamenta, then we must first give an account of the
Institutiones, so that we can grasp Thomasius’ view of the problems the
Affektenlehre was intended to solve.

.. Institutiones Jurisprudentiae Divinae

While no less inimical to metaphysical rationalism, Thomasius’ early
natural law work remains closer to the theological roots of voluntarism
than Pufendorf ’s. As a result, in comparison with Pufendorf ’s funda-
mental and magisterial reconstruction of natural law, Thomasius’
uncoupling of theology, moral philosophy, and jurisprudence takes a
different and more circuitous route. The marks of this difference are
evident in the title of the Institutiones Jurisprudentiae Divinae itself. For here
Thomasius was signalling his intention to construct a jurisprudence that
would encompass not just the laws enacted by men and known by
reason, but also the ‘divine positive laws’ or biblical commands willed by
God and known by revelation – at least to the degree these commands
pertained to man’s temporal happiness.
Despite the apparent anomaly, though, the inclusion of certain bibli-
cal laws within jurisprudence was in fact true to Thomasius’ deconfes-
sionalising agenda. For his objective was to transfer the authority for
 Natural law 
interpreting and applying a particular class of biblical laws – those that
could be deemed as pertaining to man’s civil welfare – from academic
theologians to academic jurists. Perhaps Thomasius saw this as a way of
dealing with the fact that even in a deconfessionalised state such as
Brandenburg-Prussia biblical law continued to play a role in the regula-
tion of civil life at the end of the seventeenth century. In any case it is
clear that while Thomasius continued to use the same deconfessionalis-
ing threshold as Pufendorf – the exclusion of all matters pertaining to
salvation from the sphere of civil governance – he could not immedi-
ately follow his mentor in superimposing this threshold on the one that
divided natural from revealed (biblical) knowledge, thereby making a
clean break between a natural jurisprudence and a revealed religion.
This residual retention of biblical law in Pufendorf ’s natural law frame-
work is responsible for the ambivalent character of Thomasius’ central
formulations in the Institutiones.
This ambivalence is visible in Thomasius’ attempt to ground the secu-
larising separation of theology and jurisprudence in a powerful theolog-
ical doctrine: namely, the doctrine of humanity’s two conditions or
Stände – the condition of innocence and undamaged human nature
(status integritatis), and the post-lapsarian condition of corrupted capac-
ities (status corruptus). According to Thomasius, natural law and divine
revealed law both originate in God’s will, which is the condition of their
agreement (IJD, .., ). Further, the two kinds of law have bound man
in both his conditions, of innocence and corruption (IJD, ..–,
–). In a footnote to this last remark Thomasius acknowledges that in
admitting revealed knowledge of man’s incorrupt state to the domain of
natural law he is deviating from Pufendorf who, as we recall, excludes
the incorrupt condition and its (Christian) laws from the domain of
natural law. In retaining the Christian two-state doctrine, Thomasius
envisages the Institutiones as prospecting a via media between Pufendorf ’s
secular voluntarism and the metaphysical rationalism of Valentin
Alberti, their common arch-enemy. Nonetheless, Thomasius’ construc-
tion of the status integritatis is one that precludes Alberti’s, Rachel’s, and
Leibniz’s treatment of it as a condition to which fallen man might return
in search of pure moral norms for the governance of civil life.
Thomasius opens the Institutiones by rehearsing the voluntarist doc-
trine that the divine being consists in pure will issuing laws, rather than
in pure thought to which man might accede through contemplation. He
supports this with the long footnote summarising his father’s repudiation
of the metaphysical conception of God – as divine intellectual being –
 Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics
for tempting man to imagine that he might conform his being to God’s,
or become holy, through thought (IJD, ..–, –). Thomasius’ use of
the two-states doctrine follows in the same vein. Beginning with the claim
that the biblical account of the Fall may be regarded as history – there-
fore as ‘a common instrument of the four faculties’ – Thomasius pro-
ceeds to give a rendition of man’s change of state that would in fact seem
to owe more to theology than history (IJD, .., ). From a condition
in which his body was flawless and immune to decay, his reason able to
penetrate the essences of things, and his will perfectly attuned to God’s,
man has passed into one in which his body is disfigured by disease and
haunted by death, his mind darkened and forever removed from nature’s
hidden essences, and his will so corrupted by affect and desire as to
render its natural conformation to God’s impossible (IJD, ..–,
–). ‘These changes in man’, Thomasius comments, ‘are so great that
we must imagine it absolutely impossible that man could improve such
imperfections through natural means in this life’ (IJD, .., ).
It is, therefore, vain of Alberti and the other metaphysicians – in fact
symptomatic of the corruption of their theology by pagan speculation
– to teach that man might know his duties through some sort of recov-
ery of his integral or holy state. As we have seen, according to this doc-
trine, man may accede to knowledge of that which is good and bad ‘in
itself ’, antecedent to God’s will, through rational participation in God’s
intelligising of such ‘perfections’ as love and justice. Such a doctrine is
impossible, according to Thomasius, because it is God’s willing that
creates moral qualities, which are therefore not available to his or anyone
else’s reason beforehand. Moreover, it is unacceptable to teach that man
might accede to pure ideas of good and evil through conceptualisation
because, following the ruin of his faculties, ‘such conceptualising
signifies an imperfection’ (IJD, .., ).
According to Thomasius, then, man accedes to moral knowledge not
through concepts shared with God but via two other paths. Like
Pufendorf, he argues that this knowledge can be gained in part through
natural knowledge of man’s own fallen nature and of the rules required
for its preservation. But, unlike Pufendorf, Thomasius argues that it may
also be gained through the positive biblical laws that God has issued to
fallen man in partial compensation for the corruption of his knowledge
and nature (IJD, .. and fn., –). For this reason, because they
purport to ground justice in transcendent or divine concepts of it, meta-
physical theologians are unable to determine the role either of natural
or of divine positive law in the sphere of civil jurisprudence.
 Natural law 
On this basis, Thomasius is able to divide up the field of natural law
in a manner suited to his deconfessionalising agenda. Theology’s proper
concern with man’s eternal felicity means that it can have no place in
‘divine jurisprudence’, whose concern is the divine and human laws
enacted to ensure man’s civil happiness, making it the exclusive preserve
of the law faculty (IJD, ..–, –). Natural law and divine positive
law, while agreeing as co-ordinate expressions of the divine will, differ in
their mode of knowing it and in their object. Natural law is known via
natural reason – in fact through the deduction of the rules required by
civil peace – and applies to conduct whose goodness or badness is deter-
mined by its agreement or non-agreement with man’s rational being.
Divine positive law, though, is known through its revelation or publica-
tion in the Bible and applies to conduct that would be otherwise morally
indifferent:
These two laws differ in that natural law has to do with conducts which neces-
sarily agree or conflict with common rational human nature. Revealed law,
though, [concerns] such conducts as are in the middle, and neither agree nor
conflict with this nature.
Because the light of nature shows that God has willed that man should be
rational and that his conduct should be subordinated to a certain norm, it
follows necessarily . . . that God will have commanded such conducts as neces-
sarily promote rational nature and will prohibit those that conflict with it. At the
same time, there are many conducts whose performance or neglect does not
disturb man’s nature, nor benefit it as such, which means that man cannot know
through rational reflection whether they are commanded or prohibited. Hence
it was necessary that this law be published. (IJD, ..–, )
With these arguments Thomasius in fact transfers the right to deter-
mine which biblical laws will be given civil effect wholly to the estate of
political jurists. The jurisconsults will use the criterion of civil welfare to
exclude all revealed law concerned with salvation from the jurispruden-
tial field. Next, they will use the threshold of moral indeterminacy to
determine when biblical law can supplement natural jurisprudence,
while finally claiming the authority to regulate the ceremonial forms of
public worship in the name of civil peace. Thomasius leaves us in no
doubt as to the political importance of these intellectual distinctions:
Moral theology teaches the Ten Commandments – which are binding on all
men – without distinguishing between natural and revealed law, and uses the
Holy Scriptures to ground both kinds of law. Generally therefore the theolo-
gians take the moral law and the natural law to be the same thing. But divine
jurisprudence separates natural law from divine revealed law, deriving the
former from the rules of sound reason (ex dictamine rectae rationis), in accordance
 Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics
with the teaching of the apostle Paul, but taking the latter purely from divine
revelation. This distinction has indescribable benefits for the discussion of the
otherwise intractable controversies over the duty of princes with regard to such
commands, and whether he has the power to dispense with them or not, over
the power and authority to make laws, and so on. (IJD, .., )
Nonetheless, despite delivering the required separation of theology
and jurisprudence, the intellectual machinery of the Institutiones remains
quite unstable. This is due to the difficulties Thomasius encounters in
reconciling the Lutheran voluntarism which he inherited from his father
and the far more radical and secularised voluntarism which he had
encountered in Pufendorf ’s natural law. The prime locus of this instabil-
ity lies in the problematic relation between the theological voluntarism
of Thomasius’ version of the two-state doctrine and the civil voluntar-
ism underpinning Pufendorf ’s doctrines of status and sovereignty. In
fact, despite their shared hostility to orthodox metaphysical natural law,
there is a crucial difference between the ways in which Thomasius and
Pufendorf construct man’s moral nature as an object of (natural law)
knowledge and governance.
For Thomasius it is the post-lapsarian corruption of the faculties that
removes man from the capacity for rational self-governance advocated
by the scholastic moral theologians and philosophers. In using the doc-
trine of man’s damaged faculties to determine that he be governed by
imposed laws rather than self-imposed reasons, Thomasius is, however,
retaining the idea of moral self-governance as the criterion for judging
man’s moral corruption and as the goal of his moral restitution – even
if the latter is impossible ‘through natural means in this life’. This means
that Thomasius treats post-lapsarian natural law and its civil applica-
tions as a surrogate for the natural law that governed man in his integral
condition, compensating for the lost capacity for moral self-governance
through a mix of prudential knowledge and civil discipline. Pufendorf,
however, despite using the doctrine of human incapacity to attack the
metaphysical rationalists, treats man’s moral nature – his weak, fractious,
sociable being – not as the ontological remnant of a more perfect kind
of moral and rational being, but simply as the ‘observable’ moral exis-
tence (natural status) whose natural laws man must deduce. In govern-
ing man’s moral nature, Pufendorf ’s natural law is thus not oriented to
a lost capacity for moral self-governance, but solely to the end of civil
security, which is the condition of preserving man’s fragile sociable exis-
tence. For Pufendorf, natural law and its civil cognate compensates not
for the higher moral being that man once was and still should be, but for
 Natural law 
the fractious sociable being that he happens to be as a matter of fact.
Pufendorf ’s natural law is oriented not the recovery of the lost status of
moral self-governance but to the construction and imposition of a new
civil status: governance by a political superior.
The Institutiones represents Thomasius’ sustained attempt to integrate
Pufendorf ’s secular voluntarist construction of natural law within the
framework of Lutheran theological voluntarism. The only intellectual
means at Thomasius’ disposal for this task was in fact the ‘dualist’ or
‘analogical’ current of Lutheran metaphysics represented by his father.
This, we recall, used the doctrine of man’s two states to separate the
theological and civil sciences – teaching that it was impossible for fallen
man to accede to revealed truth through natural reason. At the same
time, however, it could maintain an attenuated relation between the two
domains, by treating naturally known things as analogues of things
revealed through faith which yet remained inaccessible to natural
reason. Using this complex figure of thought, Thomasius is able to con-
struct his version of natural law around the inaccessibility of divine will
to rational insight. For this enables him to treat Pufendorf ’s naturally
known natural law as the analogical form of God’s hidden commands,
while treating biblical law (divine positive law) as the published or
revealed form, each form compensating in its own way for the lost
perfect knowledge characteristic of the incorrupt state.
Thomasius’ construction of natural law in the Institutiones thus steers
an unsteady path between the Aristotelian and Pufendorfian frame-
works. But the solution Thomasius arrives at is closer to Grotius’ version
of natural law than Pufendorf ’s. Thomasius thus offers a quasi-
Aristotelian derivation of natural law in terms of the laws needed to
realise an ontological essence, which makes natural law duties ontologi-
cally good. This derivation is marked in such formulations as: ‘The law
of nature is a divine law written in the heart of all men and obligating
them to do that which agrees with man’s rational nature and refrain from
that which is contrary to it’ (IJD, .., ). At the same time, though,
Thomasius is aware that this construction is problematic, as it appears
to bind God’s will to antecedent concepts of good and evil to which man
might accede. He thus attempts to hold the incipient rationalism at bay
via a second, more Pufendorfian deduction. According to this, natural
laws are simply the rules required to preserve the (sociable) nature willed
for man by God, which makes natural laws a function of civil security.
In fact the only way that Thomasius can forestall this incipient ration-
alism in the Institutiones is to treat the rational deduction of natural law
 Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics
as itself symptomatic of the limited or analogical knowledge of God’s
will available to man in his fallen condition. He does this by treating the
moral indifference of certain actions as a sign of fallen man’s incapac-
ity for natural knowledge of their true moral character, thereby deviat-
ing markedly from Pufendorf ’s secular voluntarism. Unlike Pufendorf,
who treats all ‘natural’ actions as morally indifferent – as a means of
excluding moral theology from the domain of natural law – Thomasius
treats the moral indifference of some actions as indicating the need to
supplement natural law with revealed commandments. Thomasius thus
reinterprets his mentor’s secular delimitation of ethics, treating it as
indicative of the inaccessibility – rather than the irrelevance – of the
divine mind to natural jurisprudence. In using the imputed deficiency
of natural knowledge to include a supplement of biblical law within
jurisprudence, Thomasius sacrifices the sharpness of Pufendorf ’s dis-
tinction between the secular–political and religious–theological
domains.
The Institutiones thus contains two distinct ways of desacralising the
domain of civil governance. According to the first, while necessary and
inevitable, the derivation of civil duties from the end of civil peace is a
sign of man’s corruption. According to the second (Pufendorfian) way,
the derivation of civil duties from the end of civil peace, far from approx-
imating man’s lost capacity for moral self-governance – inaccessible or
not – is in fact the means of relegating this concern in favour of a
different derivation of such duties: namely, their imposition by a politi-
cal superior as a means of governing man’s fractious sociability in accor-
dance with the end of security.
The instability arising from these two ways of ‘secularising’ natural
law is evident in Thomasius’ treatment of marriage law which, as a
nexus for religious and civil governance, was a neuralgic point for
the problem of deconfessionalisation in early modern Germany. In the
Institutiones, Thomasius offers a quasi-Aristotelian deduction of the
natural laws of marriage, but one whose final insufficiency dictates its
supplementation by biblical marriage law. As the ends of this society are
the begetting of children and the assuaging of lust, and as these ends
have been implanted in the marriage partners in the form of an inner
desire for marital society, it should be possible to derive the duties of
marriage by deducing them from these ends in accordance with the
method of natural law (IJD, ..–, ). So powerful is the ‘burning
desire’ implanted in man for the realisation of the natural ends of mar-
riage that it completely overwhelms his capacity to judge and conform
 Natural law 
himself to the duties of marriage (IJD, ..–, –). Con-
sequently, were it not for the relevant biblical injunctions regarding adul-
tery, incest, polygamy, whoring – acceded to by jurists in order to secure
man’s civil happiness – marital conduct would remain morally
indifferent (IJD, ..ff, ff).
Outside of the natural law setting of the Institutiones, however, in a
context determined by a concrete religious–political dispute over the
regulation of marriage, Thomasius adopts a position much closer to
Pufendorf ’s statism. The dispute in question had broken out over the
marriage of Maria Amalia, the Calvinist daughter of Friedrich Wilhelm
I (III) of Brandenburg, to the Lutheran Duke Moritz Wilhelm of Saxon-
Zeitz, a brother of the Electoral Prince of Saxony, where the marriage
was opposed on religious grounds (Lieberwirth , ). In  the
Lutheran theologian Philipp Müller – Provost of Magdeburg and pro-
fessor at the University of Jena – published a pamphlet in which he
attacked the marriage, using extensive biblical citation to show the
unlawfulness of such inter-faith unions. For our immediate concerns, the
most striking characteristic of Thomasius’ polemical response to this
pamphlet – given in his Fürstlicher Personen Heirat (The Marriage of Royal
Persons, ) – is how little it owes to the ‘divine law’ framework of the
Institutiones. Rather than grounding the prince’s marital duties and rights
in natural or biblical law, as mediated by his theological or juristic Räte,
here Thomasius derives them directly from positive Staatsrecht:
In fact, from that which we have . . . advanced from the Osnabruck Peace Treaty
[ie., the Treaty of Westphalia], it can be seen following it that the adherents of
the Reformed [Calvinist] religion were expressly included [in its provisions];
that they should enjoy all the privileges and rights enjoyed by the adherents of
the Augsburg Confession [Lutherans]; and that the freedom of royal persons of
both religions to marry each other, arising from divine law, was reinforced
rather than limited by that [treaty]. (ADS, , )
In other words, under the pressure of confessional disputation,
Thomasius appeals to political law not to mop up the residue of
indifferent conduct remaining from the application of natural and bib-
lical law, but as the source of autonomous duty-imposing norms. Here
therefore the role of political jurisprudence is not to compensate for a
lost capacity for rational insight into true morality. Rather it is to trans-
mit norms arising from a politically imposed pacification of society.
These are norms grounded in the political–juridical instrument that
banished all concern with true morality from the governance of civil
society: the Treaty of Westphalia.
 Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics

.. Fundamenta Juris Naturae et Gentium

Some of these ambivalences and instabilities are resolved in Thomasius’
final formulation of his natural law doctrine, the Fundamenta Juris Naturae
et Gentium of  – translated into German as Grundlehren des Natur- and
Völker-Rechts in , which is the edition I have used. Looking back at
the Institutiones Thomasius explains to his readers that with the concept
of divine positive law he had been attempting to find a middle path
between the alternatives of natural and Mosaic law and, indeed,
between Pufendorf and his scholastic opponents (FJN, Fwd, –). In
doing so he had failed to separate fully the principles of natural knowl-
edge and revelation, in part because he had located positive law in the
revealed word of God, and in part because he had failed to scrutinise
with sufficient care the central thesis of Pufendorf ’s opponents: namely,
that principles of natural law ‘must be looked for in their agreement and
non-agreement with the condition of innocence’ (FJN, Fwd, ). He soon
learned, though, that he would be reviled by the scholastics regardless of
whether he attempted to reconcile his conception of natural law with the
Bible, hence ‘the [concept of] universal positive law was renounced and
finally the hypothesis that the foundation of natural law is to be sought
in the state of innocence has henceforth been completely buried and for-
gotten’. As a result:
The constitution of natural law as we are now considering it requires that we
disregard the Holy Scriptures and the state of innocence. This is especially so
since not only has the state of innocence been utterly lost, it also cannot be
regained in this life – not to mention the fact that while the purpose of Holy
Scriptures is the blessed life in the next world, moral philosophy and the whole
of jurisprudence are aimed solely at true happiness in the present life. (FJN,
Fwd, )
In this manner, Thomasius abandoned the residual dualist or analog-
ical metaphysics of the Institutiones. Henceforth natural law was to have
no relation to an inaccessible condition of rational self-governance – not
even an analogical one – and there would be no biblical supplement for
natural law in the domain of civil jurisprudence. Thomasius thus took
the deconfessionalising threshold, which partitioned the goal of civil
happiness from that of eternal felicity, and superimposed it on the epis-
temological one that separated the principles of natural jurisprudential
knowledge from those of revealed biblical truth. In doing so, he approx-
imated Pufendorf ’s clean break between a biblical moral theology con-
cerned with salvation, and a natural ethics and jurisprudence whose
 Natural law 
ends reach no higher than civil well-being. With this, Thomasius nego-
tiated his own passage from theological to secular voluntarism, relegat-
ing the two-state conception of innocent and fallen man in favour of a
conception of man as a being whose single passional nature was the
source and object of naturally known ethical and political duties.
Nonetheless, despite arriving at an intellectual destination similar to
Pufendorf ’s, Thomasius had taken a very different route. If Pufendorf
had secularised natural law by decoupling the recognition of civil duties
from the cultivation of moral personality – specifically from the
Christian–metaphysical contemplative integration of the person – then
Thomasius did so by secularising the cultivation of moral personality
itself. As we shall now see, this means that Thomasius’ construction of
natural law continues to differ in important regards from Pufendorf ’s.
For, in contradistinction to Pufendorf ’s conception of the imposed char-
acter of civil offices, Thomasius’ foundational appeal to a quasi-
Epicurean moral anthropology allows civil duties to remain grounded in
a practice of moral cultivation, albeit a very different practice to the con-
templative exercises of the Christian rationalists.
The first three chapters of the Fundamenta – in which Thomasius out-
lines his image of man as a being whose will is governed by corporeally
rooted passions quite outside the reach of intellectual control – are little
more than a summary of the Ausübung der Sittenlehre, minus the latter’s
ideal of reasonable love and the fideist conclusion. In the Fundamenta
Thomasius uses his Affektenlehre to mount a frontal assault on metaphys-
ical moral philosophy and Christian natural law (FJN, ..–, –).
If man is governed by his affects, specifically by the three dominant pas-
sions of ambition, lust, and greed, this is not because he has fallen from
a higher condition of rational self-governance but is simply the result of
the kind of natural being that he is. Like all such beings, man is driven
by the desire to preserve himself and consequently is attracted to that
which sustains his life and well-being and repelled by that which threat-
ens it. These visceral feelings of attraction and repulsion, giving rise to
the affects of hope and fear, are the primitive source of moral judgment
and natural law.
From the perspective of this ethical naturalism, and apparently mis-
understanding the full significance of Pufendorf ’s doctrine of imposed
entia moralia, Thomasius declares that the scholastics and Pufendorf
share a common error: they make a sharp distinction between man’s
moral and physical nature. For the will is both driven by the physiologi-
cal powers of the passions and yet functions as the source of their moral
 Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics
governance. This means that the will must achieve moral governance in
and through these powers: ‘The moral nature of man is thus a concept
of the power to will through forces controlled by the will. Because of this
the physical nature of man is not rightly opposed to the moral nature of
man, nor absolutely and finally to the intellectual [vernünftigen] or ratio-
nal [verständlichen] nature of man’ (FJN, ..–, ). Yet the will is never
rational in the sense of acting on the basis of ideas, for these are the
exclusive preserve of the understanding. For its part the understanding
is capable of discerning the ‘truly good’ – that is, the conduct that pre-
serves man’s life and happiness – but only on the basis of a prior calming
of the passions. This tempering is a work of the will on the will, requir-
ing the arousal of passions – hope and fear – to effect a restraint of the
passions (FJN, ..–, –).
With his Affektenlehre in place, Thomasius is ready to announce the end
of the metaphysical moral philosophy and its replacement by a disci-
pline for governing the passions. Arguing that if the will is governed by
the balance of passional powers then it is meaningless to talk of freedom
of the will – in the sense of its freedom to choose on the basis of moral
ideas – Thomasius declares with an overly optimistic flourish: ‘Now, if
the will has no freedom to choose, then undoubtedly the whole of scho-
lastic moral philosophy falls to the ground’ (FJN, .., ). Nonetheless,
while not itself free, the will can be restrained. This gives rise to actions
that are ‘free-willed’ in the sense of being chosen on the basis of a rec-
ognition – itself dependent on the calming of the passions – of the
conduct required to give man a long and happy life. This degree of
freedom is enough for individuals to be held responsible for their actions
(FJN, ..–, –). Moral philosophy of the standard intellectualist
kind must therefore be replaced by a ‘moral discipline’ that will provide
individuals with the capacity to moderate their passions, thereby allow-
ing their reason to judge the conduct conducive to man’s civil happiness
(FJN, .., ). Thomasius thus uses his quasi-Epicurean anthropology
in order to expunge the residual theological aspects of his construction
of natural law in the Institutiones, and to ground the naturalistic construc-
tion of the Fundamenta. At the heart of the Fundamenta lies the conception
of man as a being whose civil happiness is dependent on the ethical and
juridical restraint of his unruly passional nature.
As we have already noted, constituting the moral self as a physiolog-
ical phenomenon is Thomasius’ way of allowing it to be approached in
a detranscendentalised manner, as something open to empirical obser-
vation and practical control in accordance with worldly ends: ‘For moral
 Natural law 
nature also belongs in a certain manner to physics, because it depends
upon and is driven by the will, whose treatment belongs to physics [ie.,
the science of corporeal things]’ (FJN, .., ). Only thus could those
who had been exposed to university metaphysics learn to refrain from
approaching their moral self in a grandiloquent sacralising manner; as
if it were the imago Dei or as the remnant spark of divine reason; as if it
were something known only through the purifying contemplation of a
priori concepts, and conformed to such exalted ends as purity of will,
selfless love, and union with God. Thomasius’ ethical naturalism is thus
intended to detach the cultivation of civil duties from the self-exalting
pursuit of ends akin to holiness, and to ensure instead that such duties
would be acceded to through a practice of passional restraint geared to
the ends of personal civility and social peace.
Nonetheless, in failing to comprehend and follow Pufendorf ’s far
more radical detranscendentalising of ethics – via the doctrine of
imposed offices – Thomasius’ natural law remains closer to moral phi-
losophy than his mentor’s. Pufendorf ’s argument is that man’s natural
goods only cross the threshold of morality through their conversion into
duties through the imposition of offices, without which man is incapable
governing his liberty in accordance with natural law. Thomasius’ argu-
ment is that inner tranquillity is itself a natural good from which natural
law duties may be derived. We cannot agree then with those commen-
tators who see Thomasius’ attempt to provide an ethical basis for polit-
ical commands as superseding Pufendorf ’s framework (Schneewind
, –). In fact Thomasius’ naturalist anthropology of the pas-
sions is an attempt to reach the same destination as Pufendorf ’s anti-
naturalist doctrine of imposed offices: a secular deconfessionalised
construction of natural law governed by the end of social peace. More
to the point, in rejecting Pufendorf ’s radical divorce of the imposition of
civil offices from the cultivation of moral personality, it seems likely that
Thomasius makes his path to this end ever more circuitous and
protracted.
The problems encountered in this regard are focused in two related
aspects of the construction of natural law duties in the Fundamenta. First,
Thomasius’ passional anthropology leads him to establish a continuum
between inner self-restraint and external juridical coercion, as steps on
a single hierarchy of governance. In tying duties to man’s passional
nature, Thomasius is thus deviating markedly from Pufendorf. For, in
regarding civil disturbance as the result of the unrestrained inner pas-
sions breaking out into anti-social conduct, Thomasius treats legal
 Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics
coercion as compensating for the failure of moral self-governance. In a
reciprocal manner, he simultaneously treats inner self-restraint as a
higher form of the civil governance exercised through external coercion.
Despite a good deal of commentary to the contrary, then, the predom-
inant construction of natural law in the Fundamenta is characterised not
by a sharp break between morality and law but by a series of graduated
steps linking moral self-restraint to legal coercion.
There are, Thomasius argues (almost certainly against Pufendorf),
two forms of obligation. Inner obligation arises from restraint of the pas-
sions, gives rise to knowledge of what it is that makes for a long and
happy life, and issues in the wise man’s counsel. Outer obligation comes
from the administration of fear and hope, compels the ‘fools’ – or those
incapable of inner restraint – to keep their conduct within the bounds
of civil peace, and is embodied in the ruler’s command backed by sanc-
tion (FJN, ..–, –). The two forms of obligation though are both
directed to the same end – securing inner and outer peace in accordance
with the end of natural law – which means that morality and law are
joined on a single hierarchy of governance:
Further, given that the fools show through their actions that they lack inner calm
and are thus incapable of promoting or preserving outer calm – in fact that they
cause the disturbance of outer calm – it follows that the norm of a wise man,
whose purpose is to lead the fools from unhappiness to happiness, is oriented to
three main points: to the achievement of inner calm, or, the restraint of the fool-
ishness of the three main desires; to the promotion of external calm through
peaceable actions; [and] to avoiding the disruption of outer [public] calm by
refraining from actions that disturb the peace. (FJN, .., )
To achieve the right distribution of friendly counsel and coercive
command across this hierarchy the wise man must have regard to ‘the
degrees of foolishness’. The greatest fools, who disrupt outer peace and
disturb the freedom of others, require command to the exclusion of
counsel. The ‘middling’ fools do not disrupt social peace but neither do
they cultivate the good-will and friendship of others. Hence their
governance can be largely based on counsel with a view to rectifying this
defect, while not excluding command should their lack of winning ways
give rise to social disturbance. The least foolish, though, because they
neither disturb social peace nor lack the ability to win the good-will of
others, require no commands and should be governed solely through
counsel aimed at reinforcing their capacity for passional self-restraint
(FJN, I..–, –). Actions can thus be divided into good, evil, and
‘middling’ or indifferent – depending on whether they are oriented to
 Natural law 
the attainment of inner calm, the disruption of external peace, or
neither disturb nor promote social peace, but seek it without cultivating
inner calm: ‘here you have the sources of the three-fold good of the hon-
ourable [ehrlichen], the decent [anständigen] and the just [gerechten]’ (FJN,
.., ).
The second obstacle to Thomasius’ full ‘political’ desacralisation of
natural law comes in the figure of the sage. Clearly, in situating legal
coercion as compensating for the failure of moral self-governance,
Thomasius establishes a hierarchical continuum between law and
morality. The wise man is described as unifying the three kinds of good-
ness: ‘Nevertheless, this threefold good should not be separated and
divided. Because he is not wise who does not live virtuously, decently and
justly at the same time’ (FJN, .., ). Thomasius thus exhorts his stu-
dents to govern themselves by beginning with the least perfect of the
three goods, law-abiding conduct, and work their way up through civil-
ity to the inner tranquillity arising from self-restraint of the passions
(FJN, .., ). Moreover, this way of relating law and morality fails to
avoid the political chiliasm that had been characteristic of moral-philo-
sophical accounts of law and that would resurface again in Kant’s
account of the law–morality relation. For, if legal coercion is a compen-
sation for the failure of moral self-governance, then it is possible that with
the general attainment of the latter there might be no further need for
the coercive legal governance of society. Finally, this secularised escha-
tology haunts Thomasius’ construction of the relation between legal
obligation and individual right in the Fundamenta. If the imposition of
legal obligation is construed as merely clearing away the obstacles stand-
ing in the way of rights arising from the capacity for moral self-gover-
nance, then these rights – to a long and happy life – appear as grounded
in the individual moral personality. This, of course, is quite unlike
Pufendorf ’s view of them as reflexes of the duties imposed by a superior
for the governance of man’s permanently dangerous liberty. Thomasius’
view of the state as the natural complement to man’s capacity for moral
self-cultivation is, we recall, precisely the teleological account that
Pufendorf rejects, commenting that it ‘presupposes a kind of civil state
wherein citizens are without any fault and wickedness, when in fact states
are a sort of remedy for human imperfection’ (DSH, § , ).
Nonetheless, despite the continuum that Thomasius’ moral anthro-
pology introduces to the law–morality relation, his conception of this
relation is also informed by a second, more disjunctive treatment of it.
This second construction is also focused in the relation between inner
 Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics
and outer obligation, but here Thomasius treats the latter form of obli-
gation – imposed by a superior possessing the means of coercion – as
autonomous of inner moral obligation, rather than as conditional on its
failure. He thus rejoins Pufendorf in arguing that all right comes from
externally imposed obligation, as no-one can obligate themselves or
claim a right over themselves, which means that: ‘all right is external not
internal’ (FJN, ..–, ). On this construction, rights in the sense of
the performance of compellable duties arise wholly from the sphere of
justice, now conceived as an autonomous domain of external obligations
imposed by a political superior, while decorum and morality do not give
rise to rights at all – not even to ‘imperfect’ ones (FJN, ..–, –). At
this point then the hierarchical relation between morality and law falls
apart, as the different modes in which individuals accede to their obliga-
tions no longer form a continuum and arise in fact from autonomous
modes of governing human conduct:
From this it follows that what a man does from inner obligation, and in accor-
dance with the rules of morality and decorum, is specifically governed by virtue;
so that this man should be called virtuous [tugendhaft] rather than law-abiding
[gerecht]. But that which a man does in accordance with the rules of justice, or
from external obligation, is governed by justice, and on the basis of such actions
he would be called law-abiding. (FJN, .., )
According to Thomasius’ second, Pufendorfian, construction of
natural law, then, the coercive character of justice or civil law arises not
from its role in compensating for the failure of moral self-restraint but
from a different source: the fact that these laws serve ends determined
by rulers possessing the means of compulsion. Moral counsel and polit-
ical command thus fall into different domains, as the end of civil peace
is construed not as the outer expression of inner moral tranquillity, but
as a purely public condition reached through the application of the
means of political–juridical coercion to external conduct (FJN, ..–,
). On this construction, law is not a less perfect form of governance
than morality and decorum but simply a different one, based in the
autonomous end of social pacification. This construction is thus incom-
patible with the doctrine of a continuum between law and morality, and
with the eschatological conception of a society of self-governing individ-
uals possessing individual rights.
The manner in which politics and law are admitted to the domain
of moral philosophy – that is, the way in which moral philosophy is
desacralised – differs significantly between these two constructions.
For, according to the first, the coercively imposed rules of outer peace
 Natural law 
prescribed by political jurisprudence are extensions of the self-imposed
rules for the inner restraint of the passions. This means that political
command (Herrschaft) and moral counsel (Ratschlag) meet in a single
subject. This is the political jurist as Epicurean sage, who is capable of
calibrating the ‘degrees of foolishness’ separating morality, decorum,
and law, and thereby determining when the state should intervene to
reinforce virtue or, conversely, when self-governing virtue makes the
state redundant. In construing him as sage, Thomasius thus envisages
the political jurist assuming the role once played by theologians in setting
the moral parameters of political governance. According to the second
construction, however, the compulsory duties prescribed by political
jurisprudence arise solely from the state’s interest in social peace, inde-
pendently of all concerns with inner ethical self-restraint. Here, then,
the political jurist is not the integral wise man of moral philosophy but
an adviser whose expertise is bound to the exercise of political
command, so that the role of political jurisprudence is to set the politi-
cal parameters of moral culture.
We can see the role that he envisaged for the first, ethically based, con-
ception of the morality–law relation in Thomasius’ new treatment of
marital duties in the Fundamenta. Here he revises the account of marital
duties given in the Institutiones, repudiating his own earlier treatment of
lust as symptomatic of fallen man’s complete incapacity to govern
himself in accordance with natural law. Lust, Thomasius now argues, is
no more powerful than the passions of ambition and greed, and all can
be controlled through the rules of morality, decency, and justice (FJN,
.., ). There is thus no residue of indifferent conduct awaiting
determination by biblical law – a strategy that Thomasius now
denounces as ‘papist’. For those duties not determined by the rules of
justice in the strict sense – monogamy and permanent cohabitation, for
example – can certainly be determined by the rules of morality and
decorum, as being necessary for the moderation of desire or the decent
rearing of children (FJN, .., –). The problem with this solution,
however, is that it assumes the existence of a civil society already in pos-
session of a deconfessionalised capacity for moral self-governance,
capable of cultivating its duties – including its marital duties – in a tol-
erant and civil manner, in accordance with the secular ends of personal
and civil tranquillity. We need only recall provost Müller’s attack on
inter-faith marriages, however – which he treats as tantamount to pro-
faning the sacrament through union with the infidel – to recognise that
the German societies had not yet reached this pacified condition.
 Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics
It should not surprise us, then, that as soon as Thomasius is con-
fronted by morality which is not in the required secularised civil form –
that is, as soon as he re-engages with the still-prevalent religious deter-
mination of civil duties – the posited continuum between moral counsel
and political command, the teacher and the ruler, falls to pieces, and
with it Thomasius’ conception of ‘natural law in the broad sense’. This
happens most strikingly in the first chapter of Book , ‘On Man’s Duties
to God’, where Thomasius is recasting his earlier account of natural law
religious duties. For here, despite his wish to construct these duties by
applying the rules of morality, decorum, and justice, Thomasius must
confront the fact that the moral–theological and political–juridical
determinations of religious duties are in conflict, precluding the appeal
to a single moral hierarchy of governance, and forcing the wise man to
negotiate between conflicting ethical ends:
[The wise man] must explain the principles of the whole rights of princes in
religious affairs together with the foresight enabling one to prevent a prince
being oppressed by teachers or priests. [He must also explain] how one should
take the middle path when a prince seeks to alter external religious worship, so
that he neither tyrannises over conscience nor allows too much scope to those
who under the pretext of their conscience foment disorder in the republic. (FJN,
.., )
Rather than reconciling moral counsel and political command,
teacher and prince in a unifying natural law hierarchy, the political jurist
is now forced to establish a different and less harmonious kind of hier-
archy: ‘There must be a thorough demonstration of the agreement and
difference between political rule [Herrschaft], religious ministry and
teaching, together with their necessary friendship and interconnection,
that is nevertheless associated with the necessary dependence of minis-
try and teaching on political rule’ (FJN, .., ). This fracturing of the
law–morality continuum, and the emergent dominance of the political
over the clerical and academic estates, arises from the fact that, in relig-
ion, the political jurist must deal with a morality that threatens the ulti-
mate end of social peace:
One must deal with the injustice of wars against other peoples on the grounds
of religion or Reformation . . .
The justice and injustice of civil wars caused by religion – both in the case of
authorities attempting to impose a new religion and in that of subjects wishing
to preserve the old one – must also be dealt with.
One must show who may decide such a question, whether it is the religious
or the secular scholars, whether theologians or jurists or both are entitled.
 From moral philosophy to political jurisprudence 
One must treat of measures in a republic and of complaints [against them]
arising from religion, whether and how far such [complaints] should be permit-
ted. (FJN, ..–, –)
Faced with the existence of moral communities conformed to inter-
nally homogenous and mutually hostile religious anthropologies, the
presuppositions of a general natural law ethics based on a secularised
moral anthropology begin to buckle. In such circumstances, rather than
providing it with an ethical basis, communal moral self-governance pro-
vides political governance with one of its most intractable problems.
Under this pressure, the unity of moral counsel and political command
symbolised by the academic sage breaks down, and the political jurist
begins to assume a different form, as the bearer of a political science
formed in and for the state:
But not all auditors are suitable for this doctrine. It is in fact a true state secret
[Königliches Geheimniß]. Accordingly it is to be presented only to adults who are
capable of discretion, who have given clear proof that they have progressed a
certain way along the path of wisdom, and who are devoted not to the univer-
sity but to government. (FJN, .., )
Moreover, Thomasius offers tacit acknowledgement of his own error in
presuming that a science dealing with the political regulation of religion
could be addressed to a general moral community.
In this regard we should accordingly confess our own lack of circumspection,
in that we have until now carelessly revealed many truths belonging to this
science. For there are numerous examples to hand showing how irrationally
they act who present counsel pertaining to religious matters in public writings,
even when they are by no means unreasonable in other matters. (FJN, ..,
)
With this confession, though, we reach the limits of Thomasius’ natural
law, whose attachment to a single moral anthropology finally renders it
incapable of detaching the political jurist from the moral philosopher.

 .                  

In the event, Thomasius’ uncoupling of law and politics from theology
and moral philosophy – of the exercise of civil power from the pursuit
of moral truth – finds its definitive formulation not in his natural law
works but in his political jurisprudence, in particular his political juris-
prudence of church law (Staatskirchenrecht). Here, in a series of works that
are indeed addressed to ‘adults who are capable of discretion . . . and
 Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics
who are devoted not to the university but to government’, he outlines a
profound and ambitious dual programme – for the desacralisation of the
state, and the spiritualisation of religion.
The influence of Pufendorf ’s political and theological writing on
Thomasius’ Staatskirchenrecht is clear in its central text, the posthumously
published Vollständige Erläuterung der Kirchenrechts-Gelahrtheit oder Gründliche
Abhandlung vom Verhältniß der Religion gegen den Staat (Complete Explanation of
the Jurisprudence of Church Law or Fundamental Treatise on the Relation of
Religion to the State) of . The first volume of the Vollständige Erläuterung
consists of a reprint of Pufendorf ’s De Habitu Religionis Christianae ad Vitam
Civilem (On the Nature of Religion in Relation to Civil Society, ), in Latin
and German, accompanied by Thomasius’ extensive commentary. The
second volume appears to be an edited version of Thomasius’ lectures
on Staatskirchenrecht. In addition to this compendium on church law and
governance, Thomasius also published an important series of disputa-
tions dealing with the state’s rights in religious affairs. We shall be con-
cerned with two of these dissertations in particular: Vom Recht evangelischer
Fürsten in Mitteldingen oder Kirchenzeremonien (De Jure Principis circa Adiaphora,
Of the Right of Protestant Princes in Middle-Things or Religious Ceremonies, )
and Das Recht evangelischer Fürsten in theologischen Streitigkeiten (The Right of
Protestant Princes in Theological Controversies, ). Of these two disserta-
tions only the latter is cited as co-authored with Thomasius’ student
Enno Rudolph Brenneysen, despite the fact that Brenneysen also co-
wrote the former, albeit under Thomasius’ professorial direction.
In these works Thomasius addresses the concrete problem of how to
construct a political–judicial programme for detaching the exercise of
civil power from the forms of religious authority. Moreover, he did so
under circumstances in which most citizens were still learning their civil
duties through religious instruction, and in which most theologians and
philosophers were still teaching that individuals acceded to their civil
duties via their Christian moral personality. If, as we have suggested, its
foundation in moral anthropology ultimately rendered Thomasius’
natural law incapable of dealing with these circumstances, this is
because it meant that he continued to ground civil power in a particular
way of acceding to moral truth. This is the lesson to be learned from the
figure of the Epicurean sage in the Fundamenta, who sets the thresholds
between morality and law through his own exemplary moral self-
governance. Under historical circumstances, however, in which the
linkage between political rule and communal moral culture continued
to threaten social peace with religious civil war, Thomasius’ natural law
 From moral philosophy to political jurisprudence 
reached its limits – as indeed did all the other forms of natural law that
grounded civil duties in moral anthropology. For, in the sphere of polit-
ical decision per se, what these circumstances demanded was not a better
(deconfessionalised) moral culture for the ruler, but a radical uncoupling
of political rule from moral culture, security from sanctity, the prince
from the sage.
This helps to explain why key Pufendorfian doctrines that play no role
in Thomasius’ natural law – the doctrines of imposed offices and
‘absolute’ sovereignty – suddenly become central to Thomasius’
Staatskirchenrecht. In taking up Pufendorf ’s officio doctrine in this new
context, Thomasius uses it consign the pursuit of moral truth and the
imposition of civil obligation to two distinct offices – those of the teacher
and the prince – thereby suspending all moral–philosophical founda-
tions for civil governance, including his own. He does so in order to con-
struct a political jurisprudence capable of meeting the contingency in
which all religious and moral doctrine – true or false – was capable of
threatening social peace, and therefore had to be regulated indepen-
dently of its veracity.
We have already observed, however, that Thomasius’ political juris-
prudence of church governance is not grounded in an all-embracing
rationalist philosophy, designed to extirpate religion or to transform it
into an expression of man’s rational autonomy. On the contrary,
Thomasius’ Staatskirchenrecht is grounded in two interrelated doctrinal
fields – a spiritualist theology and a statist politics – designed to support
a dual programme: the spiritualisation of religion and the desacralisa-
tion of politics. The result of this dual formulation is a Staatskirchenrecht
in which the ‘visible church’ and the clerical estate are to be excluded
from all exercise of civil power, but in which the state must exercise its
power without concerning itself with the ‘private’ pursuit of transcen-
dent truth and moral regeneration. Given this remarkable outcome, we
should discuss its two doctrinal sources in a little more detail.
Thomasius’ conception of religion in the Vollständige Erläuterung is
dominated by a spiritualistic and inwardist, typically Protestant, under-
standing of moral renewal and salvation. Drawing in part on Gottfried
Arnold’s Unparteiysche Kirchen- und Ketzerhistorie (Impartial History of Religion
and Heresy), Thomasius argues that moral regeneration can only occur
when individuals, eschewing all sacerdotal and ceremonial assistance,
acknowledge their misery and freely open themselves to the gratuitous
grace of a loving but inscrutable God. None of the rites and ceremonies
of the visible church, none of the metaphysical doctrines and articles of
 Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics
faith – which have only served to promote religious discord and heresy-
hunting – can affect an individual’s moral condition, which is deter-
mined solely by the inner relation of the will to God. From this arises an
ecclesiology grounded in a radical distinction between the visible and
invisible church:
The only precept that Christ has given us is the precept of love. All the rest is
unnecessary and lacks the character of a true church . . . Christ said, though:
‘By love you should know that you are my disciples’; and Peter said: ‘God has
chosen some from among all peoples’; because God is always gracious and sees
into the heart of man. And so one finds nothing of the visible church in Christ’s
teaching, which much more rebukes the Jews for this, that they concern them-
selves with external ceremonies and holy days . . . Hence the distinction that
when someone seeks the true church in external and visible things, they depart
from the Scriptures. Because [the true church] is understood as the invisible
community, and all predicates [of the church] apply to the invisible church,
which is alone holy, and in which Christians are unified in God; and this church
is eternally one. (VKR, .., –)

Like Pufendorf, Thomasius regards this spiritualistic form of religion,

epitomised in the simple and loving relation between Christ and his dis-
ciples, as the original or ‘primitive’ form of Christianity (DHR, §, –;
VKR, , –). In making this non-sacramental private faith the key to
salvation, both thinkers distinguish it from ‘natural religion’, which is a
minimalistic religion taught by the state for civil purposes but having no
bearing on salvation.
According to Thomasius’ Arnoldian religious history, primitive
Christianity was traduced through the historical assimilation of two
other traditions. As a result of the adoption of Jewish ceremonial and
political law – regarding such matters as baptism and Sabbath obser-
vance – Christianity developed into a religion claiming the capacity to
save through sacramental rituals and, consequently, the right to a share
in the political governance of a Christian state (VKR, , –). Next,
through the absorption of Greek philosophy into its theology –
specifically the metaphysical doctrine that man is a being who might be
regenerated through the purification of his intellect – Christianity gave
birth to a speculative religiosity or religiose speculation. This in turn
gave rise to the view that individual salvation depends on knowledge of
specific intellectual doctrines and articles of faith (VKR, .., ). We
have, of course, already encountered this view of Greek philosophy in
Thomasius’ Foreword to Grotius, where he treats Aristotelian and
Platonic metaphysics as the source of a ‘secret theology’, teaching the
 From moral philosophy to political jurisprudence 
possibility of moral regeneration through speculation and mystical
ascent to the pure intellectual forms (VG, –).
Thomasius leaves us in no doubt that Jewish ceremonial law and
Greek philosophy are in fact stalking-horses for the ecclesiology and
metaphysical theology of Lutheran orthodoxy, whose representatives he
calls ‘our papists’. Indeed, the whole point of Thomasius’ Arnoldian
ecclesiastical history is to demonstrate the illegitimacy of confessional
religion: that is, religion claiming a share in civil authority on the basis
of credal doctrines and saving ceremonies. Similarly, the object of
Thomasius’ spiritualist theology is to deny that moral renewal is in any
way dependent on the sacramental ceremonies of the Lutheran church
or the metaphysical doctrines of its theology faculties. Salvation is
wholly a matter of the private opening of the spirit to a God who sees
into hearts:
Whether we consider God or man, we will find nothing from which reason
could conclude that God demands such external forms of worship from us. For
he has an exact knowledge of the heart and needs no external ceremonies for
us to declare our will to him. And as for that which most pleases him in his
service, this too is best known by him. From this our reason must conclude that
there is nothing in the nature of God that commands us to an external worship
of him. (RFM, § , )
The notion of compulsory forms of worship is thus entirely foreign to
true religion, which consists in the free dedication of the will to God.
Consequently, orthodoxy’s claims to theological truth and sacerdotal
mediation must be treated as ‘priestcraft’, as a use of false doctrine to
secure the clergy’s civil power. Similarly, in claiming a share in the
governance of a Christian state – through its jurisdiction over blasphemy
and heresy and its claims to the ‘power of the keys’ (ex-communication)
– the church must be seen as betraying its true role in opening souls to
God, and as usurping coercive powers properly belonging to the civil
sovereign alone (VKR, .., –).
In complementing this spiritualist theology with a desacralised con-
ception of politics and the state, Thomasius’ Staatskirchenrecht draws
directly on Pufendorf ’s doctrines of imposed moral offices and absolute
sovereignty. No matter how alien it might be to the teachings of modern
moral philosophy, Pufendorf ’s conception of sovereignty holds that
the state’s rights and powers are not delegated to it on the condition
that it realise man’s moral being, but only so that it might preserve
security, which is thus the only legitimate end of the state. In his discus-
sion of the prince’s right to dispose over religious adiaphora – all aspects
 Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics
of religion not necessary for salvation – Thomasius follows Pufendorf
to the letter:
Because they concern the fundamental laws of particular republics, through
which the exercise of sovereign territorial government is observed and limited,
the rights to which a prince is entitled in religious matters, in accordance with
the law of nature and the properties of sovereign government, can best be dis-
cussed in relation to the ultimate end of republics and the causes from which
they arise. The ultimate end of the republic in this ruined condition is that the
subjects need it for protection against the evil and cunning attacks of other
people, to which they were prey in the state of nature from their more power-
ful neighbours. For apart from God there is no more powerful means to curb
human evil and to attain security than this wise invention: that many men by
means of a pact subordinate their will and their power to the will of another,
for the common benefit of the whole community of subjects. Without doubt,
then, a prince must be entitled to as much power as is required for attaining the
ultimate end of the republic; that is, for [attaining] its internal and external
calm and peace. (RFM, § , –)
To the extent that it now finds its end solely in preserving the security of
a territorial population, all coercive power – all right to make law and
war – belongs to the civil sovereign alone. Moreover, to the extent that
it disturbs the republic, the prince is justified in using this power against
all kinds of conduct, religious as well as worldly; for, as a recent period
of religious civil war has shown, religious conduct can also cause great
harm to the commonwealth:
Is it not shown in Germany and all the kingdoms of Europe what kind of dis-
aster and injury comes from religious conflict and rebellion? Were the power to
suppress such disturbance as arises from religion now to be removed from the
prince, so the whole republic would certainly be ruined. Therefore, to my way
of thinking, they reason correctly and prudently who say: That in so far as it
stands in their free will, all conduct of subjects – both natural and moral – is
subject to the power of the prince . . . Because damage to the republic can arise
from all such conduct of subjects. (RFM, § , –)
In combining statist sovereignty doctrine and spiritualistic theology,
Thomasius’ political jurisprudence of church governance gives rise to a
far-reaching programme for deconfessionalising the church and the
state. In the first place, by construing all religious ceremonies as ‘middle-
things’ or adiaphora – that is, things neither commanded nor forbidden
by divine or natural law – he is able to bring the entirety of church law
and liturgy within the supervision of the territorial sovereign, giving rise
to a conception of church governance known as ‘territorialism’
(Schlaich ). In the lengthy discussion that comprises the seventh
 From moral philosophy to political jurisprudence 
chapter of the second volume of the Vollständige Erläuterung, Thomasius
applies the category of adiaphora to all the central sacraments of the
church. Here he treats baptism, catechisation, the Eucharist, confession,
exorcism, marriage, and ordination as ceremonies inessential to inner
‘saving’ religion, hence as open to the sovereign’s supervision, should
they give rise to uncivil conduct (VKR, ., –). As for the compet-
ing theological doctrines of the three major confessions and the various
sects, the prince should endorse none of them; for their intellectual and
compulsory nature make them all equally distant from the genuine relig-
ion of those who seek salvation in ‘simple active Christianity’. Political
prudence dictates, however, that the prince steer his public pronounce-
ments mid-way between the extreme ritualism of the Catholics and
orthodox Lutherans, and the equally extreme spiritualism of the
Quakers and other illuminati. The only public religion suited to both true
piety and the desacralised state is natural religion. This is a religion
whose few simple propositions – that there is a God, that Christ teaches
us to love God and our neighbour – both agree with true Christianity
and are accessible to natural reason, yet do not give rise to any relig-
ious–civil rights that might subtract from secular sovereignty. The spiri-
tualisation of religion in Thomasius’ Staatskirchenrecht is thus reciprocally
related to his secularisation of the visible church.
At the same time, however, the prince may not exercise his supervi-
sion of religion on the basis of his own insight into moral truth, or in
order to make his subjects holy. Instead, in keeping with the rest of the
state’s sovereign powers, the prince’s right over religion must be exer-
cised solely in accordance with the end of civil security, against conduct
threatening social peace. On the basis of this construction of the state’s
religious neutrality, or indifference to transcendent truth, Thomasius
was able to develop one of the most far-reaching of all the early modern
doctrines of religious toleration. Using injury to civil peace as his sole
criterion for state intervention in religious affairs, he is able to extend the
threshold of toleration beyond the Protestant churches to include sects
harbouring heterodox conceptions of the Trinity and mediation.
Thomasius thus offers the following fundamental criticism of the
demand by Leipzig’s leading controversial theologian – J. B. Carpzov –
that Socinians and Arians be treated as criminal heretics:
Disagreement as such does not disturb the tranquillity of the republic – even
though the Socinians say that Christ is not truly God, or the Arians that Christ
is not co-eternal with the Father . . . Of course it cannot be denied that here
they err gravely, especially because they fail to recognise their own misery. But
 Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics
why should the prince force them into exile? Such people can still also be good
and honourable citizens. They give the prince their taxes and obey his com-
mands, make good soldiers, and so on. It is not they who disturb the republic
but the intemperate geniuses [i.e., controversial theologians like Carpzov], who
moan and complain about each other . . . . (VKR, , p. )
Further, on the same basis, Thomasius was able move beyond both
Locke’s refusal to extend toleration to atheists, and Locke’s and
Pufendorf ’s unwillingness to offer it to Catholics. Locke had claimed
that atheists could not be trusted to honour oaths, and both he and
Pufendorf argued that Catholics, in owing allegiance to a foreign
monarch, could not be good citizens of the territorial state. Thomasius’
remarkable account of his own change of mind on these questions war-
rants an extended quotation:
Religions as such do not disturb external peace, and where their teachings are
so disposed [to tranquillity], then the prince can well tolerate them. For those
who deny the Trinity do not immediately disturb the state. Where, though, such
people do disturb the state, then the prince’s duty (Officium Principis) demands
that he expel them from the republic. In fact, in the past I maintained that
nothing could be more injurious to the republic than atheism. Now, though, I
recognise this to be false. Who then may not be tolerated in the republic? Our
author [Pufendorf] responds: the papists – because they say that a prince
belonging to another religion may be killed in good conscience, and that here-
tics may not defend the faith. These principles are against the law and disturb
the republic – as one has seen in France – which means that they should not be
tolerated. For my part, I will not here inquire into the facts of the case, which
are no doubt deserving of respect. Nonetheless, we must not impute the prin-
ciples of the Jesuits to everyone. And if a prince were to act on the basis that
disturbance could arise from a doctrine as a matter of probable consequence,
he would tolerate no religion; for the Lutheran religion can also give occasion
to turbulence as a matter of consequence. Those who say that true religion is
contrary to state utility delude themselves, and we therefore maintain that no-
one should be exiled on the grounds of [religious] disagreement. (VKR, ,
–)
Through this dual strategy – of spiritualising religion by secularising the
visible church, and desacralising the state by establishing its religious
neutrality – Thomasius establishes a threshold for the state’s interven-
tion in the church which varies with religion’s capacity to damage civil
society. This marks an important advance on the threshold used in the
De Habitu. Here Pufendorf had attempted to draw a firm line between
the internal order of the church which should be left to the clergy
(liturgy, sacraments), and the external order open to control by the
 From moral philosophy to political jurisprudence 
prince through the Consistory (appointment of priests, funding, and
administration of church property) (DHR, –). The problem with this
solution, Thomasius argues, is that it leads to irresolvable argument over
whether a certain matter should be regarded as internal or external,
thereby paralysing the state’s capacity for political action.
The two cases that Thomasius uses to exemplify this argument in the
Recht in Mitteldingen indicate both the kind of problem his floating thresh-
old was intended to address and its success in doing so. Consider the
case, says Thomasius, of a Catholic prince who, after the Treaty of
Westphalia, finds himself ruling over a territory inside whose Lutheran
churches the congregations are singing hymns extolling the Pope’s
murder. The question of whether the prince has the right to suppress this
conduct cannot be solved via the distinction between the internal and
external governance of the church; for this case can be argued passion-
ately on both sides, depending on how hymn-singing is classified. Using
Thomasius’ threshold, however, the prince can readily be assigned this
right, regardless of whether hymns are normally seen as belonging to the
internal liturgical order of the church; for this is conduct that foments
communal hatreds and thereby damages civil peace (RFM, § , –).
At the same time, however, the sovereign must not attempt to exercise
this right on the basis of his religious persona or in a manner that coerces
the conscience of his citizens. This is the point of the second example,
which concerns the question – much disputed by the ‘doctors’ – of
whether Protestant princes have the right to compel their Jewish subjects
to attend Christian worship. Again, this case had proved irresolvable
using the internal–external division, due to the lack of agreement over
how to classify church services. And again, Thomasius’ floating thresh-
old provides an unambiguous resolution, this time denying the right:
The rule we have provided above decides the matter quite clearly. Since to
attend the churches and participate in the worship of the Christians appears
unjust and aggravating to the Jews, and since it is of no assistance to the peace
and calm of the country, so one should not compel their conscience. Though
their conscience is erroneous, it will not be helped from error through compul-
sion, but only if one associates with them in a friendly manner, providing them
with a good example so that they might better agree with reason and the teach-
ings of Christ. (RFM, § , –)

In short, given their indifference to salvation, all religious ceremonies are

potential objects of political supervision. Yet whether they meet with tol-
eration or suppression must in no way depend upon the state’s religious
 Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics
or moral ideology, being determined instead by the sole criterion of civil
disturbance.
The mixture of spiritualist theology and statist politics informing
Thomasius’ Pufendorfian Staatskirchenrecht presents the post-Kantian
history of moral philosophy with insurmountable difficulties. Written
from the standpoint of its own (neo-Kantian or neo-Aristotelian) moral
anthropology, this historiography continues to derive political rights
from a theory of moral personality or moral community, and it imagines
that civil society resulted from the extension of reason and democracy.
It is thus predisposed to assimilate Pufendorfian Staatskirchenrecht to moral
philosophy, either by treating it as the expression of a particular moral
anthropology, or by criticising it for its ‘unreconciled’ spiritualist and
statist aspects. In her discussion of Pufendorf ’s construction of natural
religion and religious toleration, Simone Zurbuchen ignores his doctrine
of imposed moral offices, and, drawing on Denzer, interprets Pufendorf
as advancing an Aristotelian conception of the state as the ‘natural’
vehicle of man’s moral perfection and moral community (Zurbuchen
, ). On this basis, Zurbuchen makes Pufendorf ’s doctrine of
natural religion into the foundation of his natural law – instead of the
other way around – thereby treating political obligation as an expression
of the commands of natural religion. Seen in this light, Pufendorf ’s doc-
trine of religious toleration appears as the recognition of a subjective
right to religious self-realisation, rather than as a means of desacralising
the state by eliminating the civil power of the church. Consequently,
Zurbuchen treats Pufendorf ’s statist defence of the sovereign’s right to
supervise the church as a deviation, induced by reason of state doctrine
(Zurbuchen , ).
We have already dealt with modern attempts to assimilate Pufendorf ’s
construction of political authority to neo-Kantian and neo-Aristotelian
moral anthropologies (.). Through his doctrine of imposed offices,
Pufendorf was able to detach sovereignty from its moral ties – to self-leg-
islating reason or the self-perfecting community – and ground it instead
in sovereign commands issued in accordance with the end of security. Far
from representing an anomaly or contradiction in Pufendorf ’s and
Thomasius’ thought, their simultaneous advocacy of religious toleration
and the political supervision of religion indicates that these were recipro-
cating strategies grounded in the end of security and oriented to the de-
sacralisation of politics. In making Pufendorf ’s doctrine of imposed
moral offices central to his Staatskirchenrecht, Thomasius was not attempt-
ing to provide any kind of moral philosophical basis for the state’s super-
 From moral philosophy to political jurisprudence 
vision of religious authority. Rather, in using it to separate the offices of
ruler and subject, teacher and auditor, he was attempting to combat the
dominant Lutheran doctrines of church governance, which were
designed to maintain the independent civil power of the church.
We recall that, in contrast with Pufendorf ’s officio doctrine, the neo-
scholastic metaphysics of the person unites all offices and duties in a core
rational substance or imago Dei, modelled on the unity of Christ’s natures
and offices in his personal substance. In this regard at least, by continu-
ing to ground civil power in moral personhood, modern moral philoso-
phy remains affiliated to the metaphysics of the person that Pufendorf
and Thomasius set out to destroy. As we have already observed, in both
neoscholastic and rationalist natural metaphysics, this Christian meta-
physics of the person was used to support the merging of religious and
political offices required to maintain clerical power in confessional soci-
eties. This provides the setting in which Thomasius did battle with the
central doctrines of Lutheran church law.
This interdependency of Christian metaphysical personalism and
confessional political theology is evident in the central doctrines of
Lutheran ecclesiology and church law. Schlaich discusses several such
doctrines, three of which are of particular importance for us (Schlaich
, –). First, the ‘three-estate doctrine’ (Dreiständlehre) taught that
the church consists of three Stände or statuses: the princely, clerical, and
popular estates (status politicus, ecclesiasticus und popularis). In thus superim-
posing the three traditional social estates – the governing, teaching, and
popular estates – on the order of the church, it forms a theory of the
church that doubles as a theory of politics and society. In fact, in propos-
ing that the three estates are unified in the church as Christ’s mystical
body, this doctrine is a means of showing that civil and religious author-
ity are harmonised in a single end – the governance of the moral com-
munity – which has to be shared between the prince and the clergy. The
Dreiständlehre was closely associated with the second doctrine, which elab-
orated a sharp distinction between the inner and outer governance of
the church. This, as we have already observed, was intended to reserve
certain ecclesiastical powers – preaching, administration of sacraments,
the ‘power of the keys’ – solely to the clergy, while confining the prince’s
role to the external administration and defence of the church. Finally,
the ‘two-person doctrine’ (Zwei-Personen-Lehre) taught that just as Christ’s
person united his divine and human natures, so too the ruler united two
personae, those of bishop and civil sovereign. This allowed legal theolo-
gians to argue that the prince receives his rights from two different
 Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics
sources, Imperial canon law and territorial Staatsrecht. The prince’s epis-
copal rights should therefore limit his exercise of territorial sovereignty,
while this exercise should in turn be governed by the purpose of his epis-
copal office, the defence of the faith. In all three doctrines, by establish-
ing the interdependency of civil and religious offices, the metaphysical
conceptions of the integral person and the moral community (church)
offered religious intellectuals a weapon to combat the complete absorp-
tion of their estate powers into the summum imperium of the sovereign ter-
ritorial state.
In using Pufendorf ’s conception of differentiated moral offices to crit-
icise these doctrines, Thomasius’ Das Recht evangelischer Fürsten in theologis-
chen Streitigkeiten shows that civil philosophy’s attack on the Christian
metaphysics of the person represents something far more momentous
than a conflict between rival moral philosophies. Written in response to
Carpzov’s attempt to restrict the state’s capacity to intervene in religious
controversies, this disputation again reveals the degree to which the
attack on university metaphysics was central not only to the desacralisa-
tion of political culture, but also to the political subordination of the
clerical estate to the territorial state. In arguing that, as part of the
church’s ‘teaching estate’, orthodox theology faculties possess the civil
jurisdiction to decide theological controversies – and in further arguing
that the prince, by virtue of his joint episcopal and civil personae, has a
duty to compel church attendance – Carpzov demonstrates typical
orthodox uses of the Dreiständlehre and the two-persons doctrine.
Thomasius’ attack on these arguments provides an object lesson in the
historical role of Pufendorf ’s doctrine of imposed moral entities, and his
natural law more generally.
In the first place, argues Thomasius, Carpzov is wrong to claim that
the church consists of the political, clerical, and popular estates; for these
statuses pertain to the civil state and not the spiritual community, which
consists only of the statuses of teacher and auditor:
Here all the other ends pertaining to man cease. Hence just as it would be illog-
ical for me to take the Christian church – which contains nobles and non-nobles
in a spiritual community – and wish to divide it into the noble and non-noble,
so it is also inept if one says that the Christian church consists of the civil author-
ity, teachers and subjects; because these are moral entities not regarded in the
Christian church. And, in this respect and purpose, the first and last of these
persons would be relinquished, in that they pertain only to the worldly state,
while on the other hand in the church they are considered only as auditors.
(RFS, )
 From moral philosophy to political jurisprudence 
Given that the persons of subject and ruler do not exist in the church –
given that here there is no civil authority – Carpzov has no grounds for
claiming that theologians possess the civil authority to adjudicate public
theological controversies.
Next, the fact that the individual who is prince may also be a member
of the church, does not mean that he represents his princely persona in
the church. Citing Pufendorf as his authority, Thomasius insists that: ‘It
is a known fact that an individual may represent several personae in
accordance with the different offices he bears’ (RFS, ). The doctrine
that the prince unites a religious and a civil persona – bishop and sove-
reign – within a single capacity is thus based on a confusion. Instead, the
prince is the bearer of three statuses, each of which imposes its own
duties. As a man, the prince is like all men in being bound by the natural
law of sociable love for his fellow man. As a Christian the prince is bound
to observe the laws of Christianity and, in recognising the common
misery of the human race, to trust in the redeemer and hope to acquire
‘a true living faith’, which consists in the living of a good life. As a prince,
however, the prince’s only duty is to maintain the public peace and
security of his subjects, using appropriate means of compulsion (RFS,
–). This means that the prince’s sovereign right of religious supervi-
sion may not be divided or limited, as if his religious persona had some
share in it: ‘If one observes that rights in religious matters are just as
much a part of sovereign majesty as other regalia [royal rights], flowing
from the same source as the others, then one would not come to this two-
fold consideration of the prince’ (RFS, ).
At the same, however – testifying to the ‘liberal’ wing of Thomasius’
desacralising strategy – this division of offices also means that the prince
may not seek to fulfil religious duties in his civil person. As subjects of a
desacralising state, citizens should not be required to be holy, only law-
abiding: ‘From this end [social peace] one learns the duties of the prince
quite clearly . . . And given this end it is not necessary that subjects ded-
icate their whole hearts to the cultivation of virtue . . ., but it is enough
for this that they refrain from external vice to the extent that it disturbs
the peace’ (RFS, ). Given that the state’s rights and powers reach no
further than the preservation of external peace, then the prince must not
attempt to rule in such a way as to make his subjects holy:
Now it follows . . . that the duty of a prince goes no further than external peace;
and if he preserves this among the subjects then he has fulfilled his duty. If
therefore he wishes to go further, then he manifests himself in the person of a
 Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics
man or a Christian, in which capacities, though, a prince may use no coercive
force, but only the sound reason and Christianity that each man and Christian
may use in relation to those he seeks to lead to the right path. (RFS, –)
Hence, while the prince has the right to compel the termination of
public theological disputes he may do so only in accordance with his
political office – that is, only when they threaten civil order. This means
that he must do so in complete disregard of the truth or falsity of the
contending doctrines. Otherwise, he must leave his subjects to resolve
such matters through their own reason, in their capacities as teachers
and auditors; for, just as the laws of grammar lie beyond the prince’s civil
authority, so too do religious truths (RFS, –).
It should already be clear that the tremors from this reconstruction of
the moral and political landscape would shake cultural precincts well
beyond those of Lutheran orthodoxy. If transcendent truths play no role
in the renovation of man’s will, and if the legitimacy of political rule is
dependent on the sovereign eschewing all interest in transcendent truths,
then it is not only religious doctrine that must be excluded from the
sphere of political authority. So too must metaphysical ethics and,
indeed, the domain of academic practical philosophy more generally;
for it also teaches that man’s perfection is intellectual and that the end of
politics is tied to man’s moral completion. As we have seen, Thomasius
was acutely aware that it was not just in moral theology that civil duties
were held to be dependent on adherence to true intellectual doctrine and
the doctrine of the true intellect. This also occurred in those rationalist
philosophical doctrines which taught that man accedes to this civil duties
through contemplation of pure concepts of goodness and justice, and
that man could come to govern his own conduct through the perfection
of his intellect (VKR, , –). For, in teaching that the exercise of civil
governance should be grounded in the pursuit of moral perfection, these
doctrines continued to reserve a place for the morally perfect in the exer-
cise of civil power. This accounts for the drive to harmonise the figures
of the sage and the prince – philosophy and government – in the whole
line of metaphysical philosophy that stretches from Leibniz through
Wolff to Kant and beyond.
As the direct inheritor of this lineage, modern (neo-Aristotelian and
neo-Kantian) moral philosophy continues to treat politics as grounded
in and limited by the need to realise moral personality. In imagining that
political society might one day converge with moral community, moral
philosophy maintains the church as a political concept; and in insisting
that the moral exercise of civil authority requires the co-operation of
 Afterword: Thomasius, Wolff, and the Pietists 
philosophers and statesmen, it harbours the image of the political sage.
As a result, while moral philosophy honours one half of Pufendorf ’s
formula for civil society – that there is no civil jurisdiction over truth – it
represses the other half: that truth should have no civil jurisdiction. This
is because it continues to teach that the legitimacy of government
depends upon realising the moral personality or moral community,
which requires the political actualisation of moral philosophy. It has
been argued that this failure to observe the separation of political and
moral governance can imbue rationalist philosophy with an intolerant
cultural and political demeanour (Koselleck ).
As we have noted (..), Leibniz’s attack on Thomasius’ decriminal-
isation of heresy – in which he insists on error remaining punishable as
the condition of building a society based on truth – shows that this
problem is more than just a theoretical possibility. If Leibniz continued
to regard heresy as a crime that is because, for rationalist metaphysics,
civil duties are acceded to through personal insight into moral ideas, and
civil governance is conditional on moral self-governance. In thus
grounding civil and transcendental–moral duties in a single source – the
practice of contemplative self-governance – metaphysical ethics prom-
ises to redeem political compulsion through the recovery of its justifying
moral principles; yet, in doing so, threatens to make these principles
politically compulsory. As we shall now see, it was not Leibniz but Kant
who rescued political metaphysics and political eschatology from the
onslaught launched by Pufendorf ’s and Thomasius’ civil philosophy. It
was Kant who showed moral philosophers how to re-enter the domain
of political governance from which they had been expelled. They would
return not as a clerical estate possessing its own share of civil authority,
but as a clerisy of academic intellectuals, claiming powers from a source
higher than the end of social peace – ‘critical reason’.

  :    ,  ,          

In  Christian Wolff (–) published his Vernünftige Gedanken von
Gott, der Welt und der Seele des Menschen, auch allen Dingen überhaupt (Rational
Thoughts on God, the World, the Human Soul, and all Things in General), usually
referred to as the German Metaphysics. Occurring eight years before
Thomasius’ death and four years before Kant’s birth, this publication
signalled the return of a full-blooded metaphysical scholasticism to the
Protestant university, in fact to the University of Halle where Thomasius
remained a leading figure. Despite its occasional appeal to Cartesian
 Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics
method, Wolff’s German Metaphysics represents an elaboration and
systematisation of Leibniz’s metaphysics. While paying less attention to
Leibniz’s monadology and doctrine of pre-established harmony, Wolff
draws directly on his mentor’s principles of contradiction and sufficient
reason, treating them as the means by which the philosopher abstracts
from empirical appearances and ascends to the pure concepts or divine
perfections that contain the possibility of things.
The German Metaphysics thus possesses the same theo-rationalist char-
acter as Leibniz’s Discourse on Metaphysics, with Wolff treating the world
as the mirror of the divine perfections and its creatures as reflections of
the divine intellect: ‘And after that nothing remains than that the world
represents God’s perfections as in a mirror. This is the intention which
God can realise through the world, and one is wont to call it the
glorification or splendour of God: that one may therefore say, God has
made the world for the sake of his glory’ (GM, § , ). Using a
Scotist interpretation of the principle of contradiction – as the law
through which a divine intellect joins atomic possibilia into the concepts
of empirically possible things – Wolff improvised his own version of the
traditional scholastic conception of metaphysics, calling it ‘the science
of the possible as possible’. For their part, the empirical or ‘historical’
sciences represent a less exalted level of the metaphysical hierarchy. Like
Albertus Magnus, Wolff treats these sciences as apprehending the possi-
bilia not as they issue timelessly from the divine intellect, but only in the
obscure and fragmentary form in which they are given to the human
senses in time. Moreover, by treating God, too, as bound by the laws of
intelligible possibility, Wolff could entertain the rationalist conjecture
that the laws of the universe would remain whether God existed or not.
We need to recall however that, despite the common interpretation of it
as symptomatic of the secularisation of metaphysics, this conjecture was
in fact a standard anti-voluntarist trope of theo-rational metaphysics
(Tierney , –).
If Wolff’s German Metaphysics represents the transformation of
Leibniz’s metaphysical sketches into a full-blown rationalist scholasti-
cism, then the ethical, theological, and political outworkings of this doc-
trine are also strikingly similar to those adumbrated by Leibniz. Wolff’s
German Ethics – the Vernünftige Gedanken von der menschen Tun und Lassen zu
Beförderung ihrer Glückseeligkeit (Rational Thoughts on Human Conduct, for the
Promotion of his Happiness) – may be regarded as an elaboration of
Leibniz’s metaphysical conception of morality. Like his predecessor,
Wolff treats the contemplation of the divine perfections or concepts as
 Afterword: Thomasius, Wolff, and the Pietists 
the means by which humans perfect their intellectual natures, thereby
aspiring to a condition of rational self-purification in which rational
conduct and felicity are one and the same. He leaves us in no doubt as
to the theo-rational character of this construction of morality:
Because a rational man is a law to himself and apart from natural obligation
needs no other, so neither rewards nor punishments motivate him to good
actions and to the avoidance of evil ones. And therefore a rational [man]
accomplishes the good because it is good, and refrains from the evil because it
is evil: in which case he will be similar to God, who has no superior to obligate
him to do the good and refrain from the evil, but does the former and refrains
from the latter through the perfection of his nature. (GE, §, pp. –)
Even more so than Leibniz, Wolff conceived rationalist metaphysics as
an alternative religion. In treating the purifying ascent to the divine per-
fections not just as the key to natural theology but also as the foundation
of a civil religion – one capable of overcoming confessional division and
reunifying Christendom – Wolff rendered explicit the quasi-religious
character of his mentor’s metaphysics.
Finally, in his German Politics – or Vernünftige Gedanken von dem gesellschaft-
lichen Leben der Menschen und insonderheit dem gemeinen Wesen (Rational Thoughts
on the Social Life of Man and in particular the Republic, ) – Wolff reveals
the consequences of using Leibniz’s metaphysics to interpret the politi-
cal pact and the formation of the state. As might be expected, he treats
the political pact as the contract through which men enter into society
on the condition that the state will perfect their intellectual nature (GP,
§ –, –). Wolff thus ignores Pufendorf ’s focus on the imposition of
civil sovereignty as the means of achieving security, endorsing instead
the moral–teleological conception of the state mis-ascribed to Pufendorf
by his neo-Aristotelian interpreters. In keeping with this conception of
the state, Wolff conceives civil authority as unifying the ‘two persons’ of
the sage and the prince, as outlined in his essay Von den Regenten, die sich
Weltweisheit befleistigen, und von den Weltweisen, die das Regiment führen (On
Princes who Cultivate Philosophy, and on Philosophers who Direct Government,
). Here Wolff adduces two main arguments for grounding the exer-
cise of civil sovereignty in philosophical knowledge and its transcendent
truth. First, considering that like all empirical phenomena the state is
merely the sensory appearance of transcendent concepts, and given that
only the metaphysician has full access to these, then only the sage may
determine the true end of the state – namely, the perfection of man’s
intellectual nature (VRW, –). Second, as the true direction of
government requires a ruler who has purified himself of all self-interest
 Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics
and thereby acts on the basis of rational insight alone, only the meta-
physical sage is in a position to direct the government (VRW, –).
Having established the metaphysical continuum between the pursuit
of moral perfection and the exercise of civil power, Wolff is able to justify
the use of civil coercion to compel this perfection, demanding not just
that Deists and atheists be stripped of their citizenship, but also that
books be censored and religious worship be made compulsory (Dreitzel
, ). Even more indicative of the neo-confessional character of
Wolff’s metaphysical programme is that fact that, in his natural law, he
seeks to make natural religion itself politically compulsory (Link ,
). Unlike the natural religion developed by Pufendorf and Thomasius,
Wolff’s is not a minimalist theology subordinate to the end of social
peace. Rather it is a fully fledged civil religion grounded in the truth of
Wolff’s natural theology, again fulfilling the tendency towards a compul-
sory metaphysical religion that we noted in Leibniz.
Given the completeness of the opposition between Thomasian civil
philosophy and Wolffian metaphysics – beginning with their rival con-
ceptions of philosophy and its relation to theology, reflected in their fun-
damentally different ethical and natural law doctrines, and issuing
finally in radically opposed conceptions of the relation between politics
and transcendent morality – we should not be surprised that they came
into conflict at Halle. Despite their private animosity, however – Wolff
describing Thomasius as a mathematical ‘idiot’ in a letter to Leibniz –
this was a war carried out by proxy, through the followers rather than
the masters themselves. As Arndt has shown, the conflict between
Halle’s Thomasians and Wolffians occurred earlier than and indepen-
dent of that between Wolff and the Pietists, beginning in , well
before Wolff officially launched his metaphysical programme, and trig-
gered by his defence of mathematical method in philosophy (Arndt
). Still, even at this stage, it was the metaphysical grounding and
claims of Wolff’s mathematical method – his treatment of it as an ars
combinatoria capable of determining the possibilia of the objects of all the
sciences – that aroused the opposition of Thomasius’ followers.
Yet, for all their interest as pointers to the ongoing struggle between
the ‘rival enlightenments’, these skirmishes between the Wolffians and
Thomasians were only a curtain-raiser to the major attack on Wolff’s
metaphysics – that launched by the Halle Pietists in  (Hinrichs ,
–). The Pietist campaign was led by Joachim Lange, an able con-
troversialist, and Johann Francis Budde(us), who would become one of
 Afterword: Thomasius, Wolff, and the Pietists 
Pietism’s leading theologians and a representative of the ‘theological
enlightenment’ (Bianco ; Sparn ).
Despite the comprehensive nature of their attack on what they chris-
tened the ‘Leibniz–Wolff philosophy’, Lange and Budde singled out two
aspects of Wolff’s metaphysics for special attention. First, they targeted
the ‘fatalism’ of Wolff’s metaphysical cosmology. According to Budde, in
treating divine intellection as the source of the intelligible substances
while simultaneously treating God’s will as bound by the logic of choos-
ing the best possible set of relations between these substances – the ‘best
possible world’ – Wolff’s metaphysics subordinates the divine will to
cosmic necessity. Not only does this appear to make God responsible for
the world’s evil, it also deprives human action of the freedom necessary
for sin, responsibility, and justification (Budde , –, –,
–). Secondly, the Pietists took issue with Wolff’s metaphysical
anthropology. Here, Budde argues, in adopting Leibniz’s bifurcated doc-
trine of the active intellectual soul and the passive senses, together with
the associated doctrine of the pre-established harmony of soul and body,
Wolff’s anthropology is completely inimical to Christian morality. On
the one hand, Wolff’s anthropology continues the fatalism of his cosmol-
ogy by denying the soul’s capacity to control the body, leading all its
actions to be treated as predetermined through their prior harmonisa-
tion with those of the body, and depriving man of the free will required
for the imputation of sin. On the other hand, by treating the soul or
intellect as perfecting itself through self-conformation to the laws of
natural perfection, Wolff’s metaphysics excludes divine will and grace
from the determination of morality, allowing humans to regenerate
themselves through their natural rational capacities (Budde , –,
–, –).
In short, Lange and Budde were reactivating some of the classic argu-
ments of Lutheran voluntarist theology, hostile to both monistic philo-
sophical conceptions of God’s relation to the world, and to the ‘Pelagian’
doctrine that man might regenerate himself through philosophical self-
purification, without need of the means of grace provided by Christian
faith. Moreover, they were directing these arguments against a
metaphysical philosophy which, we have argued (.), was itself the
product of a Platonistic modification of seventeenth-century Lutheran
Schulmetaphysik. In the event, after a protracted intellectual and political
battle – involving both sides making representations to the court in
Berlin, the appointment of an investigative commission, and the direct
 Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics
participation of the cabinet and Friedrich Wilhelm I – the controversy
ended in November , with Wolff’s dismissal from the university and
exiling from Brandenburg-Prussia by royal decree (Hinrichs ,
–).
If the conflict between Thomasians and Wolffians offers us a further
window onto the conflict between civil and metaphysical philosophy,
then Wolff’s battle with the Pietists is indicative of the longstanding
conflict between Lutheranism’s metaphysical and voluntarist wings. The
Halle events thus provide us with a snapshot of the German academy’s
‘intellectual civil war’ as this passed into the eighteenth century. With the
notable exception of Hinrichs’ valuable study, however, the standard
interpretations of these events fail to reveal their historical significance.
For a long time Wolff’s exiling was interpreted as a victory of religious
obscurantism over philosophical Enlightenment – a victory soon to be
reversed, with the great philosopher’s triumphant return to Halle in 
at the request of the enlightened Frederick II (Beck , ; Zeller
). The inadequacy of this interpretation should already be clear. In
treating Wolffian doctrine as grounded in secular reason as opposed to
religious authority, it overlooks the cultural and religious dimension of
Wolff’s metaphysics, thereby misunderstanding the character of the
Pietist opposition to it. In presenting his metaphysics as an integral
anthropology and cosmology, holding the key to both personal regener-
ation and socio-moral renewal, Wolff was responsible for launching
metaphysics as an academic religion. Attuned to the manner in which
Leibniz’s metaphysics transferred the formerly esoteric authority of
metaphysical holiness to the secular philosopher, Wolff took this adum-
bration and actualised it at the level of the university curriculum. Far
from representing the reaction of religious obscurantism to rationalist
enlightenment, then, Lange and Budde were engaging Wolff on a shared
ground, countering his intellectualist anthropology and cosmology with
their own voluntarist kind. Even though their doctrine was oriented to
the inward search for the signs of grace and rebirth, while Wolff’s was
intended to induce self-purifying philosophical ascent to contemplation
of the intelligibles, both were in fact spiritual disciplines administered to
overlapping intellectual elites as exercises in moral regeneration.
For this reason, we should also be sceptical of a second longstanding
interpretation of the Halle events, which unites Thomasius and the
Pietists in a line of ‘Thomasian–Pietist’ philosophy – Rüdiger, Hoff-
mann, Crusius (Carboncini ; Tonelli ; Tonelli ). There is of
course some justification for this linkage, as Thomasian and Pietist
 Afterword: Thomasius, Wolff, and the Pietists 
thought overlap through a common ‘spiritualist’ anti-metaphysical
theology, and in their shared hostility to metaphysical cosmology and
anthropology, with its intellectualist conception of a philosophical path
to moral regeneration. Nonetheless, it is misleading to treat this overlap
as the source of a Thomasian–Pietist philosophy. As we have seen,
Thomasius’ spiritualist theology has a quite different organisation and
aim to the Pietist version, being partnered by a statist conception of
political governance, and being directed towards the privatisation of
faith, rather than the Pietist’s general reformation of society. To see this,
we need only take note of the Pietist’s attack on Thomasius’ decorum
doctrine; for in separating the cultivation of decorum from the pursuit
of moral regeneration – treating the former as suited to a ‘decent public
life’ in civil society and the latter as a matter of private faith and grace
– Thomasius was rejecting the claims of Pietist fideism to provide a
single foundation for civil and religious governance; just as he rejected
the analogous claims made by the rationalist metaphysicians (Hinrichs
, –). Further, we can observe that, unlike Crusius, Thomasius
was not interested in harmonising academic philosophy and voluntarist
theology. On the contrary, he explicitly rejected this programme, seeking
to reduce theology to the status of an informulable private faith, and to
return philosophy to its role as a propaedeutic training in the liberal arts.
Thomasius was not a philosopher in this sense, but a political jurist who
realised that Protestant scholasticism was wholly unsuited to the ethical
and professional preparation of the young jurists and politici of a decon-
fessionalised state.
In this context we should recall our earlier discussion of the limits of
post-Kantian dialectical treatments of the conflict between the
Thomasians and Wolffians (pp. –). In treating Thomasius and
Wolff as representatives of reciprocally deficient philosophical theories
– a voluntarism that leads to political utilitarianism and a rationalism
lacking all grounding in empirical experience – this approach uproots
the rival intellectual cultures from their ascetic and institutional con-
ditions, turning them into mere actors in the theatre of Kantian
dialectics (Schmidt-Biggemann a, –; Schmidt-Biggemann ;
Schneiders b; Schneiders , –).
In fact, this tendency to remove the rival intellectual cultures from
their institutional settings and political orientations is common to all
three of the above interpretations of the Halle events. In addition to
reducing the conflicting institutional cultures to mere ideas, this deraci-
nation has the effect of creating homogeneous epochs on the basis of the
 Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics
rise and fall of theories. As we have already noted, this gives rise to the
standard periodisation of early modern German philosophy. According
to this periodisation, the philosophical dominance of Thomasian volun-
tarism characteristic of the first two decades of the century ends with its
eclipse by Wolffian rationalism in the s. This is followed by a
melding of Thomasian and Wolffian perspectives in mid-century
Popularphilosophie; which is in turn superseded by Kant’s definitive
transcendence of the key oppositions in the s (Schneiders b).
We can conclude our discussion of Thomasius and open the door to our
discussion of Kant by indicating the inadequacy of this intellectualist
and ‘epochalist’ treatment of the Halle conflicts.
First, we recall that Pufendorfian and Thomasian civil philosophy did
not undergo some kind of universal supersession in the s. In fact it
remained powerful in Protestant Germany’s leading law faculties – Halle
and Göttingen – well beyond this epochal boundary, due to its role in the
academic formation of jurists and political officials (Hammerstein ;
Rüping ). In his illuminating account of the teaching of jurispru-
dence at Königsberg during the first half of the century, Steven Lestition
offers important pointers to the reasons for the continuing vitality of
Pufendorf ’s and Thomasius’ natural law. In discussing the place of
Grotius, Pufendorf, and Thomasius in the foundation programme of
Reinhold Sahme and the Königsberg jurists, Lestition suggests that their
role was ‘to encourage students (and political actors and state-officials)
to break free of “tutelage” by “scholastic” modes of thinking and above
all to grasp the way in which the power of princely, territorial–state insti-
tutions would end the heritage of religious strife and sectarianism’. He
further comments that this fostered ‘the renewal of juristic modes of
thought encouraging self-disciplining and a functional subordination to
diverse roles on various levels below the prince’ (Lestition , ). If
therefore Protestant Germany’s leading law faculties continued to teach
Pufendorfian and Thomasian civil philosophy long after its supposed
eclipse by Wolffian metaphysics, this is because these rival philosophies
interacted not as competing theories – only one of which could be true
– but as rival intellectual cultures dedicated to the formation of partic-
ular kinds of intellectual comportment.
Next, we may observe that if Pietism and Wolffian metaphysics also
interacted as rival comportment formations – rather than as opposed
theories – then neither was their historical relation characterised by a
uniform epochal movement from the false to the true, or from religious
obscurantism to secular Enlightenment. This helps to account for the
 Afterword: Thomasius, Wolff, and the Pietists 
otherwise scarcely explicable fact that after the period of initial warfare
at Halle in the s, Wolffian metaphysics and Pietist theology under-
went a culturally crucial process of convergence and hybridisation.
Although we are not in a position to enter into a detailed discussion of
this process here, we can shift the burden of proof back onto the stan-
dard interpretation. For this argues that through its rationalist reconcil-
iation of theology and philosophy, Wolffian metaphysics opened the
door to a form of Lutheran theology – ‘Neology’ – seeking a ‘rational’
or moral reinterpretation of the Christian mysteries (Aner , –;
Beck , –).
As a consequence of our brief redescription of it, however, we may
suggest that it was the cultural and religious character of Wolffian meta-
physics – its capacity to function as a spiritual discipline for the pursuit
moral regeneration and social reform – that permitted its convergence
with Pietism, which, unlike the new civil philosophy, was dedicated to
just these ends. This interpretation finds some confirmation in the fact
that the Königsberg theologians and philosophers who pioneered the
merging of Wolffianism and Pietism – particularly F. A. Schultz and
Martin Knutzen – did so by improvising a series of doctrines that mini-
mised the difference between Wolff’s rationalist ascent to the divine intel-
ligibles and the Pietist regimen for spiritual rebirth through the inner
pursuit of grace (Erdmann ; Hollmann ; Malter ). In this
new cultural space – formed when a metaphysics aspiring to be a relig-
ion entered into an alliance with a religion seeking a purely rational
moral form – it would become possible to elaborate a metaphysical
moral philosophy capable of functioning as ‘pure moral religion’ and,
on this basis, to once again propose to rebuild society in the image of the
church. The architect of this next renewal of metaphysics was
Immanuel Kant – heir to Wolff, protégé of Schultz and Knutzen, and
alien to the ‘juristic civic consciousness’ Sahme and his successors were
forging in a faculty nearby but intellectually so far away.
    

Kant and the preservation of metaphysics

 .            
In this our final chapter we discuss Immanuel Kant’s practical philoso-
phy – his metaphysics of morality, law, politics, and religion – in relation
to the conflict between civil and metaphysical philosophy whose history
we have been essaying. Kant’s philosophy, we shall argue, represents the
decisive step in the modernisation of university metaphysics initiated by
Leibniz, whose own embryonic programme had since been developed
into a new and all-embracing form of Protestant scholasticism by
Christian Wolff. Despite its lack of direct engagement with the writings
of Pufendorf and Thomasius, Kant’s philosophy thus remains deeply
implicated in the intellectual civil war that continued to rage between
university metaphysics and civil philosophy. Kant’s role in this conflict,
however, has become very difficult for us to discern, as the modern
humanities academy is so saturated by Kantian styles of thought that we
have come to treat them as timeless. This dehistoricising of Kant is
reflected in the debate over whether he may be regarded as a metaphy-
sician at all, rather than as the philosopher who simply uncovered the
subjective conditions of human thought and morality (Gram ). It is
also reflected in those histories that see Kant’s philosophy as transcend-
ing religious, political, and cultural conflict altogether – as ushering in
an epoch of Enlightenment in which all the old divisions would give way
to a fully universal and autonomous conception of human reason, char-
acterised by the virtues of Aufklärung, Selbstdenken, Perfektibilität: enlighten-
ment, intellectual autonomy, perfectibility (Beck ; Beck ;
Hinske ; Schneiders ).
It is not difficult to demonstrate the prima facie implausibility of this
kind of interpretation; for Kant’s practical philosophy is shaped at every
point by a relentless and occasionally vehement rejection of the central
tenets and direction of civil philosophy of the Pufendorfian kind. This

 Introduction 
rejection is manifest in Kant’s unstinting repudiation of all conceptions
of virtue that treat it as a restraint of conduct in accordance with the
ends of personal or civil happiness. The following attack on the concep-
tion of virtue as outward conformation to prudential law – taken from
his Religion within the Boundaries of Reason Alone – is typical:
Virtue here has the abiding maxim of lawful actions, no matter whence one
draws the incentives that the power of choice [Willkür] needs for such actions
. . . But not the slightest change of heart is necessary for this; only a change of
manners [Sitten]. A man here regards himself as virtuous whenever he feels
himself fortified in the maxims of observing his duty, but not by virtue of the
supreme ground of all maxims, namely duty itself. The immoderate man thus
converts to moderation for the sake of health; the liar to truth for the sake of
reputation; the unjust man to civil righteousness for the sake of peace or profit,
and so on, all in conformity with the prized principle of happiness. (.; RRT,
)
This criticism is, of course, a direct echo of Leibniz’s complaint that
Pufendorf ’s ethics confines itself to merely lawful actions and ignores
inner motives. It is also strikingly similar to the ‘old theologian’s’ attack
on Thomasius’ restriction of morality to management of the passions,
in the course of which it is argued that ‘the theory of the virtues (through
which true happiness is attained) should also illuminate a man’s immor-
tal soul with the brilliance of the true light of virtue, and implant there
these virtues so that the soul may turn to God . . . again ascending to
reunite with him, once more able to appear worthy and capable before
God’ (KTS, ).
Kant’s attack on prudential ethics should thus serve to remind us that
it was the civil philosophers who had in fact sought to confine ethics to out-
wardly lawful actions, rejecting all concern with inner motives. Further, it
should lead us to recall that Pufendorf and Thomasius had indeed created
an ethics and politics designed to convert the unjust to civil righteousness
for the sake of social peace, regardless of purity of heart. After all, we have
just listened to Thomasius’ powerful argument against the political meta-
physicians that, considering the end of civil rule is social peace, ‘it is not
necessary that subjects dedicate their whole hearts to the cultivation of
virtue . . . but it is enough for this that they refrain from external vice to the
extent that it disturbs the peace’ (RFS, ). Finally and above all, however,
Kant’s attack should remind us that in restricting ethics to outward civil-
ity regulated in accordance with the end of social peace, the civil philos-
ophers were engaged in a profound struggle to desacralise politics and
deconfessionalise society – the struggle to uncouple civil authority from
 Kant and the preservation of metaphysics
moral truth, the public pursuit of happiness from the private striving for
moral regeneration. In short, despite what the modern Kantians say,
Kant’s attack on the moral sufficiency of outward lawfulness and pruden-
tial ethics allows us to approach him as heir to the main line of German
university metaphysics – including its constitutional hostility to civil phi-
losophy – and hence as party to the ongoing attempt to resacralise the
domain of civil governance.
As in our discussions of Leibniz, Pufendorf, and Thomasius, in order
to arrive at an historical understanding of Kant’s philosophy we must
return it to the circumstances of cultural, political, and religious conflict
in which it was fashioned. Four features of Kant’s historical circum-
stances lend plausibility to our treatment of him as a university meta-
physician who was constitutionally opposed to civil philosophy’s
detranscendentalising of ethics and desacralising of politics. In the first
place, after attending a Pietist preparatory school in Königsberg, Kant
was trained by Wolffian philosophers at the university, and then spent his
entire adult life in the precincts of the University of Königsberg’s phi-
losophy faculty; first as a student, then as lecturer (–), and finally
as professor of logic and metaphysics (–) (Stark ). Unlike
Leibniz, Kant did not know the life of the court savant. Unlike
Pufendorf ’s, his philosophy was not shaped by the role of political or
jurisprudential adviser to government. Further, we have already noted
that Königsberg’s philosophy faculty was responsible for elaborating the
modus vivendi between Pietist voluntarism and Wolffian rationalism. In
seeking to reconcile the cultures of moral rebirth and rationalist self-
purification, Kant’s teachers, F. A. Schultz and Martin Knutzen, pro-
vided the form in which he would inherit Schulmetaphysik (Erdmann ;
Hollmann ; Malter ).
Secondly, if Kant was himself taught by Wolffian metaphysicians,
then his own teaching was also heavily indebted to the Leibniz–Wolff
inheritance. Kant’s lectures on metaphysics and moral philosophy were
based on the same two Wolffian compendia – A. G. Baumgarten’s
Metaphysica () and Initia Philosophiae Practicae Primae () – through-
out his long career. Kant was, of course, no slavish adherent of Wolffian
rationalism. In fact his commentary on Baumgarten’s texts, published in
volumes  and  of the Akademie Ausgabe, shows that, while he
expounded them for his students, he used their divisions primarily as a
platform for his own metaphysical and moral philosophising. This is
borne out by the surviving transcripts of Kant’s lectures. In all likelihood
produced by professional amanuenses for student use, and now available
 Introduction 
in English as the Lectures on Metaphysics (LM) and Lectures on Ethics (LE),
these transcripts reveal little if any deviation from Kant’s published doc-
trines. Nonetheless, while criticising Leibnizian and Wolffian metaphys-
ics – for its claims to immediate noumenal intuition and for the
perfectionism associated with this knowledge – Kant’s philosophy
emerges as an elaboration, criticism, and modification of his metaphys-
ical predecessors’ (Heimsoeth ; Heimsoeth ; Schmucker ;
Wundt ). We shall return to this point below.
Thirdly, we must take due note of the institutional centrality of meta-
physics to the Königsberg philosophy and theology faculties. Unlike
their contemporaries at Halle, students at Königsberg – expressly the
theology students – were required to begin their course of six semesters
and three years with a semester of metaphysics, the most famous teacher
of which during the latter half of the eighteenth century was Professor
Kant. The Methodological Instructions to Students, issued in the summer
semester of , left them in little doubt about why:
Metaphysics deals with the first concepts and principles of all human knowl-
edge, and without it nothing in any other science can be possibly explained or
proven. It therefore facilitates the learning of all the other sciences because,
unlike them, it treats of the world, of the nature of the body, of man and all his
spiritual powers, and of God; thus it fosters fundamental insight in theology,
jurisprudence and medicine. (Stark , )
Eighty years after the fact, then, Thomasius’ proposal to explode the
metaphysical unity of the neoscholastic curriculum – to separate philos-
ophy from theology, replacing metaphysics with history, and moral phi-
losophy with his Affektenlehre – would seem to have fallen on deaf ears, at
least in a faculty charged with the philosophical preparation of theolo-
gians rather than jurists. Kant, who had himself been taught metaphys-
ics by Knutzen, was in his turn required to teach it to the next generation
of philosophy and theology students, which he did with great dedication.
Finally, to understand the importance of metaphysics at Königsberg,
we need to take brief note of the university’s cultural and political
setting. As the capital of East Prussia, Königsberg was a frontier post of
Lutheran German culture, adjacent to the religiously unreliable Baltic
states and multi-religious Poland, and confronted by the vast unknown
of Russian orthodoxy. It was in this setting that Königsberg’s law faculty
took on the role of forming the ‘juridical civic consciousness’ of a pro-
vincial ruling elite, imitating the forms of legal education and legal
governance that held sway in the Prussian centre, but adapting these to
the culture and circumstances of the Baltic periphery (Lestition ).
 Kant and the preservation of metaphysics
More importantly for our present concerns, it is also this frontier setting
that accounts for the key role played by Königsberg’s philosophy and
theology faculties. For it was their joint task to train the Lutheran clergy
and schoolmasters of East and West Prussia, thereby functioning as a
kind of cultural headquarters for the maintenance of Lutheran religious
culture in the Baltic region (Hubatsch ). Salmonowicz thus points to
the quasi-colonial character of Königsberg culture when he reminds us
that by lecturing in German from a Lutheran perspective, the philoso-
phy and theology faculties were doubly excluding the town’s Polish
inhabitants (Salmonowicz ). For, in this way, a foreign language was
joined to a foreign religion, forcing these residents to send their young
men to Cracow for university education. If the brilliance of the
Königsberg Aufklärung thus failed to illuminate all its sons equally, then
neither were the teachings of its sage suited to all hearts and minds. Just
as he had been taught by Schultz and Knutzen, Kant taught moral phi-
losophy and metaphysics in German to Protestant boys, whose average
starting age was sixteen. The majority of these boys came from Prussia,
were students of theology, and were destined to become Lutheran
pastors, teachers, and academics (Stark , –). This, as we shall see,
turns out to be an important pointer to the role of Kant’s metaphysics
in the delineation and grooming of a certain kind of cultural deport-
ment.
In helping us to grasp the circumstances in which Kant’s attack on
civil ethics took place, these four aspects of Kant’s role as a Protestant
university metaphysician provide important pointers to the historical
meaning and significance of his philosophy. They indicate that the uni-
versity where Kant received his education, and became a celebrated
teacher, was one in which the philosophy and theology faculties fulfilled
the same joint function as in other Lutheran confessional universities:
namely, the cultural formation of the religious intelligentsia – a role
sharpened by Königsberg’s role in maintaining Lutheran religious
culture at Prussia’s Baltic frontier. Further, they suggest that Kant’s elab-
oration of a practical philosophy capable of harmonising rationalist
Wolffianism and voluntarist Lutheranism, undertaken within the frame-
work of a curriculum officially regulated by metaphysics, was the latest
refurbishment of the discipline whose role had always been to effect the
alliance of philosophy and theology: Schulmetaphysik. In short, despite the
widespread view of Kant as a non-metaphysical philosopher who tran-
scends the history of religious, political, and cultural conflict, we have
prima facie grounds for approaching Kant’s philosophy in a quite
 The morals of metaphysics 
different manner: namely, from the viewpoint of its emergence in a uni-
versity dedicated to preserving metaphysics as a comportment-educa-
tion for religious intellectuals.
Still, regardless of their prima facie significance, unless we can show
their relation to Kant’s central intellectual conceptions and doctrines,
these features of his cultural and academic situation will remain only
pointers to the historical significance of his philosophy. To this end, this
chapter undertakes a series of tasks. First – having prepared the his-
torical and methodological ground (., .) – we essay an historical
reconstruction of Kant’s moral philosophy, focusing on its moral anthro-
pology and attendant ‘spiritual exercises’, and treating these as the key
to understanding the manner in which this philosophy was embedded in
historical and institutional reality (.). In doing so, we will be perform-
ing the same kind of historical reconstruction as already undertaken on
Leibniz, Pufendorf, and Thomasius, approaching Kant’s moral anthro-
pology, like theirs, as the programme for a particular way of relating to
and shaping the self. We then discuss the formative role of Kant’s meta-
physical paideia for his doctrines of law and politics (Rechtslehre and
Staatsrechtslehre) (.) and his philosophical theology and ecclesiology
(.). Throughout, we shall maintain a running comparison between
Kant’s doctrines in these areas and those of Pufendorf and Thomasius.
The object of this undertaking is to redescribe Kant’s metaphysical phi-
losophy as a specific historical intellectual culture, neither more nor less
true to ‘humanity’ than its civil rival, but, like it, constituting a particu-
lar response to the problems of religious and civil governance confront-
ing early modern states.

.        

The key to the historical significance of Kant’s metaphysics lies in
understanding the ‘ascetic’ or self-formative role of his metaphysical
anthropology. The central obstacle to this understanding arises from
Kantian historiography for itself. By dividing Kant’s philosophy into so-
called pre- and post-critical phases – and by setting the threshold for the
transition in Kant’s supposed rejection of noumenal intuition and the
noumenal subject – this historiography presumes that Kant transcended
all merely historical moral anthropologies, thereby achieving a formal or
transcendental recovery of the conditions of subjectivity (Beck ,
–; Schilpp ; Schneewind , –; Wundt , –).
This historiography acknowledges that Kant’s pre-critical philosophy
 Kant and the preservation of metaphysics
remained wedded to the metaphysical cosmology of a spiritual world
and the metaphysical anthropology of man the intelligible being. But it
repeats Kant’s own metaphors of illumination and rebirth – of the
‘great light’ of  followed by the ‘awakening’ from dogmatic sleep
during the s – in order to present Kant’s ‘critical’ philosophy as
indicative of a radical break with his metaphysical past. In this way,
Kant’s later ‘critical’ use of the metaphysical cosmology and anthropol-
ogy is treated either as a leap to a post-noumenal philosophy grounded
in experience (Beck, Schneewind), or as the restriction of the noumena
to the moral domain (Wundt). This historiography thus ignores the
remarkable continuity of concepts, themes, and preoccupations joining
Kant’s so-called pre- and post-critical phases, a continuity first demon-
strated in Joseph Schmucker’s unrefuted textual analysis (Schmucker
). Even more importantly, it misunderstands the ground of this con-
tinuity, which lies in Kant’s unwavering life-long cultivation of the disci-
pline of university metaphysics.
To grasp the nature of this cultivation we must return to our central
characterisation of a metaphysical culture. If Kant’s metaphysical ethics
is characterised by a strongly ‘ascetic’ or self-formative character –
grounded in the anthropology of man’s dual intelligible–sensible being
– this is because, like Leibniz and Wolff, Kant inherited a university
metaphysics that made access to its object conditional on the transfor-
mation of its subject. This discipline and culture had been formalised in
the great medieval scholastic systems, where it was tied to the life-form
of a contemplative monasticism. We have already sketched the forms in
which it reappeared in Protestant universities at the beginning of the
seventeenth century (.); and we have outlined the Platonistic
modifications through which Leibniz made possible the broader dis-
semination of metaphysics achieved by Wolff (.). Moreover, in drawing
on Beroald Thomassen’s remarkable study of Albert the Great’s
Metaphysics Commentary, we were able to gain an insight into the inner
nexus between the pursuit of metaphysical knowledge and the cultiva-
tion of a certain kind of subjectivity (.). This linkage, we recall, is
focused in the dual characterisation of the divine intellect – simple,
immaterial, active, creative, intuitional – and the complex human one,
which appears as both intelligible and sensible, active and passive, crea-
tive and reproductive, intuitional and discursive. In this anthropological
differentiation of ‘rational being’, we have located the self-formative
dynamics of the culture of university metaphysics.
Kant’s metaphysics is grounded in this same characterisation of the
 The morals of metaphysics 
divine and human intellects, emblematised in his version of homo duplex
as ‘sensitively affected rational being’. This is a pointer to the fact that
far more of Kant’s philosophy is prefigured in the history of university
metaphysics than is generally understood. This continuity takes place
not so much at the level of exact doctrinal formulation – although here
too there are striking similarities – but at the level of the intellectual
grooming of the being who is to be the bearer of metaphysical knowl-
edge. Given our prior analysis of the self-formative use of the metaphys-
ical anthropology we have good reason for approaching Kant’s
metaphysics of morals as a discipline for shaping the moral deportment
of the metaphysician. In doing so we shall arrive at a new understand-
ing of the relation between Kant’s pre- and post-critical philosophy, so-
called, and thereby at a better understanding of his role as a university
metaphysician.
We have already noted that Kant’s characterisation of the noume-
non–phenomenon relation is prefigured by the longstanding metaphys-
ical construction of the relation between divine and human intellection.
In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant thus characterises the noumena or
pure intelligibles in terms of a simple active intellect that creates the
noumena by intelligising them; and he characterises phenomena in
terms of the appearance of the intelligibles to rational beings whose
passive sensory apparatus cuts them off from divine intellectual intuition
(CPR, A–, B–). Those who argue that Kant’s critical philos-
ophy represents a fundamental break with university metaphysics do so
by treating the inaccessibility of the noumena as indicative of Kant’s
turn to an experience-based philosophy. It should already be clear that
this reading of the history is premised on a fundamental misunderstand-
ing. After all, metaphysicians from Albert to Leibniz also declare that the
noumena or divinely intelligised substances are not directly accessible to
a rational being possessing man’s passive sensory apparatus. The point
is that the inaccessibility of the noumena belongs to a particular spiri-
tual paideia. In presenting the pure intellection of the substances as
unavailable to a sensible–rational being such as man, this paideia is
designed to induce and intensify the longing to behold such substances
– a pathos which in turn drives the self-purifying exercises of metaphys-
ics as an intellectual ethos. In Wittgenstein’s succinct formulation, pre-
senting limits to the human understanding ‘satisfies a longing for the
transcendent, because in so far as people think they can see the “limits
of human understanding”, they believe of course that they can see
beyond them’ (Wittgenstein , ). We can therefore shift the burden
 Kant and the preservation of metaphysics
of proof onto those who presume that in proclaiming the inaccessibility
of the noumena to human understanding Kant was effecting a radical
break with Schulmetaphysik and its culture. In fact, there is every reason to
conclude that this proclamation, like its Albertian prototype, is a means
of inducing and intensifying the desire for metaphysical knowledge.
Nonetheless, it might be said that Kant’s shifting of the goal of meta-
physical knowledge from theoretical objects to moral laws itself marks a
fundamental departure from the culture of university metaphysics.
Those who take this stance usually treat Kant’s discovery or invention of
the categorical imperative as marking such a departure. Their assump-
tion is that, prior to this, university metaphysics had been ‘consequen-
tialist’ or committed to constructing morality in terms of some kind of
good end – generally the perfection of rational being – rather than in
terms of unconditional commands arising from man’s practical reason
or higher self. Not only is this view historically inaccurate, we shall now
see that it is formulated in a language that is itself deeply embedded in
the culture of university metaphysics; for all anti-consequentialist moral
philosophy arises directly from the culture of metaphysical autarky. As
the means of cultivating intellectual autonomy – the complete freedom
from all dependency on material outcomes that comes from contemplat-
ing rational being – metaphysics is constitutionally anti-consequential-
ist, which makes Kant’s formulation of the categorical imperative far less
epoch-making than it seems. We can clarify this point, and Kant’s rela-
tion to the culture of metaphysics more broadly, by briefly returning to
Albert’s metaphysics.
According to Thomassen, Albert’s metaphysics is intrinsically ethical
because it is the discipline for cultivating the contemplative ethos
required for metaphysical knowledge (Thomassen , –). Albert,
we recall (.), constructs the contemplative life as the most virtuous via
the Aristotelian differentiation between the two ends of human life –
contemplative and civil happiness – which is in turn grounded in the dis-
tinction between activities whose end lies in themselves and those whose
ends lie outside them. Contemplation, or rational being’s action of
thinking and realising itself, is the only activity that contains its own end
or is ‘good in itself ’; for by being its own end or good it depends on no
other goods or ends outside itself, thereby unifying all the goods and
becoming autarkic. Civil happiness represents a lower form of life,
however; for it arises from the prudential pursuit of extrinsic ends – typ-
ically those of commercial and political life – whose morality is uncer-
tain and whose realisation is always threatened by the contingency of
 The morals of metaphysics 
action in the material world. We have already noted that this subordina-
tion of the civil to the intellectual life is grounded and shaped in the
metaphysical anthropology. According to this, through speculative
thought the ‘active intellect’ enlightens man’s higher rational being, per-
mitting it to rise to the domain of the intelligences or noumena.
Prudential virtue and civil activity, however, are viewed as products of
the lower or unenlightened part of man’s being, governed by the ends of
useful actions in the civil world.
If Kant needed no direct knowledge of Pufendorf or Thomasius in
order to display contempt for those who cultivate ‘civil righteousness for
the sake of peace or profit . . . all in conformity with the prized princi-
ple of happiness’, this was because he could fit their kind of civil philos-
ophy into the hierarchy of forms of ethical life to which he had been
inured through his own metaphysical enculturation. We glimpse the
metaphysical–anthropological basis of Kant’s hostility to prudential
ethics in the comments immediately following his display of contempt
for those who cultivate civil righteousness in this ‘consequentialist’
manner:
But someone who wishes to become not merely a legally but a morally good
man (pleasing to God); that is, virtuous in accordance with the intelligible char-
acter [of virtue] (virtus Noumenon), and who needs no other incentive to acknowl-
edge something as a duty than the idea [Vorstellung] of duty itself – this, so long
as the maxims remain impure, cannot take place through gradual reform, but
must rather be effected through a revolution in the disposition [Gesinnung] of
man (a transition to the maxim of holiness of disposition). And so a ‘new man’
can come about only through a kind of rebirth, as it were through a new crea-
tion (John, : ; compare with Genesis, : ) and a change of heart. (.; RRT,
pp. –)
This suggests that, rather than representing an innovation symptomatic
of a break with intellectualist metaphysics, Kant’s hostility to prudential
ethics, and his anti-consequentialism more generally, are in fact improv-
isations on longstanding doctrines whose role was to elaborate and val-
orise the contemplative ethos.
We gain further confirmation of this conjecture by briefly consider-
ing Albert’s treatment of metaphysics as the path to moral autonomy.
Albert elaborates moral autarky in his account of the way in which the
unmoved ‘first substance’ moves the ‘separated substances’ or intelli-
gences that aspire to unity with it (Thomassen , –). The only
way in which this can occur is if the first substance constitutes the good,
thereby motivating the intelligent beings through their desire for the
 Kant and the preservation of metaphysics
good. Albert explicates this by dividing the desirable goods into those
that are good in themselves and those only accidentally good. The acci-
dental goods or ends are not chosen for their own sake but – as Albert
says in a formulation that will be immediately familiar to readers of
Kant – only because they promise to satisfy the utilitarian desires of the
sensible world, which means that they are always only means to the satis-
faction of other ends, ad infinitum (, fn. ). As the final moving good,
the first substance cannot therefore belong to the domain of accidental
goods and must rather be the good in itself, just as, in the course of con-
structing the categorical imperative, Kant characterises rational being as
‘something whose existence has in itself an absolute value . . . which as
an end in itself could be a ground of determinate laws’ (.; PP, ).
In the same manner, therefore, as theoretical contemplation – that is,
due to its freedom from extrinsic ends and purposes – the prime moving
good acquires the quality of autarky. Moreover, the moral autarky of
Albert’s first substance is an expression of its intellectual nature. For the
fact that there are no conflicting ends in the intelligible world (spiritus
mundi) means that the intellectual good is self-consistent and completely
unified, unlike the accidental goods of the material world, which come
into conflict because of the diversity of desires they are meant to satisfy.
Finally, the fact that intellectual good is realised immediately in self-con-
templation means that, unlike material good, it is independent of all
consequences in the temporal and spatial world.
Readers of Kant will of course recognise here many of the central
themes of Kant’s metaphysics of morals. In particular, we find clear
prefigurations of Kant’s contemplative anti-consequentialism; his dis-
tinction between categorical and prudential motivation; his associated
distinction between the good in itself and the accidentally good; his doc-
trine that morality consists in the purely formal unity of moral ends rather
than the diversity of material goods; the associated theme of a moral
world consisting of a unity of intelligences oriented to a single intellec-
tual good, which Kant calls the ‘kingdom of ends’; and, finally, we find a
clear prefiguration of Kant’s fundamental doctrine that morality arises
from the manner in which a lower sensibly affected intelligence seeks its
own purification through contemplation of a higher autarkic intellectual
good – the ‘transition to holiness of disposition’. Here though we can see
these themes in their true historical light, as the doctrinal scaffolding for
a contemplative ethos focused in a special spiritual exercise.
If the foundation of metaphysics depends on inducing the desire for
metaphysical knowledge through the inculcation of its anthropology,
 Kant’s metaphysical ethos 
then we must learn to approach German university metaphysics as a
particular historical Lebensführung or culture of ethical life. Further, if the
metaphysical conception of morality – as the self-transformative appre-
hension of an intellectual end that is good in itself – is indeed only func-
tional for an ethos of contemplative self-purification, then we shall have
to change our view of Kant’s project to provide a foundation for the
metaphysics of morals. Rather than seeing the elaboration of founda-
tions as a theoretical prelude to the moral life, we shall see that, for the
metaphysical ethos, the pursuit of foundations itself constitutes the
highest form of ethical life; for it represents precisely that exercise of
speculation through which the human intellect is purified and prepared
for contemplative felicity. Metaphysical knowledge of morality, we shall
now see, is not a theory of man’s moral worthiness. Rather it is the goal
or condition that man strives to become worthy of through theoretical
activity, in accordance with a hierarchy of forms of ethical life that is
internal to university metaphysics as an institutional ethos.

.    ’          

It is not difficult to show the centrality of the metaphysical anthropol-
ogy to Kant’s work, from its earliest to its latest stages of development.
Although he did not publish a work wholly dedicated to moral philoso-
phy until the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals in , the anthro-
pology of homo duplex is vividly apparent in those parts of his early
theoretical philosophy that deal with the moral domain.
In the third part of his General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens
(), Kant sketches a theory of morality in the form of a speculative
cosmogony – a theory of the moral universe derived from its constitu-
tive substances. There must, says Kant, be rational beings or intelli-
gences on other planets because otherwise these planets ‘would not be
of the slightest use to the end of nature, namely the contemplation of
rational being’ (.). Turning to our solar system, he then constructs a
moral cosmogony in which the capacity for theoretical contemplation
varies with the moral physiologies of the different planetary beings, as a
factor of their distance from the sun. The inhabitants of planets nearest
to the sun have coarse and lethargic psychologies that mire them in their
sensuous natures, making them incapable of theoretical understanding
and moral self-governance. The beings dwelling on the outer planets
though possess refined and active organic natures, perfectly suited to the
activity of theoretical contemplation and the end of morality:
 Kant and the preservation of metaphysics
To what progress in knowledge will the insight of those blessed beings of the
highest heavenly spheres not reach! What beautiful consequences will this illu-
mination of insight not have in their moral constitution! If they possess the
proper degree of perfection and distinctness, the insights of the understanding
have far livelier attractions than the sensuous lures, which they are capable of
ruling victoriously, crushing them under foot. (.)
Man, as the resident of a planet mid-way between the inner and outer
heavens, is the possessor of a duplex moral psychology. Tied to sensory
knowledge and sensuous desire through the coarseness of his corporeal
nature, yet capable of theoretical reflection through the fineness of his
rational being, he must struggle to purify his ambivalent being in order
to render himself capable of participating in moralising theoretical
insight (.–). Clearly this speculative moral cosmogony – represent-
ing man as the nexus of the spiritual and material orders whose duality
he embodies in his own higher and lower nature – shows Kant impro-
vising on the scholastic metaphysical anthropology, attempting to adapt
it to the Newtonian universe without compromising its role in program-
ming the contemplative ethos.
A decade later we see Kant nearing his goal. Here he develops a cos-
mological version of the metaphysical anthropology that would remain
powerfully present in his mature moral philosophy. Kant published the
Dreams of a Spirit-Seer Elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics in  in order
to criticise Swedenborgian claims to visionary insight into the spirit
world. In presuming the possibility of empirical experience of intelli-
gible entities, Kant argues, such claims blur the boundary between
man’s sensory understanding and his intellectual reason, whose mainte-
nance is the task of metaphysics (.–; TP, –). Nonetheless, in
the course of establishing this boundary, Kant elaborates an account of
man as a rational being that remains rooted in the figure of his dual cit-
izenship in two worlds, the intelligible and the material. We may
imagine, says Kant, that there is an immaterial world or mundus intelligib-
ilis. Following the standard pneumatology of university metaphysics, he
declares that this world consists of ‘all created intelligences, some of
them united with matter so as to form a person, others not’ (.; TP,
). Unencumbered by corporeality and passive faculties, the intelli-
gences of this world are in immediate communication with each other,
thereby forming a spiritual community unfettered by the media of space
and time. Man, though, is also a member of a world of material entities
governed by their causal relations in space and time, and, to the degree
that his understanding is tied to this mundus sensibilis through his senses,
 Kant’s metaphysical ethos 
he may have no knowledge of his place in the spiritual community;
although this is something of which he may nonetheless be obscurely
aware (.–; TP, –).
Kant’s reason for insisting on the inaccessibility of spiritual commu-
nity to man’s empirical understanding is not, however, to foreclose
knowledge of it. Rather, it is to shift the locale in which this insight must
be struggled for, to the moral domain. The concepts through which
Kant effects this shift – those of the good in itself and moral autarky con-
sidered as the unification of all ends or goods – would have been imme-
diately familiar to Albert. We are aware of moral impulses lying beyond
our own sensible desires, says Kant, through our capacity to sacrifice our
self-interested ends to the ends of other wills. Through this capacity we
acquire insight into the fact that our higher will forms a unity with all
other such wills, the spiritual community thus constituting a single
general will whose rule (Regel) gives unity to morality: ‘As a result, we rec-
ognise that, in our most secret motives, we are dependent on the rule of
the general will. It is this rule which confers upon the world of all think-
ing beings its moral unity and invests it with a systematic constitution,
drawn up in accordance with purely spiritual laws’ (.; TP, ).
As in the Albertian version, the unity of the will is tied to its freedom
via the figure of contemplative autarky. By engaging in the only activity
whose end or good lies within itself – contemplation of the intelligible
world – the private will frees itself from all ends whose satisfaction
depends on consequences in the world of space and time. It thereby joins
a cosmic unity or ‘kingdom’ of ends, the spiritual community or general
will. In this manner man apprehends his participation in the intelligible
world, where his purified intentions are immediately efficacious
throughout the entire community of spirits – merely by being thought –
and are themselves reciprocally purified through this moral unity: ‘For
since the moral character of the deed concerns the inner state of the
spirit, it follows that it can only naturally produce an effect, which is con-
sonant with the whole of morality, in the immediate community of
spirits’ (.; TP, ). Heinz Heimsoeth’s comments on Kant’s spiri-
tual anthropology and cosmology – originally made in  – thus
remain valid:
A pluralistically constructed ‘realm of spiritis’, of immortal individuals (of the
kind in Berkeley’s world or in Swedenborg’s), is the tacit background of [Kant’s]
rational faith . . . Every interpretation of the categorical imperative (which com-
mands me always to behave in such a way that the maxim of my will could serve
as the principle of universal law) in an individualistic sense changes its meaning
 Kant and the preservation of metaphysics
and essentially misinterprets Kant’s intent. For Kant, too, everything comes
down to a community of rational beings, which is made possible by the fact that
all of them will essentially the same thing and that in the spiritual-rational core
of their being they are totally alike. Only ‘empirical’ self is individual in the
sense of something unique; the special character of individuals is merely a fact;
it is not itself something of importance and value. (Heimsoeth , –)
The main difference between the Dreams and Kant’s earlier and more
Wolffian cosmogony is his insistence that man is aware of his participa-
tion in the general will not through a pure theoretical insight, but
through an obscure yet immediate ‘moral feeling’. Kant introduces this
feeling as the form in which man’s material nature experiences the law
of moral gravity acting on his intellectual nature in the spiritual commu-
nity: ‘If the phenomenon of moral impulses were represented in this
way, the moral feeling would be this sensed dependency of the private will
on the general will’ (.; TP, ). In fact Kant goes so far as to say
that, given the different sources of knowledge of the two worlds – intel-
lectual intuition as opposed to sense-based discursive knowledge – the
individual subject of the intelligible and material worlds lacks personal
unity: ‘Accordingly, while it is true that there is one single subject which
is simultaneously a member of the visible and the invisible world, it is
nonetheless not one and the same person, for the representations of the
one world are not, on account of their different constitution, the accom-
panying ideas of the representations belonging to the other world’
(.; TP, ).
Kant is thus able to insist on the illegitimacy of the illuminist claims
to empirical experience of spirits. Yet he can simultaneously explain why,
in his version of the two worlds, he, ‘as a human being’, may be morally
affected by his membership of the spiritual community while having no
clear recollection of it. But this is simply a pointer to the fact that in the
Dreams Kant is putting the anthropology of homo duplex and the ethos of
contemplative autarky to two distinct but associated uses. On the one
hand, he uses these key elements of the metaphysical culture to defend
it against its misuse by popularisers like Swedenborg, who threatened to
discredit university metaphysics by turning it into a kind of popular
religion. On the other hand, though, he continues to use the pathos of
the inaccessibility of the intelligible world for its central self-formative
purpose. Once again, its role is to induce and intensify the longing for
metaphysical knowledge, here in the form of a moral feeling whose very
obscurity incites the desire for insight into the intelligible world that it
veils.
 Kant’s metaphysical ethos 
The Dreams thus provides us with good prima facie evidence that
Kant’s moral philosophy emerged as an improvisation within the culture
of university metaphysics. Kant, too, ties the founding insight of the
metaphysics of morals to an anthropology of the being capable of
bearing this insight, and he does so as a means of inducting his students
and readers into metaphysics as a contemplative form of life. Why then
do we find so little discussion of the crucial role of the metaphysical
anthropology in modern accounts of Kant’s moral philosophy? For the
most part such accounts either pass over the anthropology in embar-
rassed silence or, if they do discuss it, treat it as part of Kant’s ‘pre-crit-
ical’ metaphysical stage, consigned to the past by his great critical
discovery of the subjectivity of reason. This discovery, it is claimed,
allowed Kant to found his moral philosophy in a principle open to
formal construction or available to ordinary consciousness, thereby ren-
dering the metaphysical anthropology redundant.
This was the view taken by such earlier commentators as Wundt and
Schilpp (Schilpp ; Wundt ). But it is also the view of those more
recent commentators who, like Henry Allison, defend what has been
called the ‘two-viewpoints’ interpretation of Kant against the ‘two-
worlds’ reading (Allison , ). Here it is argued that as a result of
his supposed ‘critical’ rejection of the metaphysical reality of noumenal
entities, Kant’s subsequent use of the distinction between the intelligible
and sensible worlds was only to provide a single subject (person) with two
perspectives on their moral conduct – as intellectually self-generated and
as causally determined (Allison , –, –). While coming from
a different theoretical quarter, the manner in which Allison transmutes
Kant’s metaphysical anthropology into the transcendental conditions of
experience has much in common with Henrich’s way of burying the
anthropology in an indefeasible phenomenological insight (Henrich
, –). Both are in fact attempts to remove Kant’s anthropology
of spiritual–rational being from the domain of competing historical
moral anthropologies, in effect by appealing to the kind of insight that
such a being would have, were the metaphysical anthropology to be true.
Finally, this strategy in turn underlies J. B. Schneewind’s treatment,
which both acknowledges that Kant possesses an anthropology compar-
able with its rivals, yet simultaneously identifies Kant’s with something
known to everyone as an indefeasible ‘fact of reason’:
Kant embeds his conception of autonomy in a metaphysical psychology going
beyond anything in Hume or Rousseau. Kantian autonomy presupposes that
we are rational agents whose transcendental freedom takes us out of the domain
 Kant and the preservation of metaphysics
of natural causation. It belongs to every individual, in the state of nature as well
as in society. Through it each person has a compass that enables ‘common
human reason’ to tell what is consistent with duty and what is inconsistent. Our
moral capacities are made known to each of us by the fact of reason, our aware-
ness of a categorical obligation that we can respect against the pull of desire.
(Schneewind , )
In treating Kant’s metaphysical anthropology of noumenal man (on
the one hand) as a fantasmatic construct and (on the other hand) as the
chrysalis from which man’s final recovery of his true rational being
would emerge, this commentary misses the register in which Kant’s
anthropology operates – that of ethical self-formation. It is true that
Kant is himself uncertain regarding the kind of belief he has in the
metaphysical anthropology and cosmology employed in the Dreams. This
uncertainty does not indicate however that Kant regards the anthropol-
ogy and cosmology as a ‘joke’ or ‘plausible fantasy’, as Schneewind
argues (Schneewind , ). Our analysis suggests that, rather than
signifying his incipient relegation of the esoteric anthropology in favour
of a common human reason, Kant’s ambivalence is symptomatic of a
quite different historical circumstance. If Kant felt called on to defend
the metaphysical ethos against its Swedenborgian popularisation into
fanatical belief in an ‘empirical’ spiritus mundi, then he was also acutely
aware that Newtonian cosmology threatened to rob the spiritual (intel-
ligible) world of all anchorage in the material one (Wundt , –).
Far from leading Kant to repudiate belief in the cosmology and anthro-
pology of the intelligible world, however, this set of circumstances
resulted in his elaboration of a new way of assenting to this belief.
According to his new mode of assent, the intelligible world should be
acceded to not as a hypothesis capable of empirical confirmation, but as
a doctrine recommended to us by its moral consequences:
If one concedes to these thoughts enough plausibility to justify the effort of
measuring them against their consequences, one may perhaps find oneself,
because of their charm, being imperceptibly prejudiced in their favour. For in
this case, the anomalies seem to vanish which are normally so embarrassingly
conspicuous in the contradiction between the moral and the physical circum-
stances of man here on earth. All the morality of actions, while never having
its full effect in the corporeal life of man according to the order of nature, may
well do so in the spirit-world, according to pneumatic laws. (.–; TP, )
This modification of the mode of acceding to metaphysical belief
points towards Kant’s new way of justifying faith in immortality and a
divine creator – in terms of a moral ‘need of reason’ rather than as a
 Kant’s metaphysical ethos 
confirmable truth. Moreover, it shows why the modern debate between
the ‘two-worlds’ and ‘two-viewpoints’ interpretations is beside the point.
In constructing a moral plausibility for the doctrine of man as the inter-
nally divided inhabitant of the intelligible and sensible worlds, Kant was
developing neither an objective moral cosmology nor a subjective moral
theory. He was in fact improvising a new way for his students and readers
to assent to the anthropology through which their desire for metaphysi-
cal knowledge would be induced and their practice of metaphysical
speculation impelled.
Next we may observe that this elaboration of a moral means of
assenting to the metaphysical anthropology was both the effect and the
instrument of an ongoing renegotiation of the relation between the eso-
teric and exoteric dimensions of the metaphysical culture. For Albert,
while all individuals possess the higher part of the soul open to enlight-
enment by the ‘active intellect’, only a minority possess the organic con-
stitution that permits this to occur. This, we may suggest, is a doctrine
appropriate to historical circumstances in which only a monastic elite
will pursue metaphysical self-transformation. In Kant’s Natural History of
the Heavens, however, all of the inhabitants of planet earth possess the
kind of mixed sensible–intelligible natures that propel them towards the
joy of contemplation. This, we may conjecture, is a result of the extraor-
dinary spread of metaphysical Christianity during the period of confes-
sionalisation and early modernity. As a result of this spread, and in order
to preserve metaphysical faith against its marginalisation by an anti-
metaphysical civil philosophy – committed to detranscendentalising phi-
losophy and treating religion as a simple private faith – university
metaphysics was driven to attach its esoteric doctrines to more readily
accessible ones.
Kant’s construction of moral feeling in the Dreams is one such strategy,
removing the metaphysical anthropology and cosmology from the pres-
sures of speculative belief by treating them as only accessible via the
feeling of right and wrong that we all experience in daily life. We have just
seen that Kant’s argument that we should accede to a purely moral belief
in these doctrines is a second such strategy, which would flow into his treat-
ment of the belief in God and immortality. For our present concerns,
however, the most important of these exoteric representations of the
metaphysical anthropology is Kant’s construction of the ‘sense of duty’;
for it is this strategy that takes us to the heart of his metaphysics of moral-
ity, revealing it in fact to be another version of the morality of metaphys-
ics. Kant’s conception of doing one’s duty for its own sake – regardless of
 Kant and the preservation of metaphysics
all external rewards or threats, merely out of regard for duty itself – has
something in common with the unconditional duty ethics of monastic
and military orders. Yet Kant is able to use this conception as a surrogate
for the central figure of metaphysical moral autarky, treating action in
accordance with duty for its own sake as a worldly correlate for the con-
templative self-conformation of rational being.
In the Preface to the Critique of Practical Reason we thus find Kant com-
menting that in this work he has been able to graft his philosophy onto
an available (moral) language and a popular (moral) consciousness,
thereby avoiding the charges of unintelligibility levelled at the First
Critique: ‘I have no fear, with respect to this treatise, of the reproach that
I want to introduce a new language, because here the kind of cognition
itself approaches popularity’ (.; PP, ). He explains his procedure
in the accompanying footnote, where he comments that in the Critique of
Practical Reason he uses the concepts of ‘duty and contrary to duty’ to
signify the metaphysical notion of action that agrees or conflicts with ‘a
law actually present in reason as such’. Kant further remarks that ‘this
distinction in meaning is not altogether foreign even to popular usage,
although it is somewhat unusual’ (.; PP, ). Remembering, however,
that the law ‘actually present in reason as such’ is in fact the rule of the
general will or spiritual community, and considering that Kant is
attempting to graft this conception onto the popular ideal of acting in
accordance with the duty for its own sake, we have here a striking insight
into his programme for providing metaphysics with an exoteric anchor-
age in an available ethical culture.
In fact Kant’s objective is to treat the sense of duty as the obscure
feeling of the unconditional laws governing individuals as members of a
purely spiritual community, leading them to measure all prospective
maxims and duties via philosophical reflection on those that could be
willed by a transparent community of intelligences. One can scarcely
imagine a conception of duty more opposed to Pufendorf ’s conception
of it as the imposition of obligations by the civil authority in the inter-
ests of social peace. As the exoteric face of Kant’s metaphysical ethos,
his ethics of duty is centrally responsible for carrying the metaphysical
anthropology into the modern period. Here, many commentators
accept it as a fully rational exposition of the moral law whose force we
are all supposed to feel. We have suggested, however, that the indefea-
sible experience of duty that is supposed to ground Kant’s philosophy as
a moral theory is actually produced by the use of this philosophy as a
discipline for the spiritual grooming of moral theorists. If this is so then,
 Moral philosophy as metaphysical ‘paideia’ 
like its Albertian predecessor, Kantian ethics must be regarded not as an
attempt to pursue the metaphysical foundations of human moral life,
but as an attempt to inculcate the pursuit of metaphysical foundations
as the highest form of moral life. It is now time to confirm this conjec-
ture by considering the manner in which Kant himself grounds his
ethics, in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.

.            p a i d e i a

We can begin by observing that the three parts of the Groundwork are
organised as an ascending series of steps. This intellectual ladder
requires the reader or student to pass ‘from common moral rational
knowledge to philosophic’, thence ‘from popular moral philosophy to
the metaphysics of morals’, leading at last to the ‘final step from the
metaphysics of morals to the critique of pure practical reason’ (.;
PP, ). Through these steps Kant wants to show, firstly, that the meta-
physical idea of morality is contained in ordinary moral consciousness;
next, that clear insight into this principle requires relegating prudential
moral philosophy in favour of metaphysical; and, finally, that the need
for this principle arises from man’s dualistic nature as an intelligible
being bound to the sensible world. Kant regards the three steps as stages
in the analytical clarification of the ‘supreme principle’ of morality that
is given in ordinary consciousness (.; PP, ). Moreover, despite
widespread disagreement over his degree of success, modern Kantians
accept this claim. Henrich’s formulation is representative: ‘[The
Groundwork] begins from ordinary moral knowledge and at first grounds
its argument wholly in evidences [that this consciousness] demonstrates
to itself. This is explicable on theoretical grounds; at the time of the
Groundwork Kant had already seen, and a little later resolutely empha-
sised, that all understanding of moral consciousness had to begin from
its facticity’ (Henrich , ). We shall show, however, that the three
steps in fact form the architecture of an elaborate spiritual exercise,
designed to lead the reader through ascending levels of speculative self-
questioning and self-purification.
The character of this exercise can be clarified by looking at its crucial
opening phase, designed to induct the reader (or Kant’s students) into a
sense of the need for a metaphysical ethics. This occurs in the Preface
and, significantly, takes place via Kant’s claim to separate the metaphys-
ics of morals from all moral anthropology. Kant’s central contention –
that there must be an a priori knowledge of the grounds of morality,
 Kant and the preservation of metaphysics
independent of all ethics derived from man’s empirical nature and his-
torical circumstances – is usually treated as a purely methodological dis-
tinction, between a pure and an applied ethics. What this standard
interpretation fails to understand, however, is that, in university meta-
physics, theoretical purity is always the instrument of moral purity.
Consequently, this interpretation fails to observe that in imposing the
‘methodological’ distinction between the metaphysics and anthropology
of morals, Kant is actually introducing his core metaphysical doctrine:
namely, that morality is grounded in the autarky of the pure intelligences
as a community of rational beings, rather than in man’s lower ‘empiri-
cal’ human nature. His central argument – that to capture the uncondi-
tional character of moral obligation one must posit metaphysical
knowledge of the law of a community of pure intelligences – occurs
rapidly and with little supporting argument, in the form of a ‘step’ from
popular moral consciousness to its pure philosophy:
For that there must be such a philosophy [cleansed of everything that may be
only empirical and that belongs to anthropology] is clear of itself from the
common idea of duty and of moral laws. Everyone must grant that a law, if it
is to hold morally, that is, as a ground of an obligation, must carry with it abso-
lute necessity; that, for example, the command ‘thou shalt not lie’ does not hold
only for human beings [Menschen], as if other rational beings [vernünftige Wesen]
did not have to heed it, and similarly with all other genuine moral laws; that,
therefore, the ground of obligation must not be sought in the nature of the
human being or in the circumstances of the world in which he is placed, but
solely a priori in concepts of pure reason; and that any other precept, which is
based in principles of mere experience – even if it is universal in a certain
respect – insofar as it rests in the slightest part on empirical grounds, perhaps
only in terms of motive, can indeed be called a practical rule but never a moral
law. (.; PP, –)
The metaphysics of morals outstrips all moral anthropology because
the universe of rational beings, existing outside space and time, outstrips
the world of man, which consists only of those rational beings attached
to bodies in the spatio-temporal world. Despite Kant’s claim that it is
presupposed in the common idea of duty, the notion that moral obliga-
tion is absolutely unconditional – in the sense of applying uncondition-
ally to the commercium of pure intelligences in which man participates –
is evidently the product of the esoteric metaphysical anthropology.
Ludwig Siep is one of the few modern commentators to note the conse-
quence of this notion: namely, that the metaphysical moral law is
grounded not in man as such, but in that part of his nature that belongs
to the world of the vernünftige Wesen or pure intelligences (Siep , –).
 Moral philosophy as metaphysical ‘paideia’ 
But Siep is so disconcerted by this discovery – commenting that Kant’s
methodological distinction might conceal the ‘secularisation of a relig-
ious morality’ – that he fails to observe that here Kant is drawing on a
standard doctrine of early modern university metaphysics. This, we
recall, is the doctrine that the true bearer of metaphysical knowledge is
not the sensible–empirical human being, but the intellect whose purity
and simplicity allow it to participate in the community of non-embodied
intelligences or rational beings. In other words, the true bearer of meta-
physical knowledge is not man as a rational being but, as Kant has it,
‘rational being in man’. The following remark, from Kant’s reflections on
his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, captures his way
of formulating the relevant distinction: ‘There is a great difference
between being a good man [Mensch] and a good rational being [vernünf-
tiges Wesen]. To be perfect as the latter involves no other limits than
finitude, [to be perfect] as the former involves many limitations’ (.).
We recall that this doctrine performs the ‘ascetic’ function of induc-
ing the desire for metaphysical knowledge, representing it as the perfec-
tion of man’s highest or best part – his rational intellect – and as
conditional on the purification of his lower sensible nature through spec-
ulation. Only the fact that Kant, too, is using the doctrine in this way –
that is, as a means of tying the theoretical purity of metaphysics to the
spiritual purity of the metaphysician – can explain the fact that he treats
empirical moral anthropology not just as philosophically mistaken but
as morally corrupting:
A metaphysics of morals is therefore indispensably necessary, not merely in
order to investigate, from speculative motives, the source of the practical prin-
ciples that lie a priori in our reason, but also because morals themselves remain
subject to all sorts of corruption as long as we lack the guiding thread and
highest norm for their correct judgment. For, in the case of what is to be morally
good it is not enough that it conform with the moral law but it must also be done
for the sake of the law . . . Now the moral law in its purity and genuineness . . . is
to be sought nowhere else than in a pure philosophy; hence this (metaphysics)
must come first, and without it there can be no moral philosophy at all. That
which mixes up these pure principles with empirical ones does not even deserve
the name of philosophy . . . much less does it deserve the name of a moral phi-
losophy, since by this very confusion it actually damages the purity of morals
themselves and acts against its own end. (.–; PP, –)
Kant’s claim to elevate the metaphysics of morals above all moral
anthropology is thus wholly dependent on his own metaphysical anthro-
pology, which he uses to induct his readers into a particular kind of rela-
tion to themselves. Through the metaphysical anthropology Kant’s
 Kant and the preservation of metaphysics
students learn to relate to themselves as beings whose true selves lie in
a higher rational being, to which they may accede only through the
purifying activity of metaphysics. Moreover, they come to recognise
prudentially oriented empirical moral anthropologies – for example,
Pufendorf ’s quasi-Stoic political anthropology and Thomasius’ quasi-
Epicurean Affektenlehre – not just as philosophically erroneous but as
morally corrupting, as a threat to their cultivation of a true pure self. If
therefore Kant is widely seen as offering an a priori metaphysics of
morals rather than a ‘material’ moral anthropology, this is only because
of the religious intensity with which the Kantian paideia welds its practi-
tioners to its anthropology, impelling them to identify it as their true self.
Intense and exclusivist adherence to ‘pure practical philosophy’ – as
opposed to the plurality of moral anthropologies – is thus itself an
outcome of the manner in which the Kantian ‘school’ inculcates its par-
ticular moral anthropology. By presenting the metaphysical anthropol-
ogy as the path to a higher moral self, the Groundwork’s Preface envisages
readers who will adhere to the philosophical purity of metaphysics as the
key to their spiritual purity as metaphysicians.

.. Inducing the desire for metaphysics

As we have already noted, Kant presents the first transition of the
Groundwork – that ‘from common rational moral knowledge to philo-
sophic’, undertaken in Section  – as an analytical recovery of the
supreme moral principle from a popular consciousness already dimly
aware of it. Given our redescription of the Preface, however, we can
expect that this analytical procedure will in fact take place as an initia-
tory spiritual exercise. This will be an exercise designed to induct readers
(or students) into the speculative ethos by presenting it as the key to a
pure and purifying principle of morality, present, but only weakly, in
their ordinary consciousness. This expectation is not disappointed.
Kant purports to show the presence of his metaphysical moral prin-
ciple in ordinary moral consciousness by leading the reader through four
stages of argument. First, he claims that his readers already know that
the only unconditionally good thing is a good will (.–; PP, –).
The good will is an incomparably higher good than all the ends we asso-
ciate with happiness – ‘Power, riches, honour, even health’ – and all the
virtues to which the ancient philosophers aspired: ‘Moderation in affects
and passions, self-control, and tranquil reflection.’ Next, Kant moves to
elucidate this still somewhat esoteric concept by showing that it is already
contained in the popular idea of doing one’s duty for its own sake
 Moral philosophy as metaphysical ‘paideia’ 
(.–; PP, –). Given that the moral worth of an action done
from duty arises not from any desired consequences, this worth must
depend solely on the purity of the rule (maxim) or principle of its willing.
It must depend, that is, on whether the action is willed in a formal or a
priori manner, independent of all gratifying consequences – as opposed
to being willed in a material or empirical manner, in accordance with
some self-interested desire. Thirdly, he argues that his concept of duty
must be understood as the determination of the will through the mere
idea or thought of duty (.–; PP, –). If the goodness of the will
is not determined by the consequences that follow from its rules, then it
must be the mere idea or thought (Vorstellung) of the rule itself that deter-
mines the will and constitutes its moral goodness. Finally, Kant claims
that in constructing this conception of the moral principle he has done
nothing more than clarify a principle already present in ordinary moral
consciousness (.–; PP, –). Given the simplicity of this princi-
ple, which requires no sophisticated calculation of the empirical conse-
quences of actions, it may be used even by the untutored mind, which
need only reflect on whether one if its maxims – to lie out of self-inter-
est, for example – could be willed as a universal law for all rational
beings. Moreover, Kant already claims to have shown that the principle
of enactment of universal law is actually revered by everyone – felt sub-
jectively as respect for the law for its own sake – even if only philosophers
have clear insight into its grounds.
It should already be clear that there are striking similarities between
Kant’s eliciting of the moral law from ordinary consciousness and
Albert’s grounding of metaphysics in man’s desire for a knowledge that
will perfect his intellectual being. In the first place, Kant’s opening
appeal to the reader’s ‘existing’ knowledge that only the good will is
unconditionally good, actually takes place in the form of an evocation
of the superiority of the contemplative over the active or prudential life.
In proclaiming that the ends of happiness and the virtues of self-control
are not the highest good, Kant’s justification is not grounded in any
argument against the rival doctrines, but in something quite different: an
evocation of the figure of contemplative autarky or intellectual auton-
omy. This, we recall, is the conception of an activity governed by no
external end or good, hence containing all goods, and obtaining thereby
the status of the good in itself: ‘A good will is not good because of what
it effects or accomplishes, because of its aptness for attaining some pro-
posed end, but simply through its willing; that is, it is good in itself and,
beheld for itself, is of incomparably greater worth than anything it could
bring about merely in favour of some inclination or, if you like, the sum
 Kant and the preservation of metaphysics
of all inclinations’ (.; PP, ). As in the Albertian version, the infe-
riority of the prudential ethos arises from the fact that it seeks happiness
in fallible empirical consequences, to which it is tied by man’s lower sen-
sible nature; while the superiority of the good will is that, ‘beheld for
itself ’, it is freed from such consequences, thereby obtaining the autarky
that in fact constitutes goodness for the contemplative ethos: ‘Even if . . .
this will should wholly lack the power to carry out its intentions . . . if
with its greatest efforts it should yet achieve nothing and only the good
will were left . . . then it would still shine like a jewel for its own sake, as
something containing its entire worth in itself ’ (.; PP, ). Through
his depiction of the autarkic will, therefore, Kant is not reminding his
readers of what they already know, for otherwise even the civil philoso-
phers would have known it. Rather, he is offering them an image of the
being they might become, if only they will turn away from external pru-
dential concerns with ‘power, riches, honour, even health’ – he does not
include civil peace on this occasion – and begin the speculative
purification of their inner wills.
Secondly, we are now in a position to see Kant’s appeal to the idea of
duty in its proper historical light. It appears here not as the explication
of a difficult concept (the autarkic will) through one available to popular
moral consciousness, but in its true pedagogical form. Through this
appeal, Kant ties the esoteric culture of contemplative autarky to the
exoteric one of duty for its own sake, in order to reshape popular con-
sciousness. Here the crucial thing to attend to is Kant’s initial character-
isation of duty: ‘We shall therefore take up the concept of duty, which
contains that of a good will though under certain subjective limitations
and hindrances, which, however, far from concealing it and making it
unrecognisable, rather bring it out by contrast and make it shine more
brightly’ (.; PP, ). Lying behind this soft-focus formulation is of
course the entire anthropology of homo duplex, according to which the
good will, as determined by pure self-active intellection, is man’s mode
of participating in the kingdom of self-governing rational beings, while
his lower sensible faculties – the inclinations that attach him to the world
of practical ends – constitute the ‘subjective limitations and hindrances’
that give rise to the sense of duty. Like its prototype – the concept of
‘moral feeling’ in the Dreams – the concept of duty as ‘respect for the law’
in the Groundwork is constructed in terms of man’s ‘sensed dependency’
as a material being on the self-rule of the community of intelligences in
which he participates through his rational being. Kant’s formulation of
the unconditional or categorical character of moral obligation – ‘so
[setting aside inclinations] there is nothing left to determine the will
 Moral philosophy as metaphysical ‘paideia’ 
except objectively the law and subjectively pure respect for this practical
law’ (.; PP, –) – thus cannot be understood as the mere
clarification of a mode of moral subjection that man is already (univer-
sally) under. Rather, drawing on the full weight of the metaphysical
anthropology, it is a means of putting individuals under the mode of
subjection peculiar to metaphysics as a particular moral culture. It is the
means by which Kant compels his readers and students to relate to their
moral strivings not as impulses that might be satisfied through the attain-
ment of worldly ends, but as the obscurely immediate commands of a
higher intelligence within them. In short, Kant’s explication of the
autarkic will through the concept of duty – as the feeling of respect for
the law – is a means of enforcing a relation to the self suited to the prac-
tice of speculative self-purification.
Third, in this light, one of the most obscure parts of Kant’s moral phi-
losophy – the conception of the moral law as one the mere idea of which
determines the will, independently of all incentives – becomes a good
deal clearer. The idea or thought (Vorstellung) of the moral law cannot be
understood on the model of concepts in the empirical or mathematical
sciences. For, like the thought of the non-embodied substances in uni-
versity metaphysics from Albert to Leibniz, this idea is of a pure intel-
lectual order the thinking of which requires the purification of the being
who thinks it. It is Kant’s distinction between the formal and material
principles of the will – the former determining the will through its mere
idea, the latter through external empirical ends – that holds the key to
the interdependency of theoretical and moral purity in his ethics. For to
have insight into the mere idea or form of the moral law, independently
of all the material ends it might have, means to have abstracted from the
sensible ends that tie the will to the empirical world, thereby realising the
higher active intellect whose thinking of the moral law is simultaneously
self-knowledge and self-completion. As we shall see in more detail below,
Kant’s initial formulation of the moral principle – ‘I ought never to act
except in such a way that I can also will that my maxim should become
a universal law’ (.; PP, ) – is thus the exoteric instrument for a
practice of speculative self-purification. For the conversion of (material)
maxims to (formal) universal laws requires the conversion of the sensu-
ous (sinnliches) subject of the maxims into the intelligible (holy) subject of
the law governing a world of intelligences.
Finally, we are now in a position to reinterpret Kant’s triumphant con-
clusion to the first stage of the Groundwork: ‘Thus, through the moral
knowledge of common human reason, we have arrived at its principle
which, admittedly, it does not thus think abstractly in a universal form,
 Kant and the preservation of metaphysics
but which it does have always before its eyes and uses as a norm of judg-
ment’ (.; PP, ). In fact the true state of affairs is that through the
manner in which he interpellates them as subjects of common moral
knowledge – that is, positions them as bearers of the obscure sensible
insight into their rational willing as intelligible beings – Kant impels his
readers to pursue an abstract universal principle of morality. For this is
the means by which they will purify their insight and come to full partic-
ipation in the community of rational beings; or, more concretely, acquire
the intellectual–social prestige attaching to those initiated into this
purificatory rite. It is not surprising therefore that the metaphysical
anthropology should make its first explicit appearance here in the con-
clusion to Part I, after its important work of induction has been done:
The human being feels in himself a powerful counterweight to all the com-
mands of duty presented to him by reason as so worthy of esteem – the counter-
weight of his needs and inclinations, the entire satisfaction of which he sums up
under the name of happiness . . . [And] from this arises a natural dialectic, that
is, a propensity to rationalise against those strict laws of duty and to cast doubt
on their validity, or at least upon their purity and strictness, and, where possible,
to make them better suited to our wishes and inclinations, that is, to corrupt
them at their basis and to destroy all their dignity . . . In this way the common
human reason is impelled, not by some need of speculation (which never
touches it so long as it is content to be mere sound reason) but on practical
grounds themselves, to leave its own sphere and take a step into the field of prac-
tical philosophy. (.; PP, –)
It should now be clear that any impulse that readers might feel to under-
take Kant’s practical philosophy comes not from any natural dialectic in
the human being. Instead, it arises from the manner in which Section 
of the Groundwork has taught them to relate to themselves as beings
whose true or higher intellectual selves are in constant danger of corrup-
tion by their lower sensible inclinations, thereby inducing the desire for
‘pure practical philosophy’ as the key to their self-purification and self-
completion. In short, like both Albert and Leibniz, Kant founds the
metaphysics of morals as theory in a desire for ‘pure’ knowledge that has
been induced by the metaphysics of morals as paideia.

.. Formal insight and spiritual purity

In ascending from ‘popular moral philosophy to the metaphysics of
morals’, Part  of the Groundwork begins by returning to the theme of the
corrupting effect of bad philosophy (.–; PP, –). It is not the
shortcomings of ordinary moral consciousness as such that necessitate
the step into metaphysics, Kant argues, but the manner in which this
 Moral philosophy as metaphysical ‘paideia’ 
consciousness is perverted by a popular moral philosophy whose cor-
rupting effect springs from its empirical character. We are back on the
terrain of competing paideia.
According to Kant, in teaching the people through empirical moral
examples, and in deriving moral rules from the ends of empirical hap-
piness – ‘Power, wealth, honour, even health’ – popular moral philoso-
phy ruins the capacity for a priori insight into the idea of the moral law.
We learned in Part I that this capacity is not only the foundation of a
true moral theory, but is also the means of attaining the only uncondi-
tionally good thing, a pure will. In limiting itself to moral rules suited to
empirical human beings – which, we recall, was the limit that Pufendorf
and Thomasius imposed on their ethics – popular moral philosophy fails
to see that the moral law is universal and a priori. In fact it fails to under-
stand that this law rules a community of rational beings existing outside
space and time, while being felt as an imperative by human beings in the
empirical world. In order to combat the corrupting effects of empirical
moral philosophy, then, it is necessary to pass from anthropology to
metaphysics. Knowledge of the moral law must therefore be derived
from an a priori idea which, because it is to apply to rational beings in
general, must not be an idea limited to human understanding:
All moral concepts have their seat and origin completely a priori in reason . . .
they cannot be abstracted from any empirical, and therefore merely contingent,
knowledge. In this purity of their origin is to be found their very worthiness to
serve as supreme practical principles . . . We ought never, as is permitted and
even occasionally necessary in speculative philosophy, to make the principles
depend upon the particular nature of human reason. Since moral laws should
hold for all rational beings [vernünftige Wesen] as such we should instead derive
them from the general concept of a rational being as such. In this way, we
should first completely expound morality as pure philosophy, that is, as meta-
physics, independent of the anthropology required for its application to man –
as can be readily done in this wholly abstract [abgesonderter] type of knowledge.
We have already shown that this proclamation of an anthropology-free
metaphysics is wholly dependent on the metaphysical anthropology –
here, closer to an angelology. In keeping with this anthropology, Kant
treats metaphysics as the conduit through which the pure will of intelli-
gible beings flows into the impure nature of human beings, which ties
pure moral knowledge to a pure moral being that must descend into
human being:
We know well that without possessing such a metaphysics it is vain – I will not
say to arrive at a speculative judgment of the moral element of duty in every-
thing dutiful – but that it is impossible, even in ordinary and practical usage,
 Kant and the preservation of metaphysics
particularly that of moral instruction, to ground morals on their genuine prin-
ciples and thereby to create pure moral dispositions [Gesinnungen], grafting them
onto human souls [Gemüthern] for the highest good of the world. (.–; PP,
–)
Kant then proceeds to demonstrate the necessity of metaphysics.
Metaphysics, he argues, is the only means by which humans can think
the notion of a moral law that necessitates the will unconditionally,
merely by the idea of it. (.–; PP, –). He stipulates that: ‘The
idea [Vorstellung] of an objective principle so far as it is necessitating for
a will, is called a command (of reason), and the formula of this
command is called an imperative’ (.; PP, ). The moral law is thus
an unconditional or categorical imperative, and the need for metaphys-
ics is tied to its capacity to show how a categorical imperative is possible.
We can show the possibility of technical imperatives – the rules of geom-
etry, for example – by showing their analytic necessity for achieving a
particular technical end, such as the construction of a mathematical
figure. Further, we can show the possibility of prudential imperatives –
as empirically necessary for certain kinds of happiness – although these
imperatives, being only the (hypothetical) means to realise empirical
ends, lack the unity and unconditionality of moral laws. How then, asks
Kant, can we show the possibility of the categorical imperative, given
that it may not be derived from, or made conditional on, any empirical
end or experienced good?
Only metaphysics provides the requisite ‘entirely a priori’ means of
investigating this possibility. Further, it takes the crucial first step in this
direction by asking whether the mere thought or concept of the categor-
ical imperative might not itself show, if not the imperative’s complete
possibility, then at least its propositional content: ‘In this task we want
first to inquire whether the mere concept of a categorical imperative
may not also provide its formula, containing the only proposition that
can be a categorical imperative’ (.; PP, –). Like the pure con-
cepts that Albert and Leibniz behold directly emanating from the divine
mind, the idea of the categorical imperative is envisaged as self-inter-
preting – as revealing its rational content to a creature whose own higher
rational being permits it to participate in immediate intellectual intui-
tion. The idea of the categorical imperative is thus one that has already
been thought prior to its appearance in the human understanding,
where it appears in the form of a self-revealing idea:
When I think of a hypothetical imperative in general I do not know in advance
what it will contain, until I am given its condition. But when I think of a categor-
ical imperative I immediately know what it contains. For, since the imperative
 Moral philosophy as metaphysical ‘paideia’ 
contains, beyond the law, only the necessity that a maxim conform to the law,
while the law contains no condition to limit it, there is nothing remaining to
which the maxim should conform except the universality of a law as such; and
it is this conformity alone that the imperative properly asserts to be necessary.
There is therefore only a single categorical imperative and it is this: Act only
in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will
that it should become a universal law. (.–; PP, )

In other words, Kant takes the crucial step towards showing the possibil-
ity of the categorical imperative and, with it, the necessity for metaphys-
ics, by demonstrating that through a mere a priori thinking of its idea,
independent of all empirical ends and experiences, he has immediate
insight into its content. This content is in fact the necessity that all sub-
jective ends or wills be conformed to a universal law or general will.
The first thing to observe regarding Kant’s step into metaphysics in
Part  is that it formalises a transition that has already taken place. The
idea of rational being as the ground of an autarkic will has been out-
lined in the Preface. Moreover, this idea governs Kant’s extraction of his
moral principle from ordinary moral consciousness in Part , which, we
have argued, should be seen as a programme for inducing the desire for
metaphysical knowledge in the reader. Part  thus presumes a reader
who has already identified his true self with a hidden capacity for self-
determination through the mere thought of the moral law. Further, this
is a reader who regards all attempts to derive maxims for the will from
external empirical ends – such as civil peace and prosperity – not merely
as philosophically erroneous but as morally corrupting. It is not so sur-
prising, then, that Kant’s hierarchical division of the moral world into
just two orders – the prudential–empirical and the categorical–a priori
– should be supported by no significant argumentation.
Kant, though, does offer two arguments for the inadequacy of pru-
dential ethics: namely, that disagreement over the nature of happiness
arising from man’s empirical desires robs this ethics of unity; and that
the fallibilities of worldly realisation rob it of certainty (.–; PP,
–). But these standard topoi presume the superiority of metaphysics
as an ethos – presume, that is, autarkic contemplation as the highest
form of life. In fact their role is only to intensify the desire for participa-
tion in that ethos, as we have already observed with regard to Albert’s
use of the same arguments. From this position, had Kant actually
encountered Pufendorf ’s solutions to these problems, then, we may con-
jecture, he would have found them morally unintelligible. For Pufendorf,
we recall (.), rejects the whole idea of a contemplatively unified moral
personality, replacing it with his doctrine of a plurality of functionally
 Kant and the preservation of metaphysics
differentiated offices and personae. Moreover, he secures agreement
over the nature of happiness in the one area where this mattered – the
civil happiness of social peace – by delegating its determination to the
political sovereign, who could enforce it if needs be. Finally, Pufendorf
was of course fully aware of the fallibility besetting the worldly realisa-
tion of social peace. He proposes to deal with this, however, not by with-
drawing into a self-actualising contemplative felicity, but by equipping
the ruler with irresistible powers of political decision and action. For his
part, were Pufendorf to have encountered Kant’s arguments for the
insufficiency of prudential ethics and the necessity of a priori insight
into a universal moral principle – and it is likely that he would have been
familiar with earlier versions of these – he would have immediately rec-
ognised them as intellectual instruments internal to the metaphysical
ethos.
If Kant’s treatment of prudential–empirical ethics thus reveals no
significant intellectual engagement with its most powerful civil-philo-
sophical instances, this is not because he had transcended all merely
anthropological forms of ethics by recovering the pure form in which
rational being reveals its will to man. Rather it is because his own meta-
physical anthropology – one might say his own metaphysical encultura-
tion at Königsberg – pre-commits him to repudiate prudential–
empirical ethics as a corrupting reinforcement of man’s lower sensible
nature. The prudential–empirical ethics discussed in Part  of the
Groundwork is actually internal to Kant’s metaphysics, and to his meta-
physical anthropology in particular. The central role of Kant’s presen-
tation of this ethics is thus actually exhortatory and pedagogical. It is
designed to turn his readers away from this cultural rival sight-unseen,
as a corrupting threat to the a priori grounding of morality, on which
the completion of their true intellectual selves depends:
Against this laxity or even ignoble cast of mind, which seeks its principle among
empirical motives and laws, we cannot give too many or too frequent warnings;
for human reason in its weariness gladly rests on this pillow and in a dream of
sweet illusions . . . it substitutes for morality some misbegotten mongrel patched
up from limbs of very diverse ancestry and looking like anything you please,
only not like virtue, to him who has once beheld her in her true shape. (.;
PP, )
In fact, this misbegotten mongrel ethics was, we recall, being taught just
around the corner from the lecture hall in which Kant denounced it, in
Königsberg’s law faculty. Here Sahme and his successors used
Pufendorf ’s and Thomasius’ natural law ethics – governed by the merely
 Moral philosophy as metaphysical ‘paideia’ 
empirical happiness of social peace – ‘to grasp the way in which the
power of princely, territorial-state institutions would end the heritage of
religious strife and sectarianism’, and to renew ‘juristic modes of
thought encouraging self-disciplining and a functional subordination to
diverse roles on various levels below the prince’ (Lestition , ). In
short, the persistence of detranscendentalised civil ethics in the face of
Kant’s reinvention of metaphysical ethics is symptomatic of the fact that
they represent autonomous moral cultures, grounded in divergent a-
rational life-orders.
The manner in which Kant presents prudential–empirical ethics,
however, does play an integral role in his ‘formal’ demonstration of the
possibility of the categorical imperative and hence of the necessity for
metaphysics. In fact Kant motivates assent to his apodeictic demonstra-
tion of the categorical imperative by presenting the rival pruden-
tial–empirical derivation of moral rules as both philosophically and
morally impure – by presenting it, that is, both as a theoretical obstacle
to pure (formal) insight into the categorical imperative, and as a moral
hindrance to the speculative purification of the rational being who is to
bear this insight. This presentation allows Kant’s ‘discovery’ of the cat-
egorical formula to assume a powerful self-validating rhetorical form:
namely, the form of a sudden illuminating breakthrough to a higher
order of pure intellection – an apodeictic insight into a self-interpreting
concept – which could of course only be achieved by a purified rational
being: ‘When I think of a hypothetical imperative in general I do not
know in advance what it will contain, until I am given its condition. But
when I think of a categorical imperative I immediately know what it
contains’ (.; PP, ). In this way, the validity of Kant’s demonstra-
tion of an imperative whose meaning and necessity lies in the mere
thinking of its idea, comes from his own exemplary performantial think-
ing of this idea. Through this intellectual performance he presents
himself to his readers and students as a being possessing the moral and
theoretical purity required to be the bearer of such an insight. This pro-
vides the appropriate light in which to view Kant’s otherwise enigmatic
statement: that ‘perhaps the mere concept of a categorical imperative
may . . . also provide us with the formula containing the only proposi-
tion that can be a categorical imperative’ (.; PP, –). If this is so,
then the acceptability of the categorical imperative is internal to the
paideia of university metaphysics.
In addition to providing an appropriate historical interpretation of
Kant’s construction of the categorical imperative, our account also
 Kant and the preservation of metaphysics
provides a clear explanation for the double – formal and ascetic – char-
acter of the formula itself, which has been a longstanding topos of Kant
commentary (Paton ; Williams ). For, on the one hand, Kant
presents the categorical imperative – ‘Act only on that maxim through
which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal
law’ – as a formal test of morality. As such, the formula is open to all sub-
jects, who may determine the morality of their actions merely by
reflecting on whether their maxims could be willed as universal law,
without the need of any erudite analysis of possible consequences
(.–; PP, –). On the other hand, it must be observed that Kant
construes ‘maxim’ as the determination of a will distracted by the
subject’s empirical nature, ‘often his ignorance or again his inclinations’,
while ‘law’ signifies ‘an objective principle valid for every rational being’
(.; PP, , fn.). In other words, it becomes clear that to will a maxim
as a universal law means to purify the intellect of its sensuous limitations
so that it can will in accordance with the mere idea of the law, which
means that the categorical imperative is also a formula for the spiritual
grooming of the particular being who is to be its subject. In short, only
someone who has undergone the ascetic transformation prescribed by
the imperative as metaphysical paideia – that is, someone who is pre-
sumed to have purged their empirical inclinations and prudential ends,
and can contemplate the law as the rule of a universe of rational beings
– will judge in the manner prescribed by the imperative as formal test.
This analysis of the categorical imperative is confirmed by, and in
turn elucidates, the manner in which Kant exemplifies its use as a test,
the most well-known of the examples being those of lying and false-
promising. Kant repeatedly uses these examples in his ethics lectures,
where he tells his students that while it may be possible to will ourselves
to lie out of self-interest, it is incoherent and self-defeating to will that
everyone should lie, by making lying into a universal law (.–;
LE, –). As Kant says, such examples are not intended as empirical
justifications for the categorical imperative, whose grounding must never
come from experience, but as external indications of the fact that all
men do have the imperative in their reason. This, remarkably, is how
modern Kantian academics continue to present the examples to under-
graduates today.
This way of presenting the examples, however, presumes a student or
reader already disposed to see himself as a member of a community
of intelligences in transparent communication with each other. This
 Moral philosophy as metaphysical ‘paideia’ 
concrete way of relating to the self both drives the test of universalisa-
tion (because intellectual beings will identically) and ensures that lying
must fail it (because it is contradictory for a being whose nature is pre-
disposed to spiritual communio to dissemble). For an ethics grounded in a
different anthropology and cosmology, therefore, the test of universal-
isation need make no sense, and lying can have a quite different moral
significance. In Thomasius’ detranscendentalised ethics – grounded not
in the Platonic anthropology of rational beings in transparent communio,
but in the Epicurean one of passional beings in civil conflict – there is
no imperative to test the morality of lying by universalising it.
Thomasius can thus offer a limited prudential justification of dissem-
bling, to the extent that this is necessary for personal safety or the secur-
ity of the state (KPK, .–, –). In other words, the categorical
imperative is not something contained a priori in everyone’s reason, but
something installed in the reason of certain individuals, as part of their
initiation into the moral culture of metaphysics.
Perhaps this is enough to show that Kant’s construction of the moral
law in Part  of the Groundwork cannot be understood as the metaphysi-
cal recovery of the principle of pure morality contained in all rational
beings. This construction is properly understood as a use of metaphys-
ics as a particular kind of spiritual grooming, one whose role is to form
subjects who will accede to moral principles as if they were commands
of a higher rational being within them. Kant treats the other three prin-
ciples discussed in Part  – the principles of humanity (rational being as
an end in itself), autonomy, and the kingdom of ends – as ways of bring-
ing the asbstract moral law ‘closer to intuition’ without recourse to
anthropology. Given, however, our argument that the formulation of the
moral law is itself wholly dependent on the metaphysical anthropology
and paideia, then we should expect the same of these three further prin-
ciples. A few remarks on each of them will be enough to suggest that this
is indeed the case.
Kant’s formula for humanity or rational being as an end in itself –
‘something whose existence has in itself an absolute value, something
which as an end in itself could be a ground of determinate laws’ – is, of
course, one we have already seen prefigured in Albert’s metaphysics, as
the formula for the autarky of the divine being. This figure of an intel-
lectual being containing its end in itself – therefore intelligising and
willing solely to realise itself, governed by no external goods and there-
fore the subject of all good, existing as pure self-contemplation or pure
 Kant and the preservation of metaphysics
self-willing – is absolutely fundamental to the metaphysical anthropol-
ogy. Its role is to model the life of self-contemplative intellectual being
as the highest possible form of life.
Kant and his modern followers make much of the fact that for him it
is man rather than God who bears this rational being. Kant marks this
change by calling this being ‘humanity’, declaring that it is the human-
ity in us that is good in itself and that, as an end in itself, may never be
used as a means to any extrinsic end (.; PP, ). As we have seen,
however, it is not the ontological location of rational being that is rele-
vant to its function in the metaphysical paideia – Albert was indifferent as
to whether this being was thought of as outside or inside man – but its
use as a model for the contemplative deportment. In this regard the
important point is that Kant loads ‘humanity’ with all the attributes of
the metaphysical God, specifically those of self-contemplating and self-
willing intellectual being. He thereby establishes a difference between
‘humanity’ and ‘human beings’ similar to that between divine and
human being in traditional university metaphysics.
As a result of this metaphysical distinction, the Kantian sacralising of
pure humanity in oneself and others can be associated with a quite
callous attitude to empirical human beings. In declaring suicide to be
absolutely and unconditionally immoral, for example, Kant treats it as
the violation of humanity as a holy being by the lower order of empiri-
cal human beings, intent merely on relieving their own suffering: ‘But
suicide is contrary to the concept of humanity in my own person; and
humanity is in itself an inviolable holiness, wherein my personhood, or
the right of humanity in my person, is no less inviolably contained.’ In
fact the sacredness of Kantian humanity is the mark of its difference
from man, providing us with a new and faintly chilling insight into
Kant’s subordination of happiness to morality: ‘It [humanity] demands
the duty of morality, and it is only man who demands happiness, which
must be unconditionally subordinated to morality.’ The metaphysi-
cal–anthropological basis for the differentiation then follows:
Personhood, or humanity in my person, is conceived as an intelligible substance,
the seat of all concepts, that which distinguishes man in his freedom from all
objects under whose jurisdiction he stands in his visible nature. It is thought of,
therefore, as a subject that is destined to give moral laws to man, and to deter-
mine him: as occupant of the body, to whose jurisdiction the control of all man’s
powers is subordinated. (.; LE, )
By locating morality in the rational being who is in man – in order to
defeat all attempts to ground it in worldly happiness – Kant’s principle
 Moral philosophy as metaphysical ‘paideia’ 
of humanity as an end in itself thus gives rise to a purism capable of
inflicting real suffering and indignity on empirical human beings.
Kant’s principle of autonomy bears similar relations, of filiation and
modification, to the great figure of contemplative autarky. His prime
construal of autonomy reads like a paraphrase of Albert’s construction
of the autarky of the divine intellect. As an end in itself, rational being
renounces all interest or ends outside itself and thereby becomes the uni-
versal ‘subject of all ends’ which, in turn, qualifies it to prescribe law for
all beings, universally: ‘From this there now follows our third practical
principle of the will, as supreme condition of the will’s conformity with
universal practical reason, the idea of every rational being as a will
giving universal law’ (.; PP, ). At the same time, Kant again
appears to humanise this formerly divine capacity of intellectual being,
ascribing it to man, who thereby becomes the author of the law to which
he himself is unconditionally subject. In fact, with this emendation,
Kant claims to have solved the problem that had defeated all previous
moral philosophies. This is the problem of how to obligate subjects to
the moral law, other than by determining their wills through incentives
and threats which, on his view, rob ethics of the universality and uncon-
ditionality proper to rational being:
For if one thought of man merely as subject to a law . . . the law had to carry
with it some interest by way of incentive or constraint, because it did not spring
as a law from his own will . . . This meant that all the labour spent in trying to
find a supreme principle of duty was irretrievably lost. For, one never discov-
ered duty, only the necessity of acting from a certain interest. This interest
might be one’s own or another’s; but on such a view the imperative was bound
to be a conditioned one and could not possibly serve as a moral law. I will there-
fore call this fundament the principle of the autonomy of the will in contrast
with all others, which I consequently class under heteronomy. (.–; PP,
–)
Despite all talk of autonomy being Kant’s way of ‘honouring man’,
however, this construction is not intended to cancel the ontological gap
between empirical man and the pure rational being whose self-willing
makes it into the universal subject of all ends. For it is only ‘Personhood,
or humanity in my person . . . conceived as an intelligible substance’ that
is in fact capable of governing itself through self-imposed universal law.
Sensible man, however, driven by transgressive inclinations, must
remain subject to incentives and sanctions capable of regulating his
desires and preparing him for the rule of his rational self. The principle
of autonomy – the idea of man as a creature whose intellectual nature
 Kant and the preservation of metaphysics
prescribes universal law to his sensible self – is thus not an idea that
simply occurs to anyone. Rather, it is an idea which those undergoing
the metaphysical paideia are induced to think; for this is how they learn
to renounce their attachment to ‘external’ ends and interests, thereby
constituting the autarkic intellect to which they aspire as the legislative
source and ‘supreme principle’ of all duties.
Seen in this light, the claim that civil philosophers like Pufendorf and
Thomasius did not solve the metaphysical problem – the problem of
how to make the moral law obligatory without recourse to incentives and
sanctions – appears in its true form: as a symptom of the chasm separ-
ating radically different ethical cultures. It is not just that Pufendorf and
Thomasius were uninterested in this problem. In fact, as we have seen
(., .), they actually attempted to obliterate the metaphysical culture
in which it plays a self-formative role. This was why the civil philosophers
repudiated the metaphysical figure of God as a self-contemplating self-
willing intelligence, and attacked the idea that human beings could be
the source of their own duties by sharing in divine intellection. It is also
the reason they proposed instead their own anthropology and ethical
culture, based on the figure of man as a fractious empirical being whose
need for civil peace could only be satisfied through duties imposed on
him by a sovereign will possessing supreme political powers. Far from
failing to solve the problem of moral autonomy, Pufendorf and
Thomasius expounded an ethical culture that was explicitly and actively
inimical to this metaphysical ideal, treating it as symptomatic of the
desire of a spiritual elite to place itself above civil governance.
Similar remarks apply to Kant’s final principle, that of the ‘kingdom
of ends’. Once again, Kant presents this concept of a pure moral com-
munity as one that all rational beings will arrive at a priori, merely by
reflecting on the idea of the moral law. If each rational being is the self-
legislating source of a universal law, then all rational beings, regarding
each other as ends in themselves, must form a totality of rational wills.
For each is the source of the law to which it is subject through the recip-
rocal willing of the others, thereby forming a single general will (.;
PP, ). Yet this idea that lies at the heart of Kant’s notion of the
kingdom of ends – the idea of a totality of intelligences organically
united through reciprocal intellection – is clearly a version of the meta-
physical notion of the community of ‘separated intelligences’ already
seen in the Dreams: ‘For Kant’, we recall Heimsoeth saying, ‘everything
comes down to a community of rational beings, which is made possible
by the fact that all of them will essentially the same thing and that in the
 Moral philosophy as metaphysical ‘paideia’ 
spiritual–rational core of their being they are totally alike’ (Heimsoeth
, ).
Man’s full ‘democratic’ participation in this community in no way
lessens the self-transformative gap between his intelligible and sensible
natures. For participation in the self-governing community of intelli-
gences is actually conditional on the speculative purification of man’s
sensible nature. This, as we shall soon see, has striking consequences for
Kant’s theories of law and politics. For these theories are in fact
grounded in this figure of a community of reciprocally determining
intelligences forming a single general will. Yet they maintain a utopian
and potentially dangerous distinction between the ideal intelligible and
the actual historical community. For the moment we can again observe
that considering themselves as reciprocally determining members of a
community of intelligences or general will is not something that all men
harbour in their reason. Rather, it is the figure of thought through which
metaphysicians imagine their participation in the spiritual community.
Kant’s notion of equal participation in the kingdom of ends – the idea
of each rational being issuing the laws to which all are subject – is thus
not a prefiguration of political democracy, but a thought-figure used in
the grooming of a spiritual elite.

.. Belief in metaphysics

Kant takes the third and final step of the Groundwork – ‘from a meta-
physic of morals to a critique of pure practical reason’ – and, with it, the
final step in his demonstration of the possibility of the categorical imper-
ative, by formulating and resolving a problem arising from the prior two
steps. Reflecting back on his discourse, Kant observes that he has pro-
vided a grounding for the moral law by invoking the idea of freedom as
rational autonomy; that is, the idea of a rational being’s capacity to
determine its will purely on the basis of self-generated laws. But, while
this grounding has permitted him to show the internal relation between
freedom and the moral law – for the categorical imperative is the only
one that expresses the self-legislative spontaneity of the rational will – it
does not, he says, appear to show why anyone should take an interest in
the moral law or subject themselves to it (.–; PP, –).
According to Kant, this problem arises from the apparent circularity
of the relation between the idea of freedom and that of the moral law:
‘We take ourselves as free in the order of efficient causes in order to think
ourselves under moral laws in the order of ends; and we afterwards think
 Kant and the preservation of metaphysics
ourselves as subject to these laws because we have ascribed to ourselves
freedom of the will’ (.; PP, ). As a result:
If someone asked us why the universal validity of our maxim as a law must be
the limiting condition of our actions, and on what we base the worth we assign
to this way of acting – a worth so great that there can be no higher interest any-
where – and asked us how it happens that a human being believes that only
through this does he feel his personal worth, in comparison with which that of
an agreeable or disagreeable condition is to be held as nothing, we could give
him no answer. (.–; PP, )
There is a way out of this problem, however, and it lies nowhere else
than in the metaphysical anthropology, which Kant is now prepared to
call on explicitly. Man, says Kant, belongs to the sensible world, to which
he is attached by his passive sensibility, and in which he knows himself and
his actions only as phenomenal appearances given to the understanding.
At the same time, though, he also belongs to the intelligible world, in
which he participates through the spontaneous activity of his reason,
which he must suppose is the transcendental ego underlying his empiri-
cal subjectivity. It is through this image of homo duplex as the nexus of the
intelligible and sensible worlds, microcosmically reflected in the relation
between the individual’s higher and lower intellectual natures, that Kant
claims to solve the apparent circularity between the concepts of freedom
and the moral law: ‘For we now see that when we think of ourselves as
free we transfer ourselves into the intelligible world [Verstandeswelt] as
members of it and recognise the autonomy of the will along with its con-
sequence, morality; whereas when we think of ourselves as under obliga-
tion, we regard ourselves as belonging to the sensible world and yet to the
intelligible world at the same time’ (.; PP, ).
According to Kant, then, the circle between intelligible freedom and
the moral law – which threatens to make it impossible to explain why
anyone would take an interest in the law or submit to its commands – is
broken by the gap between man’s intelligible and sensible natures. For
this gap is the source of the dynamic tension that leads man to take an
interest in the pure moral law and, in fact, to regard himself as bound
by it:
Hence, in spite of regarding myself from one point of view as a being that
belongs to the sensible world, I shall recognise that, as intelligence, I am subject
to the law of the intelligible world – that is, to the reason that contains this law
itself in the idea of freedom, and so to the autonomy of the will; consequently
I must look on the laws of the intelligible world as imperatives for me, and on
the actions conforming to this principle as duties. (.–; PP, )
 Moral philosophy as metaphysical ‘paideia’ 
The key to the possibility of the categorical imperative, therefore, lies in
the idea of a world of intelligences and our higher selves as members of
it. For, in the difference between this viewpoint and his knowledge of
himself as the passive member of the sensible world, man experiences
his ‘sensed dependency’ on the intelligible world, thereby taking an
interest in it, feeling himself bound by its laws.
This explanation, though, says Kant, marks the outermost limit of
philosophical reflection on the possibility of the moral law. For, while it
may be thus shown that we take an interest in the moral law through the
idea of the intelligible world, we are unable to know how we come to take
this interest or just what the reality of the intelligible world and its
freedom might be. On the one hand, Kant claims that the idea of his
membership in the intelligible world is just one that naturally occurs to
man: ‘This kind of conclusion must be drawn by a thinking man from
all the things that are presented to him’ (.–; PP, ). This means
that the difference between his intelligible and sensible natures – the
difference that impels him to take an interest in the moral law and to feel
his subjection to it – simply occurs to the thinking man as the result of
spontaneous self-reflection. On the other hand, through this same spon-
taneous insight, the thinking man becomes aware that he may have no
direct knowledge of the intelligible world, owing to the passive charac-
ter of sensibility, which confines human understanding to the domain of
empirical appearances.
We cannot agree therefore with those modern commentators who
treat the practical (as opposed to the theoretical) interest in the intelli-
gible world as arising from the epistemological critique of this world’s
metaphysical reality in the Critique of Pure Reason (O’Neill, , ). On
the contrary, it seems clear that Kant constructs the practical interest by
requiring belief in the metaphysical reality of the intelligible world, but
as something inaccessible to man’s empirical understanding, and there-
fore as something that induces and orients his desire for speculative self-
purification. For this strategy – which is already present in the Dreams –
is the basis of Kant’s argument that while it is possible to think such nou-
menal ideas as that of the intelligible world, these must never be treated
as objects of theoretical knowledge, being acceded to instead only for the
moral transformation that they work in us:
In any case, the idea of a pure intelligible world, as a totality of intelligences to
which we ourselves belong as rational beings (although on the other side we are
also members of the sensible world), always remains a useful and permitted idea
for the purposes of a rational faith [vernünftigen Glaubens], even if all knowledge
 Kant and the preservation of metaphysics
stops at its boundary – useful and permitted for producing in us a lively inter-
est in the moral law by means of the noble ideal of a universal kingdom of ends
in themselves (rational beings), to which we can belong as members only when
we carefully conduct ourselves in accordance with the maxims of freedom as if
they were laws of nature. (.–; PP, )
Like the university metaphysicians who preceded him, Kant thus uses
the metaphysical anthropology to induce belief in the world of rational
beings and its laws. He does so by treating the gap between man’s higher
rational and lower sensible nature as the source of his interest in a pure
and purifying metaphysical knowledge of morality, which can only be
satisfied through a priori knowledge of the categorical imperative. In
treating the motivating idea of membership in the intelligible world as
one that just occurs to the ordinary intelligence – and in simultaneously
blocking further inquiry into this idea by treating it as beyond the reach
of theoretical inquiry, thereby converting it into an object of moral faith
– Kant thus folds his account of the foundations of the metaphysics of
morals in on itself. He treats the idea that induces the interest in meta-
physics as one in which human beings are already interested, transmit-
ted to them via moral feeling from a world lying outside knowledge – but
therefore beyond doubt – hence the object of a philosophical faith
admitting of no further explanation or inquiry.
We, however, have offered further explanation and inquiry. In discuss-
ing Part I of the Groundwork we discovered that, far from just occurring
to the ordinary intelligence, the idea of man’s dual intelligible and sen-
sible nature is one that Kant’s philosophy is designed to inculcate in its
students. It does so by grafting this idea onto their existing moral culture
through the intermediate (exoteric) idea of ‘respecting the law for its own
sake’, and then using it to intensify the desire for the contemplative intel-
lectual self-transformation that constitutes metaphysics as an ethos.
Further, in our discussion of Part  we showed that the categorical
imperative is not a formal test of morality, immanent in a universal
subject by virtue of the transcendent nature of moral reason. We discov-
ered instead that it is the formula for a practice of speculative self-
transformation, through which the members of a contemplative estate
subject themselves and others to the imperative as a distinctive moral
viewpoint, renouncing worldly prudential ethics as morally corrupting,
and constituting themselves as the ‘subject of all ends’. In short we have
shown that the idea of man’s membership in the community of intelli-
gences arises not from his natural desire for metaphysical moral purity,
but from the metaphysical paideia that uses this idea in order to induce
such a desire.
 Moral philosophy as metaphysical ‘paideia’ 
As the central instrument of this paideia, Kant’s metaphysical anthro-
pology shares the same mode of historical existence as those other
anthropologies that we have investigated: Pufendorf ’s doctrine of man
as a being whose fractious yet weak nature drives him to sociability; and
Thomasius’ anthropology of passional man, who must practice self-
restraint in order to achieve tranquillity. From a suitably indifferent
scholarly standpoint, neither the metaphysical nor the civil anthropol-
ogy can be regarded as representing a true human nature or experience.
Each is a means of shaping a particular comportment of the person in
accordance with the objectives of a specific ethical culture. Historical
scholarship must therefore give up the idea that Kantian ethics is, as
metaphysics, superior to these rival ‘empirical’ anthropologies, by virtue
of its grounding in a priori insight into the moral law. This idea, through
which modern scholarship remains tied to Christian transcendentalism,
is, as we have seen, itself a product of Kant’s metaphysical anthropol-
ogy. It results from the representation of the moral law as the rule of a
world of autarkic rational beings, and from the use of this representa-
tion to induce an intense desire to repudiate all prudential ethics in order
to attain the telos of speculative self-transformation. The idea of the
intrinsic theoretical superiority of moral metaphysics over moral anthro-
pology may thus be regarded as symptomatic of the religious intensity
with which Kantian initiates adhere to their particular anthropology,
holding to it as the key to their personal moral purity and insight.
We have thus achieved the first of our objectives, the reconstruction
of Kant’s metaphysics of morals as one of the historically available of
ethical cultures. In the process we have shed some light on what it was
about this culture that suited it to the teaching of metaphysics in a uni-
versity like the one at Königsberg. In transposing the old metaphysical
figure of man’s participation in the intelligible world into a new moral
register – where it could be acceded to for its transformative effect rather
than its theoretical objectivity – Kant had effected a major adaptation
of metaphysical culture to its new, post-Newtonian and post-
Westphalian, circumstances. On the one hand, through this new moral
grounding, he completed the ‘secularisation’ of metaphysics begun by
Leibniz and advanced by Wolff. In making the idea of the spiritual com-
munity into an object of ‘moral faith’ or ‘felt need’ alone, Kant loosened
the ties of university metaphysics to its theological partner – which con-
tinued to require literal belief in the spiritual community – thereby
allowing a wider circle of intellectuals to cultivate metaphysical wisdom
and authority. On the other hand, he simultaneously preserved
Schulmetaphysik as a culture of self-sanctification used in the formation of
 Kant and the preservation of metaphysics
a religious intelligentsia; that is, a group of intellectuals whose wisdom
and authority is grounded in the (moral and theoretical) purity of their
intellectual ethos. In doing so he maintained the hostility of the meta-
physical ethos to its civil alternative. In presenting the latter’s lack of
theoretical formality not just as philosophically erroneous but as morally
corrupting, Kant heightened the intensity with which his students would
renounce prudential–civil ethics – that ‘misbegotten mongrel patched
up from limbs of very diverse ancestry and looking like anything you
please, only not like virtue’ – and turn inwards towards the speculative
purification of the will. Through his moral philosophy Kant thus
pursued the reciprocal goals of secularising metaphysics and spiritualis-
ing civil knowledge. We are now in a position to investigate the effects of
this programme in two further areas of Kant’s practical philosophy: his
metaphysics of law, and his metaphysics of religion and politics.

.         

Kant’s Rechtslehre – variously translated as ‘theory of justice’ or ‘doctrine
of right’ – is a direct extension of his metaphysics of morals. It uses the
figure of man as a physically embodied intelligence in order to construct
an account of the rights and obligations of such intelligences as they
interact through the possession of material things. In this regard, Kant’s
Rechtslehre represents a continuation of Protestant scholasticism which,
we recall from our discussion of Leibniz and the Lutheran legal meta-
physicians (..), sought to maintain natural law and politics as
branches of moral philosophy, hoping thereby to forestall the autonomy
of law and politics as scientia civilis of the security state.
Like Leibniz’s, Kant’s metaphysics of law is closed and inimical to all
the civil sciences that Pufendorf and Thomasius had sought to admit to
the ethical domain through their reconstruction of natural law. Apart
from occasional expressions of disapproval, Kant’s Rechtslehre thus allows
no room for ‘reason of state’ doctrine, Bodinian sovereignty theory,
Helmstedtian political science or, indeed, the whole tradition of positive
political jurisprudence (Staatsrecht) that had emerged as a means of secu-
larising the governance of confessionally divided communities. Indeed,
in purporting to subsume positive Staatsrecht within a philosophical
reflection on its ‘formal’ conditions of possibility – conditions ultimately
grounded in the figure of the community of rational beings – Kant’s
metaphysics of law may be regarded as a direct attack on the desacralisa-
tion of politics that had been achieved by German political jurisprudence
 The metaphysics of law 
and formalised in Pufendorfian natural law. For, as we have seen, a central
condition of this desacralisation is that law be regarded as coming from
a source no higher than the positive commands of the civil sovereign,
issued solely for the purposes of maintaining social peace.
This is not to suggest, however, that Kant’s legal philosophy is back-
ward looking in any absolute sense. On the contrary, considering its long
future, Kant’s treatment of law and politics has just as much right to be
considered ‘progressive’ as Pufendorf ’s, even though they were headed
in opposite directions. Indeed, Kant’s grounding of law and politics in
inalienable natural rights clearly strikes many modern intellectuals as far
more progressive and enlightened than its civil–philosophical alterna-
tive. For Pufendorf and Thomasius, it will be recalled, focus on political
obligations and treat rights as creations of positive law, instituted for the
purposes of civil governance. The modern viewpoint may, however, be
indicative of a ‘moral forgetting’ of the work of the state in pacifying
fratricidal religious and ethnic communities. Here, perhaps we should
again recall Pufendorf ’s remark regarding states, that ‘their force is not
realised by children or the unlearned, or their advantages by those who
have never experienced the losses consequent upon their non-existence’,
leading the latter to ‘live in [the state] in such a way as not to value its
excellence’ (DJN, .., ). In any case, Kant’s unapologetic treat-
ment of justice or right (Recht) as a branch of metaphysical ethics shows
that the civil–philosophical treatment of jurisprudence – as an autono-
mous discipline grounded in the positive legislation of the territorial
state – remained locked in intellectual combat with its metaphysical
rival. If Kant’s Rechtslehre did indeed look back to a curriculum in which
law and politics had been integral parts of a metaphysically unified prac-
tical philosophy, then it simultaneously found a new and durable means
of anchoring the legal and political in the moral: namely, the language
of inalienable subjective rights.

.. Morality and law

At first appearing separately from the Tugendlehre (Doctrine of Virtue), to
which it would later be added to form the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant’s
Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Rechtslehre (Metaphysical Principles of the
Theory of Justice) was published in , hence late in his career;
although Schmucker and Ritter have argued that its central figures of
thought can be found in Kant’s writings and Reflexionen from the mid
s (Ritter ; Schmucker ). Kant opens the Rechtslehre with his
 Kant and the preservation of metaphysics
version of the relation between law and ethics, elaborated through the
extension and subdivision of the central concepts of his moral philoso-
phy: law, duty, obligation, and freedom.
Law and ethics, Kant argues, are both ultimately grounded in the
rational will (Wille) of the intelligible being. The medium in which they
interact, however, and are related and differentiated, is not the rational
will as such, but a specific use of it: namely, the free ‘power of choice’
(Willkür):
The faculty of desiring in accordance with concepts, insofar as the ground
determining it to action lies within itself and not in its object, is called a faculty
to do or refrain from doing as one pleases. Insofar as it is joined with one’s con-
sciousness of the capacity to bring about its object by one’s action it is called
choice [Willkür]; if it is not joined with this consciousness its act is called a wish.
The faculty of desire whose inner determining ground, hence even what pleases
it, lies in the subject’s reason is called will [Wille]. The will is therefore the faculty
of desire considered not so much in relation to action (as choice is) but rather
in the ground determining choice to action. The will has no determining
ground as such but, in determining choice, is practical reason itself. (.; PP,
pp. –)

Through the faculty of choice, therefore, the will of rational beings

(beings whose substance is reason) is connected to objects external to
their pure autotelic willing for the sake of willing. As the ‘external use of
freedom’, choice is the gateway through which an otherwise self-
enclosed and self-willing community of intelligences comes to desire
external objects or material goods, thereby giving force to the inclina-
tions that affect them as sensibly embodied rational beings. The meta-
physical character of Kant’s treatment of the relation between law and
morality thus starts to emerge. Unlike Pufendorf, Kant does not con-
struct this relation in terms of the need to uncouple civil authority from
inner purity, the pursuit of security from the pursuit of moral regenera-
tion. Rather, he constructs it as a particular metaphysical problem
grounded in the anthropology of homo duplex: namely, how to relate the
governance of man’s external (material) choices to his internal (intelli-
gible) ones.
Kant’s exposition of the difference and relation between law and
ethics in the Introduction to the Metaphysics of Morals is not immediately
perspicuous, although this may in part be due to the possible corruption
of this part of the text (Ludwig , –). Nonetheless, the central
point is clear enough. Unlike Pufendorf and Thomasius, Kant does not
treat law and ethics as independent spheres of duties – one grounded in
 The metaphysics of law 
the state’s maintenance of security, the other in the private pursuit of
moral regeneration. Instead, he treats them as different uses of a single
subjective faculty, the power of free choice (Willkür). Jurisprudence thus
concerns a use of freedom that is ‘external’, both in the sense of being
oriented to outer ‘public’ actions rather than to the inner condition of
the will, and in the sense of being governed by ‘external lawgiving’; that
is, by lawgiving designed coercively or ‘pathologically’ to determine the
will to a certain action, through rewards and punishments. Ethics,
however, even if it may involve external actions, concerns the ‘internal’
use of free choice – that is, its orientation to the purity of willing as such,
rather than to the outcome of actions. For ethics is governed by lawgiv-
ing that is internal in the sense of arising from the mere thinking of the
law, or rational being’s capacity to govern its will through the mere idea
of duty:
All lawgiving can therefore be distinguished with respect to the incentive (even
if it agrees with another kind with respect to the action that it makes a duty, e.g.,
these actions might in all cases be external). That lawgiving which makes an
action a duty and also makes this duty the incentive is ethical. But that lawgiv-
ing which does not include the incentive of duty in the law and so admits an
incentive other than the idea of duty itself is juridical. (.–; PP, )
Juridical laws thus pay no heed to the inner condition of the will, and
ethical duties may not be subject to coercive juridical lawgiving.
Nonetheless, as different dispositions of the single capacity for free
choice, juridical and ethical laws share a common ultimate ground in the
moral law, responsible for the pure rational determination of the will:
‘So whether one considers freedom in the external or internal use of
choice [Willkür], its laws, as pure practical laws of reason for free choice
in general, must at the same time be the inner determining grounds of
this choice; although they may not always be considered in this regard’
(.; PP, ).
It is necessary to clarify why Kant argues that the laws of pure prac-
tical reason underlie even the external use of freedom – constituting its
‘inner determining grounds’ – but that they may not always be regarded
as doing so. In his discussion of this problem, Wolfgang Kersting argues
that Kant’s juridical and moral laws share a common grounding, as both
are instances of the Vernünftgesetz or rational law governing man’s
‘transcendental freedom’ (Kersting , –). For Kersting, as a result
of the formal–rational unity of the subject of (moral) action, juridical
law is simply the means of enforcing the moral law, under circumstances
where external hindrances to it require their coercive removal.
 Kant and the preservation of metaphysics
Consequently, it is only because of these circumstances that the moral
law may not always be considered ‘the inner determining ground’ of
external choice.
There are several reasons for rejecting Kersting’s formal–rational
interpretation of Kant’s construction of the law–morality relation. First,
it is unacceptable to construe juridical law as arising to redress the exter-
nal obstruction of moral action; for, given that the morality of an action
consists in the mode in which it is willed rather than its successful execu-
tion then, as Kant insists in the Groundwork, it is impossible to obstruct
morality from the outside: ‘Even if . . . this will should wholly lack the
power to carry out its intentions . . . if with its greatest efforts it should
yet achieve nothing and only the good will were left . . . then it would still
shine like a jewel for its own sake, as something containing its entire
worth in itself ’ (.; PP, ). Next, and conversely, actions give rise to
wrongs redressable by juridical law only in so far as they are ‘facts’ or
‘deeds’, signifying, as Kant puts it in the Rechtslehre, the capacity of
persons to impinge externally on each other: ‘The concept of right
[justice], insofar as it is related to a corresponding obligation (i.e., the
moral concept of right), concerns . . . only the external and indeed prac-
tical relation of one person to another, insofar as their actions, as facts,
can have (direct or indirect) influence on each other’ (.; PP, ). In
other words, if morality is incapable of external obstruction because it
is independent of external deeds, and if only external deeds ‘as facts’ are
capable of giving rise to wrongs redressable by juridical law and right,
then we cannot accept Kersting’s argument that the wrongness of legally
sanctionable actions arises from their obstruction of inner morality.
These problems are pointers to a more fundamental flaw in the kind
of interpretation of the law–morality relation offered by Kersting. In
attempting to construct a non-anthropological account of the relation
between law and morality – grounded in a formal–rational ‘law of
transcendental freedom’ – such interpretations fail to grasp the degree
to which Kant’s construction of this relation is embedded in the meta-
physical anthropology of homo duplex. For Kant, if man is subject to two
kinds of law, moral and juridical, that is because he harbours a dual
moral nature, which means that his exercise of choice (Willkür) assumes
two different forms:
That choice which can be determined by pure reason is called free choice. That
which can be determined only by inclination (sensible impulse, stimulus) would
be animal choice (arbitrium brutum). Human choice, however, is a choice that can
indeed by affected but not determined by impulses, and is therefore of itself
 The metaphysics of law 
(apart from an acquired proficiency of reason) not pure, but can still be deter-
mined to actions by pure will. Freedom of choice is this independence from
being determined by sensible impulses; this is the negative concept of freedom.
The positive concept of freedom is that of the capacity of pure reason to be of
itself practical. (.–; PP, )
There may indeed be only a single subject of choice, but the fact that
this subject possesses dual moral natures means that it must be governed
by two kinds of law. With regard to man’s rational or intelligible being,
choice may be governed by the moral law; for rational being governs the
exercise of its will by merely thinking the law. As a sensibly affected ratio-
nal being, however, whose choice is subject to the force of the inclina-
tions, man must be subject to juridical laws designed to overmatch these
inclinations with a countervailing pathological force.
In Kant, therefore, juridical law is related to moral law not as the spe-
cialised coercive form of a single ‘law of transcendental freedom’, but
by virtue of the fact that it governs the lower sensible level of man’s dual
metaphysical nature. Far from treating juridical law as arising from exer-
cises of choice that transgress morality, Kant argues that, regarded as a
noumenal or intelligible being, man is incapable of transgressing moral-
ity by choosing in opposition to the law. The capacity to deviate from the
moral law thus arises from man as a sensible or phenomenal being,
whose sensible desires for external goods permit him to deviate from the
autotelic willing of that which is good in itself – the rational being ‘in’
him. At the same time, however, drawing on the standard Christian–
metaphysical treatment of evil as ‘privative’ – that is, in terms of failure
of good being to realise itself, as opposed to the positive existence of evil
– Kant insists that bad choices reflect only sensible man’s incapacity.
Despite appearances, man cannot freely choose against the moral law,
as freedom arises only from man’s inexplicable self-activity as an imma-
terial intellectual being, and the moral law is just the law of this activity
(.–; PP, –).
In other words, the reason juridical law may not be understood in
terms of the coercion required to redress breaches of the rational moral
law is that the rational being who is the subject of this law is incapable
of breaking it. Conversely, human beings may appear to act against this
law in the phenomenal world, but in reality this transgression represents
only an incapacity for intelligible action arising from man’s lower sen-
sible self. Here, we need only recall what it is that gives rise to juridical
wrongs – that is, man’s external choices ‘as facts’ through which persons
infringe each others rights – in order to obtain a clearer picture of Kant’s
 Kant and the preservation of metaphysics
construction of the relation between law and morality. Now we can see
that Kant regards juridical law as necessary to regulate the relations into
which human beings enter when, governed by their sensible inclinations,
they choose external objects. For in this way they enter the material
world of scarcity and conflict over goods, displaying their incapacity for
rational moral self-governance, and requiring juridical coercion in order
to compensate for this. In other words, we may propose that Kant
regards juridical law not as a direct compensation for a rational agent’s
failure to obey the moral law – that is, not as a specialised coercive form
of the ‘law of transcendental freedom’ – but as a distinct kind of legis-
lation, suited to rational beings whose sensible nature condemns them to
interact through possession of material goods.
Kant’s treatment of the juridical law as an ‘indirect’ form of the moral
law is thus not grounded in the posit of a common underlying formal
law of reason. Rather it arises from the fact that he regards the juridical
as a degenerated legislative domain, formed in order to regulate the
conflicts arising from man’s (inescapable) choice to interact through
material goods, rather than through the transparent commercium of the
community of intelligences. If, therefore, the gap between morality and
law arises from the difference between man’s two natures, then their rela-
tion cannot be understood by treating the law as a direct compensation
for moral failure. In fact, Kant presents a quite different view of the rela-
tion between law and morality: namely, that organised by the figure of
a metaphysical ascent from man’s lower to his higher nature.
Taking place when man becomes capable of making the mere idea of
(external) laws into the only incentive for obeying them – that is, when
man rises from his sensible to his intelligible nature – Kant envisages a
process in which juridical laws are elevated and absorbed (aufnehmen) into
ethical duties: ‘But just because ethical lawgiving includes within its law
the internal incentive to action (the idea of duty), and this determina-
tion must not flow into external lawgiving, ethical lawgiving cannot be
external . . .; although it does elevate [absorb] duties resting on external
lawmaking into the incentives of its own [internal] lawgiving’ (.;
PP, ). In short, for Kant the relation between morality and law is not
governed by the continuum of a formal–rational ‘law of transcendental
freedom’, but by the gap between the intelligible and sensible natures of
the metaphysical homo duplex. This gap is not to be closed through the
philosophical grounding of law in morality, but only through the meta-
physical transformation of man’s sensible nature, which would make
 The metaphysics of law 
juridical law redundant, as in Leibniz’s treatment of the same theme. Of
course, the fact that Kant envisages a closure of any kind entirely separ-
ates his conception of law from Pufendorf ’s.

.. The principle of right and noumenal possession

In keeping with this metaphysical construction of it, Kant treats justice
as arising from a principle, rather than from existing legal systems or
from the positive legislation of actual governments. He thus proceeds to
construct the Princip des Rechts – the principle of right or justice – as the
second great principle governing human conduct, alongside the categor-
ical imperative. Anglophone readers need to keep in mind that the
German Recht does not distinguish between right as a legitimate claim to
exercise a personal capacity and justice as an impersonal body of laws
governing action – especially in Kant’s hands.
Invoking the standard metaphysical hierarchy of the sciences, Kant
argues that the principle of justice may not be discovered by professional
jurists generalising from existing laws. Like Leibniz, he insists that this
principle is not to be found in empirical statutes, whose justness it must
in fact determine:
[The jurist] can indeed state what is legal [Rechtens]; that is, what the laws in a
certain place and in a certain time say or have said. But whether what these laws
prescribed is also just [recht], and what the universal criterion is by which one
could recognise the just as well as the unjust (iustum et iniustum), this would remain
hidden from him unless he leaves those empirical principles behind for a while
and seeks the sources for such judgments in reason alone, so as to establish the
basis for any possible giving of positive laws (although positive laws can serve as
excellent guides to this). (.–; PP, –)
Like neoscholastic and Leibnizian natural law – and in radical opposi-
tion to Pufendorf ’s – Kant’s principle of right is thus intended as a
higher rational principle of judgment to which the state’s positive laws
must be subordinated.
To leave his empirical principles behind, the jurist must turn away
from his concern with the ‘material’ ends governing man’s choice of
things. Kant thus grounds his principle of justice in a purely ‘formal’
consideration of the totality of reciprocal choices: ‘in this reciprocal
relation of choice no account at all is taken of the matter of choice, that
is, of the end each has in mind with the object he wants’ (.; PP, ).
Arrived at in this way, Kant’s formula for the principle of justice is: ‘Any
 Kant and the preservation of metaphysics
action is just [recht] if, through it or its maxim, the freedom of choice of
each can coexist with the freedom of all, in accordance with a universal
law’ (.; PP, ). Kant unfolds this principle in four stages.
First, and fundamentally, he treats the principle of right as grounded
in the specific metaphysical anthropology of man as a sensibly embod-
ied pure intelligence. Like the moral principle, the legal one is grounded
in the metaphysical figure of the reciprocal determination and
unification of a community of rational wills. In the legal domain,
however, the reciprocal acts of will are not mediated through the instan-
taneous transparency of intelligible substances in intellectual commu-
nity. Instead, here the exercise of will is oriented to and mediated by the
choice of material things, whose opacity and finitude means that the
choosing intelligences may infringe on each other’s choices, thereby
giving rise to wrongs. This is because, to the extent that rational beings
will in accordance with the moral law, they are incapable of conflicting
with each other, constituting in effect a single spiritual community
(kingdom of ends), devoid of all the conflicting personal ends arising
from sensuous inclinations. To the extent, however, that they choose
material things, in accordance with their sensuous inclinations, human
beings are differentiated and governed by material ends that can conflict
with each other.
Second, given that someone who hinders another’s external choice
coerces them, and that it is right to resist this through a counter-coercion,
then the reciprocal coexistence of choices that constitutes the principle
of justice is actually a universal reciprocal coercion: ‘Strict justice [Recht]
can also be represented as the possibility of a fully reciprocal use of coer-
cion that is consistent with everyone’s freedom in accordance with uni-
versal laws’ (.; PP, ). The externality that differentiates justice
from ethics thus arises from the human choice of material things – that
is, the desires of ‘sensibly affected rational beings’ for things lying outside
their own rational willing. This in turn necessitates that such choices be
unified through external juridical coercion:
Even as justice [Recht] in general has as its object only what is external in actions,
so strict justice, namely that which has nothing ethical mixed with it, requires
only purely external determinations for the power of choice [Willkür]; for only
then is it pure and not mixed with any prescriptions of virtue. Only a completely
external justice can thus be called strict (narrow). This is indeed based on every-
one’s consciousness of obligation in accordance with a law; but if it is to remain
pure, this consciousness may not and cannot be appealed to as an incentive to
determine his choice in accordance with this law. Strict right rests instead on
 The metaphysics of law 
the principle of its being possible to use external coercion that can coexist with
the freedom of everyone in accordance with universal laws. (.; PP, )
A community of rational beings would have no need of external law and
would not be subject to strict justice.
Third, Kant’s principle of justice is in its turn grounded in the idea of
‘intelligible possession’ (possessio noumenon), which is the central concept
of his legal metaphysics and forms the somewhat idiosyncratic core of
his treatment of private law (Privatrecht). In fact, like the concept of ‘duty
for its own sake’ in his ethics, the notion of intelligible possession forms
the exoteric link that permits Kant to tie the idea of the community of
intelligences to an available civil culture – here to the legal culture of
private property rights. Kant’s central intellectual strategy in the
Rechtslehre is thus to allow the notion of intelligible or non-physical pos-
session to embrace two very different capacities: the capacity of non-
physical (intelligible) beings to possess physical things; and the capacity
for juridical ownership of something, as distinct from its mere physical
possession. Through this structural ambiguity in the notion of non-phys-
ical possession, Kant attempts to solve two problems at the same time.
On the one hand, he seeks to provide a metaphysical basis for the prin-
ciple of justice, in the figure of a community of immaterial intelligences
interacting through their possession of material things. On the other
hand, he seeks to provide exoteric (juristic) plausibility for the notion of
noumenal possession – that is, of beings who exist outside space and
time possessing physical things – by anchoring it in the notion of legal
ownership:
Something external is my property if I would be wronged by being disturbed
in my use of it even though I am not in possession of it (not holding the object).
– I must be in some sort of possession of an external object if it is to be called
mine, for otherwise someone who affected this against my will would not also
affect me and so would not wrong me. So . . . intelligible possession (possessio
noumenon) must be assumed to be possible if something external is to be mine or
yours. Empirical possession (holding) is then only possession in appearance (pos-
sessio phenomenon) . . . (.; PP, )
Fourth, given that the idea of intelligible possession by definition lies
beyond all empirical experience, it must, like the idea of the community
of intelligences itself, be postulated as a ‘need of reason’, again for moral
reasons. Kant thus ‘deduces’ this postulate by observing that, were such
possession not possible, then the person would not be able to rightfully
choose objects. This, however, ‘would annihilate [usable objects] from a
 Kant and the preservation of metaphysics
moral viewpoint [praktischer Rücksicht] and make them into res nullius
[ownerless things]’, which ‘would be a contradiction of outer freedom
with itself ’. Further, given that intelligible possession does not require
actual physical disposal of the object, then, ‘in order to think of some-
thing simply as an object of my choice [Willkür] it is sufficient for me to
be conscious of having it within my power’. As a result: ‘It is therefore
an a priori presupposition of practical reason to regard and treat any
object of my choice as something which could objectively be mine or
yours’ (.; PP, –).
Kant completes his construction of the principle of justice – simulta-
neously making the shift from private to public law ( jus publicum,
Staatsrecht), or from law to politics – by stipulating that intelligible posses-
sion remains merely provisional in the state of nature, requiring the civil
state for its actualisation. We will return to this construction of the civil
state in the following section. For the moment, we must clarify the his-
torical significance of Kant’s principle of justice, by contrasting the
interpretations of some modern Kantian commentators with our own.
Despite certain differences of emphasis, Hinske, Kersting, and
Gregor argue that Kant provides a formal–philosophical basis for the
principle of justice – that is, one transcending all moral anthropologies
and political purposes. As a result, he may be regarded as grounding
justice in human reason itself, and as showing that only a law grounded
in the rational general will is agreeable to humanity (Gregor ;
Hinske ; Kersting ). Kersting, for example, argues that Kant’s
‘legal postulate of practical reason’ – ‘It is possible for me to have any
external object of my choice as mine’ – is the subject of a purely formal
‘deduction’, analogous to the deduction of the categories in the Critique
of Pure Reason. Without attempting to capture the detail of this argument,
it is enough to say that it largely repeats Kant’s own procedure in this
regard, which we have already summarised. In short, Kersting rehearses
Kant’s arguments that the possession of external objects by intelligible
beings must be possible, because without it such objects would be
reduced to the moral nullity of being ‘ownerless things’, and because a
prohibition on ownership would be ‘a contradiction of freedom with
itself ’ (Kersting , –).
Kersting acknowledges the indebtedness of this figure of thought to
the theological doctrine that God made the world for man’s use, but he
fails to link this doctrine to the metaphysics of intelligible possession.
Similarly, he also acknowledges the interdependency between Kant’s
 The metaphysics of law 
notions of law and the spiritual commercium between rational beings,
citing Kant’s comment that ‘all legal relation is a purely intelligible rela-
tion of rational beings to each other’ (.). Yet Kersting treats this
relation between rational beings as expressive of a formal ‘law of
transcendental freedom’, insisting that this may be known in a formal
‘anthropology-free’ manner. As a result he ends up treating the relations
of universal reciprocal coercion, established between intelligible beings
possessing material objects, as something known in a purely a priori
manner, independent of all anthropological presuppositions. Finally,
with this formal–rational determination of the need for a general will in
place, Kersting, like Hinske and Gregor, can proceed to treat Kant’s con-
ception of an anti-statist popular sovereignty as founded in reason itself.
We have already observed, however, that Kant’s metaphysical anthro-
pology and cosmology are central to his construction of the principle of
justice. They permit him to treat the legal principle as a devolved form
of the moral principle, needed to govern sensibly embodied intelligences
who interact through their choice of external objects, rather than in the
transparent medium of rational willing. In this regard one of the most
remarkable and least understood aspects of Kant’s construction of legal
possession is that it is configured by the longstanding metaphysical dis-
cussion of how a timeless intelligible being can occupy the spatio-tem-
poral world. Deeply embedded in the anthropology of Christ’s one
person and two natures, and in the cosmological individuation of intel-
ligible being through its embodiment in material things, Kant’s discus-
sion of intelligible possession is grounded in the figures of incarnation,
ensoulment, and the soul’s (non-spatial) habitation of the body. The
wrongs informing Kant’s notion of juridical right, the wrongs that jurid-
ical law must redress, are thus above all those to which pure intelligences
become susceptible through their choice and occupancy of material
things. Through this external embodiment, intellectual community loses
its spontaneity and transparency; for wills individuated by their choice
of material things and goods enter into conflict, subordinating each
other, and thereby losing the intelligible freedom responsible for their
dignity.
Kant’s view of coercion is, thus, that it is an unfortunate consequence
of the differentiation of wills attending the sensible inclinations and
choices of rational beings. Among the comments that Kant wrote on his
own work, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, during
–, we find the following:
 Kant and the preservation of metaphysics
A will that is subject to the will of another is imperfect and contradictory,
because man possesses spontaneity. If he is subject to the will of a man (even
though he chooses this himself) then he is hateful and contemptible. Only his
subjection to God’s will is in accordance with nature. One must not perform
actions from obedience to a man that one could perform from inner motiva-
tion; and to demand obedience where everything could have been done
through inner motivation is to make slaves.
The possibility of subordination and legal coercion arises from the
manner in which rational beings claim possession of the material world:
The body is mine because it is a part of my self and is moved through my power
of choice [Willkür]. The whole animate and inanimate world that lacks the
power of choice is mine in so far as I can control it and move it in accordance
with my choice. The sun is not mine. Other men are in the same position, which
means that no property is a proprietary or exclusive property. In so far though
as I want to appropriate something exclusively, at least I will not assume that
another’s will opposes mine or that his deed conflicts with mine. I will therefore
perform actions that signify my ownership, cut down the tree, make it into
something, etc. The other man tells me that this thing is his because, through
the actions of his choice, it belongs, as is it were, to his self.
The will that is to be good, if it is taken as universal and reciprocal, must not
cancel itself for the sake of the other; and the other [person] must not claim as
his own that which I have worked, because in this case he would be assuming
that his will moved my body. (.–)
Here Kant prefigures the concept of intelligible possession and the
principle of right that would be elaborated in the Rechtslehre nearly thirty
years later. Yet here their construction is unambiguously metaphysical,
carried out in terms of the degeneration of spiritual community attend-
ing its necessary material embodiment, and in terms of the partial or
analogical restitution of this community through the establishment of
‘universal and reciprocal’ rights of external possession. Moreover,
despite all attempts to confine this metaphysical construction to Kant’s
‘pre-critical’ stage, we find the same construction at the heart of the
Rechtslehre’s so-called formal treatment of the concept of original posses-
sion:
In this way, taking possession of a separated piece of land is an act of private
choice without being arbitrary. The possessor bases his act on the inborn
common possession of the earth’s surface and on the a priori general will cor-
responding to it, which permits private possession of it (since otherwise unoc-
cupied things would in themselves and in accordance with a law become
ownerless things). The possessor thus originally acquires a piece of land through
first possession and resists by right (iure) [mit Recht] anyone else who would hinder
 The metaphysics of law 
him in his private use of it; although in the natural condition he cannot do so
by legal proceedings [rechtswegen] (de iure), because there is yet no public law in
this condition . . .
Merely physical possession of land (holding it) is already a right to a thing,
though admittedly not of itself sufficient for regarding it as mine. Relative to
others, since (as far as one knows) it is first possession, it is consistent with the
law of external freedom and is also involved in original possession in common,
which provides a priori the basis on which any private possession is possible.
Accordingly, to interfere with the use of a piece of land by the first occupant of
it is to wrong him. Taking first possession has therefore a rightful basis
[Rechtsgrund] (titulus possessionis), which is original possession in common.
(.–; PP, –, fn. s)
Despite various attempts to treat these paragraphs as corrupt, or as a
throwback to Kant’s pre-critical thought, this figuration of intelligible
being’s occupancy of the material world remains central to Kant’s con-
struction of noumenal possession in the Rechtslehre. In Chapter  of Part
 on Privatrecht, we thus find Kant returning to the account of ‘the inborn
common possession of the earth’s surface and . . . the a priori general
will corresponding to it’, in order to ground his concept of original or
first acquisition:
All human beings are originally (i.e., prior to any act of choice that establishes
a right) in legitimate possession of land, that is, they have a right to be wherever
nature or chance (apart from their will) has placed them. This kind of posses-
sion (possessio) – which has to be distinguished from residence (sedes), a chosen
and therefore an acquired lasting possession – is possession in common, because
the spherical surface of the earth unites all the places on its surface; for if its
surface were an unbounded plane, people could be so dispersed on it that they
would not come into any community with one another, and community would
not then be a necessary consequence of their existence [Dasein] on the earth. –
The possession by all human beings on the earth which precedes any acts of
theirs that would establish rights (as constituted by nature itself) is an original
possession in common (communio possessionis originaria), the concept of which is
not empirical and dependent on temporal conditions . . . Original possession in
common is, rather, a practical rational concept which contains a priori the prin-
ciple in accordance with which alone people can use a place on the earth in
accordance with principles of right. (.; PP, –)
In other words, even in the Rechtslehre, Kant continues to use the figure
of the spiritual community’s occupation of the material world in order
to construct the notion of legal possession. He does so by treating the
spherical nature of the earth as providing the conditions of material
contiguity and scarcity through which the spiritual devolves into
the legal community; that is, a community characterised by universal
 Kant and the preservation of metaphysics
reciprocal coercion rather than universal reciprocal intellection. Even if
Kant wishes to treat this figure as non-empirical, and as a ‘practical
rational concept’ containing the principle of legal possession a priori, we
can see that it is not formal in the sense of ‘anthropology free’. On the
contrary, returning to his anthropology and cosmology of the spiritual
community’s devolution into a worldly community, Kant uses it as the
basis of the ‘formal’ construction of his ‘practical rational concept’ of
intelligible possession. Indeed, if we return to the two arguments that
Kersting identifies as crucial to the ‘formal’ deduction of intelligible pos-
session – namely, that external objects would be morally null without
such possession, and that to prohibit it would be a contradiction of
freedom with itself – then we can see that these arguments are them-
selves desiderata of this metaphysical anthropology and cosmology. For
it is only in accordance with a moral cosmology of spiritual being’s occu-
pancy of the material world that ownership of things becomes morally
redemptive of them. Further, it is only in accordance with the anthro-
pology of intelligibly free rational being that the prohibition on posses-
sion is self-contradictory. A pair of Reflexionen from c.  shows us the
role of the metaphysical cosmology and anthropology in constructing
these supposedly a priori insights:
The world is of no value where there are no rational beings [vernünftige Wesen]
to make use of it (not merely to contemplate it). The purely willful use of the
world arises from the pleasures of life. Therefore, as the only natural end of all
rational creatures, this is the only purpose for which the world is good, not
merely for consumption, but also for use. The highest condition of this purpose
is solely the good use that [rational beings] make of themselves and the things
of the world.
Everything in nature is good only in so far as it is useful, and everything is
nonetheless subordinated to the power of choice. Nature agrees with freedom
when the ends of the former are supported by the latter. (.,  and
)
The ‘formal–philosophical’ character of Kant’s principle of justice –
the notion of things chosen independently of all empirical objects of
choice – is thus dependent on the figure of noumenal beings choosing
external things in order to rescue them from moral nullity and to give
themselves a place in the world. In short, Kant’s formal construction of
natural rights through the principle of right – to choose things in a
manner compatible with the choice of all others in accordance with a
universal law – is actually grounded in the substantive metaphysical doc-
trine of the moral occupation of the material globe by rational beings
seeking worldly communion.
 The metaphysics of law 
Kant’s argument for the superiority of the metaphysician’s theory of
the a priori principle of justice over the jurist’s empirical knowledge
of existing laws now appears in its proper historical light. Like the idea
of spiritual community in the Groundwork, the principle of a totality of
reciprocating free choices in the Rechtslehre may be regarded as a self-
formative device impelling intellectuals to repudiate prudential–empir-
ical (juridical) constructions of justice. It does so by presenting laws
imposed for the ends of civil welfare and security as radically incompat-
ible with the exercise of free choice by rational beings. We can see this
configuration of ideas in the following reflection, written somewhere
between  and :
It is not benefits that determine the law [Recht], but the wills of each and every
individual. Given that, in accordance with the rule of freedom, each must
decide what is beneficial on the basis of his own thought, then the authority for
judging others applies not to their benefits, only to their wills. The multitude
can form a political body through rules of prudence, although this [body] in no
way arises from the rules of justice [Rechts].
No-one can cede to another the power to execute his own judgment of rights,
unless he reserves the same power to hold the other to their obligation; because
that would be to give another the right to do what he wanted (licentiam). If
though the other can do nothing unjust [unrecht] through his action, then his
actions are based only in his power and not in his right [Recht]. (., )
The prime role of Kant’s formalisation argument is to induce meta-
physicians to renounce the civil–prudential rationale for the enactment
of laws, providing them instead with an image of themselves as giving
laws and possessing rights purely as sensibly embodied intelligences.
With Kant’s subordination of the empirical legal order to a theory of its
principle, the metaphysical attack on the autonomy of the civil jurispru-
dence – first encountered in Leibniz’s critique of Pufendorf ’s empirical
natural law – appears in its modern form, as anti-positivism. In the light
of our discussion of Kant’s differentiation between metaphysical and
empirical ethics, however, we may propose that the ultimate source of
the anti-positivist principle of justice is not its a priori concept, but the
speculative self-purification of the philosopher who is to think it. For this
is the way the philosopher demonstrates his moral and theoretical purity
in relation to the jurist, whose empirical concepts mortgage his thought
to worldly benefits and powers. In short Kant’s anti-positivist critique of
‘empirical’ law is in fact an anti-juridical attack on historical legal cul-
tures and their bearers.
Given this, we may suggest that viewing the historical legal order as
the expression of natural rights is actually an historical projection of the
 Kant and the preservation of metaphysics
ethos of philosophical intellectuals. This helps to explain the radical
inversion of the history of rights that seems to have taken place in
Germany at the end of the eighteenth century. It was at this point that
popular–philosophical journals began to argue that liberal rights had
been extended through the struggle for individual freedom against the
encroachments of government. This was an argument supported by a
‘new’ version of natural law – actually a revival of the old Christian legal
metaphysics – claiming that men entered political society in order to pre-
serve natural rights, rather than to obtain security (Bödeker ). In
fact, as we saw in the case of the rights associated with religious tolera-
tion, the creation and extension of rights typically depended on the
expansion of the new territorial governments and their legal systems
(Schiera ). That is because these rights had been fashioned in the
crisis of religious civil war as instruments for the state’s political neutral-
isation of religion and pacification of society, giving them, as Dreitzel
has argued, a degree of independence from their philosophical
justifications (Dreitzel a).

.. Kant’s political metaphysics

The metaphysical figuration of Kant’s Rechtslehre provides the key to
understanding his theory of the state, displaying the intellectual–histor-
ical basis of its divergence from Pufendorf ’s.
Kant necessitates the civil state – conceived as an all-powerful collec-
tive will – as the means of realising an original noumenal act of appro-
priation. Were it not for the relations of universal reciprocal coercion
that the civil society establishes between this act and all other such acts,
then rightful choice and natural rights would remain in their merely pro-
visional natural condition.
Now, with regard to external and therefore contingent possession, a unilateral
will cannot serve as a coercive law for everyone, since that would infringe upon
freedom in accordance with universal laws. So it is only a will putting everyone
under obligation, hence only a collective general (common) and powerful will,
that can provide everyone this assurance. – But the condition of being under a
general external (i.e., public) lawgiving accompanied with power is the civil con-
dition. So only in a civil condition can something external be mine or yours.
(.; PP, )
Kant thus construes legal–political order – the state’s realisation of
the coercive reciprocity of wills – as a lower-level approximation of the
transparent intellectual reciprocity of wills in the moral order. For this
 The metaphysics of law 
reason he rejects the Pufendorfian origination of the state; that is,
through the pact in which individuals give up their will to decide matters
pertaining to collective security, allowing the formation of a supreme
agency of political decision and action. Instead, Kant regards the civil
state as arising from a real ideal unification of individual wills into a
general will, for the purpose of realising natural right, or, allowing intel-
ligible beings to form a community through the moral use of things:
The act by which the people constitutes itself as a state – more precisely, the
idea of this act, which is the only means by which the legitimacy of the state
can be thought – is the original contract. In accordance with the original con-
tract, everyone (omnes et singuli) within the people gives up his external freedom
in order to take it up again immediately as a member of a commonwealth, that
is, of the people considered as a state (universi). And one cannot say the human
being in a state has sacrificed a part of his inborn outer freedom for the sake of
an end, but rather, he has relinquished his wild lawless freedom in order to find
his freedom as such undiminished, in a dependence on laws, that is, in a right-
ful condition, since this dependence arises from his own lawgiving will.
(.–; PP, )
If therefore the people is sovereign in the Kantian state, this is because
the role of public law (Staatsrecht) is to realise the ‘rightful’ condition –
that is, rule of rational beings exercising free choices (natural rights) in
the external world – and this is a rule that such beings can only impose
on each other. Kant’s ‘democratic’ construction of the people – as refus-
ing all status hierarchies and obeying only those laws they could pre-
scribe for themselves – is thus neither more nor less than a transposition
of the metaphysical image of the spiritual community into the political
register.
Here we reach the point of sharpest contrast between Kant’s concep-
tion of the state and Pufendorf ’s; for Pufendorf, we recall (.), rejects
all forms of popular sovereignty – indeed all forms of sovereignty arising
from moral or transcendental sources independent of the state as a polit-
ical artifice. Instead, he treats civil sovereignty as the outcome of a pact
whose function is not to realise the natural rights of a collective will, but
to ‘impose’ the differentiated ‘offices’ – the subject who obeys in
exchange for security, and the ruler who protects in exchange for obedi-
ence – required to realise a single political end: social peace. We have
observed that this differentiation of civil personae holds the key to
Pufendorf ’s distinction between sovereignty and form of government.
For sovereignty is a ‘moral personality’ that may be occupied by the
several forms of government – monarachy, aristocracy, democracy – as
 Kant and the preservation of metaphysics
long as they fulfil the duties of the office by exercising supreme power in
accordance with the end of social peace. This in turn holds the key to
the ‘liberal’ differentiation of state and society in Pufendorf, for it is only
conduct capable of threatening social peace that is subject to politi-
cal–legal regulation, even if it is the sovereign’s prerogative alone to
determine what is to count as such. Finally, we can recall that Pufendorf
elaborated these distinctions in order to shape a political and legal
culture suited to the governance of a desacralised state. In fact, he used
them to sever the state from all imperatives to represent a prior moral
community or will – a view central to the political theology of the con-
fessional state – treating the state rather as a will formed artificially for
the sole purpose of security.
In unifying ruler and subject in the figure of the all-powerful self-leg-
islating general will, Kant therefore collapses the desacralising distinc-
tion between sovereignty and form of government and, finally, the
liberal one between state and society. Rather than seeing monarchy, aris-
tocracy, and democracy as optionally equivalent forms in which politi-
cal sovereignty can be exercised, Kant treats them as physical correlates
of the spiritual community – ‘the united will of the people’. As such they
are required only as long as the actual will of the empirical people falls
short of rational self-governance, being destined for subsumption by the
only form of government capable of realising this condition, the pure
democratic republic:
The different forms of states are only the letter (littera) of the original legislation
in the civil condition . . . But the spirit of the original contract (anima pacti origi-
narii) involves an obligation on the part of the constituting authority to make the
form of government suited to the idea of the original contract. Accordingly,
even if this cannot be done all at once, it is under obligation to change the form
of government gradually and continually so that it harmonises in its effect with
the only legitimate constitution, that of a pure republic. [This must occur] in
such a way that the old (empirical) statutory forms, which served merely to bring
about the political subjection [Unterthänigkeit] of the people, are dissolved into
the original (rational) form. [This is] the only form which makes freedom the
principle and indeed the condition for any exercise of coercion, as is required
by a rightful constitution of a state in the strict sense of the word, finally leading
[the spirit of the constitution?] to become the letter. (. ; PP, )
Under these circumstances, any gap between the ideal collective person-
ality of the people and the actual moral person of the sovereign must be
seen as a sign that the people has yet to form the self-governing general
will needed to make the ideal but provisional rightful condition actual.
 The metaphysics of law 
Only the pure republic, therefore, possesses the moral personality
capable of representing the people’s will ‘in person’. It thereby closes the
gap between the empirical exercise of civil power and the self-gover-
nance of a community of rational beings, and, with it, the gap between
political representation and its subject:
All true republics are and can only be a representative system of the people, in
order to protect the people’s rights in its name, through all the citizens united,
by means of their delegates (deputies). But as soon as the head of state (whether
this be king, nobility, or the whole population, the democratic union) also allows
himself to be represented in person, then the united people does not merely rep-
resent the sovereign, it is the sovereign itself. For in it (the people) is originally
found the supreme authority from which all rights of individuals as mere sub-
jects (and in any case as officials of the state) must be derived. (.; PP, )
Kant’s legitimation of civil sovereignty in terms of the people’s self-gov-
ernance in the pure republic is, therefore, grounded neither in the
formal principle of justice nor in a political philosophy borrowed from
Rousseau, but in something he shared with the Genevan philosopher:
the Christian–metaphysical conception of the state as the means by
which the spiritual community governs its worldly commercium. We first
encountered this conception, it will be recalled (.), in Althusius’ notion
of sovereignty arising from the ‘universal symbiosis’ responsible for the
community’s spiritual and physical perfection.
This image of the pure republic, as the means by which the moral com-
munity realises its worldly self-governance, is responsible for Kant’s
deeply ambivalent attitude to the legitimacy of the state, which has been
observed by commentators since the Rechtslehre was first published. On the
one hand, to the extent that it is regarded as the pure expression of the
general will, then the state is hyper-legitimate. By representing the people
‘in person’, the pure republic collapses the distinction between ruler and
subjects, who, because they are only obeying their own will, must obey it
unconditionally: ‘For, in order for the people to judge the supreme polit-
ical authority (summum imperium) with rightful force [rechtskräftig], they must
already be viewed as united under a general legislative will; which means
that they cannot and may not judge otherwise than the present head of
state (summus imperans) wills them to’ (.; PP, –). Here Kant thus
joins Pufendorf in denying the right of active political resistance,
although on quite different grounds and for quite different ends. For
Pufendorf, the sovereign is an artificial construct created by individuals
giving up their political wills to another; and this means that while they
may privately disagree with the sovereign’s political commands, they may
 Kant and the preservation of metaphysics
not dissent from them in public, unless they are to dissolve the state alto-
gether. For Kant, though, in the sovereign of the pure republic, the people
confront the manifestation of their own lawgiving will. These moral
origins give the sovereign’s laws a quasi-holy status and makes even doubt-
ing them a crime: ‘A law that is so holy (inviolable) that it is already a crime
even to call it in doubt in a practical way, and so to suspend its effect for a
moment, is thought as if it must have arisen not from human beings but
from some highest, flawless lawgiver; and this is what the saying “All
authority is from God” means’ (.; PP, ). Far from representing an
aberrant concession to ‘political absolutism’, Kant’s denial of the right of
resistance, grounded in a secularised version of divine right, is in fact an
integral expression of the political metaphysics that Pufendorf ’s political
absolutism was designed to destroy.
On the other hand, because he regards the state as coming into exis-
tence only to protect the exercise of pre-civil free choices – or ‘natural
rights’ as they are more commonly known – Kant’s political–legal order
lacks autonomous legitimacy altogether. Kant thus treats positive stat-
utory laws as legitimate only in so far as they do not infringe natural
rights (.; PP, ). He insists, as we have just seen, that the only
legitimate form of the state is a pure republic conceived of as the trans-
parent expression of rational community (.–; PP, –). This
means that the legitimacy of the state resides neither in the welfare of its
citizens – ‘for happiness can perhaps come to them more easily . . . in a
state of nature . . . or even under a despotic government’ – nor in their
security, but only in ‘that condition in which its constitution conforms
most fully to principles of justice; that is, the condition that reason
through a categorical imperative obligates us to strive after’ (., ;
PP, , ). As a result, Kant treats crime as a breach of the moral
order – rather than the state’s positive legal order – hence as something
that must be punished in an absolute retributive manner, rather than
‘therapeutically’ in accordance with the ends of public safety (.; PP,
–). In each of these regards, Kant’s theory of the state represents an
anti-political reduction of civil to moral governance.
With this observation of his ambivalence over the legitimacy of the
state, we reach the limits of Kant’s legal and political thought as
expounded in the Rechtslehre. For the doctrine that underpins both the
state’s hyper-legitimacy and its chronic illegitimacy – the doctrine that
the Rechtsstaat exists only to make it possible for intelligible beings to form
a worldly community through reciprocating free choices – reminds us
that, after all, Kant’s theory of law and state is a manifestation of his
 The pure religion of reason 
metaphysical ethics. Kant provides us with a striking formulation of his
anti-juridical, anti-political social metaphysics in the following reflection,
written between  and :
The best condition of man in accordance with the rule of law is the social con-
dition; and the best condition of social man with regard to his security is the
irresistible power that compels him to act in accordance with this rule of law.
The sciences and arts make him less resistant [to it]. In this way he becomes not
better but tamer. One can easily capture him through a small appeal to his
pleasures or his honour. He becomes in fact weaker because each such need,
even were it to be chosen [willkürlich], is a bond that ties him to the law. (.,
)
We might say that for Pufendorf and Thomasius the legal and politi-
cal order’s taming of man – its pacification of the moral conflicts that
had torn Germany to pieces during the seventeenth century – signifies
not its inferiority to, but its hard-won independence from the moral
order. For, when states had joined with their confessional churches in
attempting to make man better, they had only intensified the destructive
powers of these conflicts. For Kant, however, the key to the separation
of the law and morality – the fact that the law controls man’s external
conduct without attempting to transform his inner disposition – is finally
a sign of the degree to which the legal and political order falls short of
the moral one. Hence, while Kant too regards the Rechtsstaat as unsuited
to man’s moral regeneration, he, unlike the civil philosophers, does not
renounce the project of building a state in which such regeneration will
take place. On the contrary, like Leibniz and the Christian natural jurists
of the seventeenth century, he continues to pursue this project through
a conception of social order older but no less powerful than the idea of
the sovereign territorial state: namely, the idea of the church as the
model for a general social order in which men can achieve moral regen-
eration on earth. Surprising, then, as it might at first appear, Kant’s most
consequential social and political thought occurs not in his Rechtslehre but
in his ‘philosophical theology’, where, like other political metaphysi-
cians, he uses the figure of the church as a blueprint for the moral state.

.           

Almost all of the modern discussion of Kant’s Religion Within the Boun-
daries of Reason Alone is organised around two interdependent conten-
tions. First, it is widely held that the Religion represents the extension of
Kant’s ‘autonomous ethics’ into the theological domain. This is taken to
 Kant and the preservation of metaphysics
signify the emergence of a conception of religion purged of all statutory
or credal bases, grounded instead in the ‘rational religious’ postulates
required to realise the moral law – the postulates of intelligible freedom,
immortality, and God as the creator of the intelligible world (Lötzsch
; Troeltsch ; Wood ). Despite the differences in their
approaches, these accounts all claim that in building on his autonomous
ethics – that is, on the basis of his purely formal account of the moral
law as the rule of man’s rational self-governance – Kant’s Religion is able
to propose a moral purification of Christian theology and religion. As a
result, religion appears as the external vehicle for the unfolding of the
rational moral law in history and society.
The second contention informing modern interpretations of the
Religion concerns the historical context in which it appeared. If the Religion
represents the moral enlightenment of orthodox Christianity then, so this
argument goes, its publication in  coincided with a concerted attempt
by the Prussian state to stem the tide of the so-called Aufklärung. Relying
for the most part on Dilthey’s original reconstruction of the events, most
accounts tie the onset of this period of reaction to the ascension of a relig-
iously conservative Frederick William II to the Prussian throne in . In
, Frederick’s ‘reactionary’ Minister of Education and Religious
Affairs, Johann Christoph Wöllner, issued an edict commanding religious
and secular teachers to cease public religious experimentation and to
‘adhere to the creed they are employed to teach’, whichever creed that
was (Dilthey ). Kant’s intellectual trajectory intersected with the path
of Prussian Religionspolitik when the second of the four essays that would
be published as the Religion was rejected by the Berlin Censorship
Commission in . After securing the agreement of the Königsberg
theology faculty that this was indeed a philosophical rather than theolog-
ical essay, Kant responded to the state censors by claiming the privilege
of academic jurisdiction. At the same time, he sent the manuscript to the
philosophy faculty of the non-Prussian University of Jena, whose impri-
matur saw the book published the following year. Kant’s evasion of the
Prussian censors had its sequel on  October , when he received an
official letter, signed by Wöllner on behalf of the king. This charged that
he had ‘abused his philosophy for the purpose of distorting and dispar-
aging several principal and fundamental doctrines of Holy Scripture and
of Christianity’, enjoining him to desist from such conduct (Di Giovanni
). This way of situating Kant’s religious philosophy in its historical
circumstances – that is, viewing it as an inherently progressive rational
enlightenment of orthodox Christianity, temporarily blocked by the
 The pure religion of reason 
forces of political and religious reaction – has now become standard in
the editorial introductions (Gregor ; Wood ).
In the light of our reconstruction of Kant’s metaphysics of morals,
however, we have good reason to be sceptical about this whole approach
to his philosophy of religion. Firstly, our account shows that Kant’s con-
struction of the principle of moral autonomy cannot be understood as
giving rise to an ‘autonomous morality’ – that is, to an ethics whose
central principle is independent of revealed religious doctrine, being
grounded in free individual reason. Kant provides the following formu-
lation of the theological disclaimer in the Critique of Practical Reason:
Nevertheless, the Christian principle of morals itself is not theological (and so
heteronomy); it is instead autonomy of pure practical reason itself, since it does
not make cognition of God and his will the basis of these laws, but only the
attainment of the highest good subject to the condition of observing these laws,
and since it places even the proper incentive to observing them not in the results
wished for but in the representation of duty alone, faithful observance of which
alone constitutes worthiness to acquire the latter. (.; PP, )
While it might serve to separate ‘pure practical reason’ from the revealed
theology of the church, this disclaimer cannot separate it from the
revealed theology or anthropology of university metaphysics. On the
contrary, having observed that Kant’s notion of moral autonomy is actu-
ally an improvisation on the figure of contemplative autarky – and
having seen, as Kant himself acknowledges throughout his Reflexionen,
that this autarky is grounded in the figure of God as pure self-acting
intelligence – then we may say that the concept of moral autonomy is
itself based in a revealed religious doctrine: namely, the doctrine of God
as autarkic intellectual substance as inculcated in Christian university
metaphysics. The autonomy of Kantian moral reason is grounded in the
revealed autarky of the metaphysical intellect.
We have further argued that the ‘formality’ of Kant’s moral principle
– the notion that it may be arrived at through a priori reflection on its
idea, independent of all ‘material’ anthropology and cosmology – is
itself dependent on the metaphysical anthropology of autarkic intelli-
gible being. For we have seen that Kant’s conception of formal moral
reason – the notion of an idea capable of determining its own contents,
independent of all experience – is actually grounded in the thought-
figure of an intellectual being whose objects of knowledge are created
by pure intellection of them. In other words, far from signifying the
emergence of an ethics independent of revealed Christian doctrine,
Kant’s conception of the autonomy of moral reason is actually a means
 Kant and the preservation of metaphysics
of modelling the ethical subject in accordance with the figure of divine
intellectual autarky transmitted in Christian metaphysics. We may
propose, therefore, that Kant’s reconciliation of reason and religion
entailed a sacralisation of reason no less powerful than its rationalisation
of religion. This reciprocity is captured in a contemporary text, bearing
the apt title of Predigten nach kantischen Grundsätzen (Sermons on Kantian
Principles): ‘Religion is innocent [of the charge of superstition] as its
precepts are purely moral, and are compatible with human reason
because reason itself is holy’ (Anonymous , ).
Kant, of course, provides many declarations of the priority of moral
philosophy over Christian theology, such as this one from the Groundwork:
‘But where do we get the concept of God as the highest good? Solely
from the idea of moral perfection that reason frames a priori and con-
joins inseparably with the concept of a free will’ (.–; PP, ). But
this is not the declaration of the rational independence of morality that
it first appears. For, given what it takes to think the a priori idea of the
moral law – the need to purify the will of all empirical ends and incen-
tives in order to realise the capacity for pure intellectual self-determina-
tion – then human beings have to imitate the concept of God, which
remains central to Kant’s moral philosophy. While true enough in its
own terms, the claim that Kant generates the practical religious postu-
lates ‘from reason alone’ thus turns out to be quite unrevealing; for the
intellectual exercises that count as ‘reason’ in this regard are actually
internal to metaphysics as a quasi-religious culture of the self. Kant’s
claim that the ‘interest’ in intelligible freedom arises from an idea natu-
rally present in the ordinary consciousness – the idea that man is both a
spontaneous intellect in an intelligible world and a passive sensibility in
a material one – only makes sense, we discovered, if this idea is seen as
the pedagogical means of inducing the interest. Given that they are
grounded in the same figure of thought, then we may treat the so-called
‘need of reason’ for the postulates of immortality (required to reconcile
intelligible virtue and phenomenal happiness) and God (as creator of the
intelligible world in which this reconciliation can take place) as arising in
the same way – that is, as a need induced through the inculcation of the
metaphysical anthropology.
The threshold that Kant establishes to distinguish rational ethics and
revealed religion – that the former is grounded in laws internal to human
reason while the latter assumes laws originating in a divine being outside
human reason – is thus itself an instrument internal to metaphysical
 The pure religion of reason 
culture. Considering that Kant regards the inner moral law as issuing
from a divine autarkic intelligence or ‘holy will’, and given that this idea
is one imposed through a metaphysical paideia rather than naturally
occurring to the ‘ordinary consciousness’, then the question of whether
the law is regarded as internal or external to human reason is not deci-
sive for the distinction between moral philosophy and revealed theology.
Kant’s distinction between rational ethics and revealed religion should
thus be seen as a purely programmatic means of distinguishing and
relating two adjacent moral cultures. We have seen that the culture of
university metaphysics requires its initiates to relate to the divine intelli-
gising of the moral law as if it were the command of a higher self to
which they might accede through speculative self-sanctification. The
religious culture in which this metaphysics was embedded, however,
requires its community to relate to the moral law as if it arose from a
divine being whose renovating grace might be obtained through various
sacramental rites. Intellectual historians must therefore learn to see the
Kantian distinction between autonomous morality and heteronomous
religion in a new way. For this distinction is in fact a device through
which Kantian metaphysics, as the ethos of a speculative elite, maintains
its spiritual superiority over the broader culture of sacramental
Christianity, while simultaneously anchoring itself within this broader
religious culture, as the instrument of its moral enlightenment.
From the standpoint of uncommitted intellectual history, therefore,
the events surrounding the publication of Kant’s Religion cannot be
understood as a clash between a rational philosophy committed to the
progressive moral enlightenment of credal Christianity, and an irra-
tional state bent on blocking this enlightenment in order to preserve
religious orthodoxy as an instrument of political repression. There are
two factors to consider here. On the one hand, the ‘theological enlight-
enment’, to which the Religion was intended as a contribution, was actu-
ally a Protestant theological movement dedicated to reforming or
rebuilding the sacramental church on the basis of a ‘pious empirical
subjectivity’ (Bohatec ; Sparn ; Sparn ). In publishing the
Religion in this context, Kant was thus actually endeavouring to embed
his ‘rational theology’ in a powerful institutional religious culture,
centred in a network of higher clergy and academic theologians known
as the Neologians (Aner ). On the other hand, given that Wöllner’s
edict was not in fact an attempt to impose a state-sanctioned religious
orthodoxy – demanding rather that priests and teachers expound the
 Kant and the preservation of metaphysics
doctrines of whatever church employed them and refrain from public
religious experimentation – then we may conjecture that it was driven
not by religious conservatism as such but by something quite different.
In fact the edict would seem to be a typical instrument of the Prussian
state’s longstanding policy of supervising the religious peace while
remaining neutral between the rival confessions. This was a policy that
permitted each confession to proclaim its doctrines, while discouraging
proselytising, and insisting that theological speculation capable of dis-
turbing the peace take place in private (Heckel ; Steiger ). The
question of the degree to which the Wöllner edict conforms to this policy
is of course a matter for historical investigation, but several factors at
least give us reason to doubt that this measure was grounded in simple
religious conservatism. First, the king’s personal religious beliefs seem to
have been radical rather than conservative, being inclined to freema-
sonry and Rosicrucianism rather than Lutheran orthodoxy (Schultze
). Next, as we have noted, the edict was not directed at mandating a
particular confession but at restraining religious enthusiasm by control-
ling public experimentation and proselytising. The edict repeats the post-
Westphalian toleration of the three main confessions and in fact extends
this to all sects not engaged in public proselytising. Finally, the culturally
and politically ambivalent character of the edict is shown by the manner
in which it was attacked and defended. As Epstein has shown, its most
powerful critic was Lutheranism’s central governing body, the Berlin
Superior Consistory, which regarded the measure as state interference in
the church. Conversely, among its defenders were many ‘desacralising’
intellectuals who regarded it as a statist measure for the political man-
agement of religious enthusiasm (Epstein , –). This at least
allows us to offer an alternative historical interpretation of the attempt
to censor Kant’s Religion. Rather than representing a reactionary politi-
cal–religious attempt to repress the so-called Aufklärung, this act can be
seen as an instance of the state’s longstanding policy of forestalling
public religious controversy and managing religious enthusiasm – here
the enthusiasm of rationalist religious intellectuals.
In any event we have perhaps said enough to reorient the approach
of historical scholarship to Kant’s religious philosophy and to his Religion
in particular. This work is not indicative of the manner in which an
autonomous moral philosophy sought the rational purification of credal
religion, finding the path of historical progress temporarily blocked by
a reactionary state. Rather, it signifies the manner in which Kant
 The pure religion of reason 
attempted to graft his version of the metaphysical paideia onto the ‘ratio-
nalist’ wing of Protestant theology (Neology). Through this strategy he
sought to reshape theology from within in accordance with his meta-
physics, while simultaneously using theology as a social vehicle for his
metaphysics. This vehicle would be the figure of the church as a morally
perfecting civil society. This is the way, then, in which we shall approach
the Religion, treating Parts  and  as elaborating a philosophical theol-
ogy in the form of the metaphysical ‘purification’ of biblical doctrine
(..), and Parts  and  as using this theology to shape a conception
of the church as a civil society under metaphysical moral governance
(..).

.. Metaphysical hermeneutics

The doctrine through which Kant effects the transition from moral phi-
losophy to philosophical theology is that of radical evil. This doctrine,
whose elaboration forms the centrepiece of Part  of the Religion, plays
no role in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morality or in the Critique of
Practical Reason. It was, however, a standard topic in Kant’s lectures on
philosophical theology, and it is not difficult to see how he could use it to
give a biblical–Christian inflection to his metaphysics of man’s nou-
menal and sensible natures. Some modern commentators regard Kant’s
discussion of evil as a uniquely profound contribution to intellectual life,
in providing a rational account of man’s relation to God (Wood ,
–). Others approach Kant’s treatment of radical evil as if it were
a forensic analysis of the nature of sin and justification, to be judged in
accordance with the canons of assertoric argument (Quinn ; Quinn
). It quickly becomes clear, however, that Kant’s discussion of
radical evil is neither unique nor rational in any absolute sense.
In fact, Kant’s treatment of the doctrine takes the form of the recon-
ciliation of an apparent antinomy or contradiction between two dif-
ferent conceptions of evil, aspects of both appearing necessary to the
understanding. Evil for Kant consists in the choice to act on the basis of
maxims satisfying the sensible inclinations, rather than the maxim of
duty or respect for the moral law. On the one hand, Kant argues, if we
are to forestall an infinite regress of such choices we must be able to posit
‘the presence in the subject of a common ground, itself a maxim, of all
particular morally evil maxims’; and this subjective ground for the
choice of evil maxims can be regarded as natural in the sense of being
 Kant and the preservation of metaphysics
ultimate and ineradicable (.; RRT, ). On the other hand, though,
if man is to be held responsible for his own moral condition, then this
subjective ground may not, as the pagans held, be considered as inher-
ent in man’s sensuous nature. It must itself be regarded as an act free
choice: ‘Hence the ground of evil cannot lie in any object determining
the power of choice through inclination, not in any natural impulses, but
only in a rule that the power of choice [Willkür] itself produces for the
exercise of its freedom’ (.; RRT, ).
In order to stop the regress that would begin were we to ask for the
ground of this ultimate choice – of the maxim underlying all other such
choices – Kant argues that we must treat it as a priori. It must thus be
regarded as timeless and inscrutable to the empirical understanding,
which accounts for it being to all appearances innate, while nonetheless
remaining intelligibly free and imputable:
But since the first ground of the adoption of our maxims, which must itself
again lie in the free power of choice, cannot be any fact possibly given in expe-
rience, the good or evil in the human being is said to be innate (as the subjec-
tive first ground of the adoption of this or that maxim with respect to the moral
law) only in the sense that it is posited as the ground antecedent to every use of
freedom given in experience (from the earliest youth as far back as birth) and is
thus represented as present in the human being at the moment of birth – not
that birth itself is its cause. (.; RRT, )
Far from being uniquely Kantian, this resolution of the problem of
evil – in which man is regarded as freely choosing the evil nature that
corrupts all his choices – was standard in seventeenth-century Lutheran
metaphysics, as we learned from Walter Sparn (.). Sparn, we can
recall, argues that this figure of thought served a particular end within
Christian apologetics: namely, that of subsuming the pagan philosophi-
cal conception evil (as arising from man’s sensuous nature) within the
Christian theological doctrine of sin (as ur-transgression of divine law).
In this way the doctrine permitted the subordination of pagan ethical
naturalism to Christian moral transcendentalism, thereby effecting a
harmonisation of philosophy and theology typical of Protestant
Schulmetaphysik (Sparn , –).
From Josef Bohatec’s still-unsurpassed study of Kant’s theological
sources we learn that, in late-eighteenth-century Königsberg, it was pos-
sible for a Protestant metaphysician to put the same figure of thought to
a remarkably similar use. Bohatec argues that Kant uses this figure to
reconcile Wolffian moral naturalism – which attributed evil to man’s
error-inducing senses – and the Pietist conception of evil as the free
 The pure religion of reason 
transgression of divine command. Moreover, he shows that, in doing so,
Kant’s use of this doctrine of radical evil closely follows that of a
number of contemporary Neologians – Heilmann, Schultz, Stapfer, and
Baumgarten – whose programme involved just this synthesis of
Wolffianism and Pietism into a philosophical religion (Bohatec ,
–). We have already observed that reconciling the rationalist and
Pietist models of spiritual regeneration was a central preoccupation of
the Königsberg philosophy and theology faculties during Kant’s forma-
tive years.
If Kant’s was the latest in a long line of metaphysical arguments
designed to reconcile philosophical moral naturalism and Christian
moral transcendentalism – ‘nature’ and ‘freedom’ – then it is important
to observe that, like its predecessors, Kant’s version also has a ‘circular’
character. Here we use this term in an historical and descriptive, rather
than a forensic and normative manner; for our aim is to show that the
circularity of Kant’s argument regarding radical evil is actually the con-
dition of it fulfilling its role in the metaphysical paideia. Kant expounds
his theme of a freely chosen evil nature through a discussion of the pro-
pensity to evil, building a good deal of his argument into the definition
of propensity (Hang) itself:
By propensity (propensio) I understand the subjective ground of the possibility of
an inclination (habitual desire, concupiscentia), insofar as this possibility is contin-
gent for humanity in general. It is distinguished from a predisposition [Anlage]
in that a propensity can indeed be innate yet may be represented as not being
such: it can rather be thought of (if it is good) as acquired, or (if evil) as brought
by the human being upon himself. (.–; RRT, –)
It is the propensity to substitute the maxims of the inclinations for the
law of duty that explains man’s (empirical) predisposition to evil and that
finds expression in the notion of his depraved or corrupt nature: ‘The
depravity (vitiositas, pravitas) or, if one prefers, the corruption (corruptio) of
the human heart is the propensity of the power of choice [Willkür] to
maxims that subordinate the incentives of the moral law to others (not
moral ones)’ (.; RRT, ).
If, however, it is to remain imputable to us, this propensity must itself
be considered as a deed. Kant himself emphasises the apparent contra-
diction involved in treating propensity – meant to explain our evil acts –
as itself an evil act:
And yet by the concept of a propensity is understood a subjective determining
ground of the power of choice that precedes every deed, and hence is itself not
 Kant and the preservation of metaphysics
yet a deed. There would then be a contradiction in the concept of a simple pro-
pensity to evil, if this expression could not somehow be taken in two different
meanings, both nonetheless reconcilable with the concept of freedom. (.;
RRT, )
It is at this point that Kant moves to solve the problem, by constructing
two different senses for ‘deed’: first, as signifying man’s timeless nou-
menal choice of the subjective nature that will predispose him to act
from the maxims of sensibility; and, second, as signifying the empirical
acts performed by this nature in accordance with such maxims:
Now the term ‘deed’ [Tat] can in general apply just as well to the use of freedom
through which the supreme maxim (either in favour of, or against, the law) is
adopted in the power of choice [Willkür], as to the use by which the actions
themselves (materially considered, i.e. as regards the objects of the power of
choice) are performed in accordance with that maxim. The propensity to evil
is a deed in the first sense (peccatum originarium) [original sin], and at the same
time the formal ground of every deed contrary to law in the second sense, which
materially resists the law and is called vice (peccatum derivatum) [derivative sin];
and the first offence remains even though the second may be repeatedly avoided
(because of incentives that are not part of the law). The former is an intelligible
deed, cognisable through sheer reason apart from all temporal condition; the
latter is sensible, empirical, given in time (factum phenomenon) [phenomenal deed].
(.; RRT, )
Not even a commentator as erudite and sympathetic as Bohatec
regards this as solving the problem. If the corruption of the heart is
regarded as a propensity in order to explain our tendency to evil acts,
and is then regarded as an evil act in order to remain imputable, then
this simply sets up a circle between propensity and deed and, conse-
quently, the original corruption of our nature remains unexplained
(Bohatec , –). But Bohatec’s careful analysis of this circularity
misses the point of Kant’s procedure. For Kant establishes the circle
between disposition and deed in order to present the original choice of an
evil nature incomprehensible to ‘human reason’ and, in fact, to ground
the ultimate or ‘natural’ character of human evil in the very incompre-
hensibility of this choice:
Now the former [intelligible deed] is said to be a bare propensity especially
when compared with the second [phenomenal deed], and to be innate, because
it cannot be eradicated (since for this to occur the supreme maxim would have
to be of the good, whereas in this propensity this maxim has been assumed to
be evil). But the chief reason [why the intelligible deed must be regarded as an
ineradicable propensity] is that we are just as incapable of assigning a further
 The pure religion of reason 
cause for why evil has corrupted the very highest maxim in us, though this is
our own deed, as we are for any fundamental attribute that belongs to our
nature. (.–; RRT, )
Far from indicating a weakness in Kant’s metaphysical theology, this
way of grounding the ultimate and ineradicable character of human evil
– that is, grounding it in the incomprehensibility of man’s ur-choice of
an evil nature – actually holds the key to its considerable power. In the
first place, it enables Kant to repudiate all ‘naturalistic’ conceptions of
moral character. This applies particularly to the Epicurean anthropolo-
gies of the civil philosophers. These, it will be recalled, treat man’s evil
disposition as arising from his empirical nature (the passions and affects)
or circumstances (bad upbringing, corrupting environment), and con-
strue ethics as a practice of self-restraint designed gradually to improve
man’s conduct. Against all such doctrines Kant insists that the corrup-
tion of moral character is a complete and instantaneous transformation
of man’s moral nature, occurring outside time. This means that there
can be no empirical explanation or mitigation of man’s evil actions, each
one of which must be regarded as if ‘he had just stepped out of the state
of innocence into evil’ (.; RRT, ). In other words, by using the
circle between propensity and deed to place evil beyond all empirical
explanation – thereby establishing it as a metaphysical mystery – Kant
seeks to place man’s moral conduct beyond the reach of all those who
treat it as a phenomenon to be managed in accordance with worldly civil
imperatives. Had he lived to see it, Thomasius would of course have
regarded this as an instance of ‘secret theology’ and ‘philosophical
priestcraft’. For Kant is not only breaching the civil philosopher’s injunc-
tion on philosophical explications of matters of faith, he is doing so to
preserve morality and religion as mysteries, ultimately open only to
metaphysicians.
Secondly, Kant uses the incomprehensibility figure as the bridgehead
for taking his philosophical theology onto the terrain of biblical exege-
sis. Kant first explicitly introduces the biblical history of the Fall, on
whose language he has been implicitly drawing, by appealing to it as far
more suited to the transcendent rational origins of evil than any of the
naturalistic accounts. For the Christian history treats evil not as a natural
endowment but as the corruption of an originally innocent nature
through sin, the ur-transgression of the moral law (.–; RRT, –).
At the same time, however, by portraying this fall into sin as something
that occurs in time – rather than as a timeless event manifesting itself in
 Kant and the preservation of metaphysics
all temporal actions – the biblical narrative seems to imply that this cor-
ruption can be given an empirical explanation, even if it does this only
to make allowances for the weakness of human reason: ‘We must not
however seek a temporal origin for a moral nature for which we are to
be held accountable, even if this is unavoidable when we want to explain
the contingent existence of this nature (hence the Scriptures, in accor-
dance with this weakness of ours, have perhaps so pictured its temporal
origin)’ (.; RRT, ).
Kant thus uses the figure of the incomprehensibility of radical evil as
the means of merging his (already tacitly Christian) metaphysical ethics
with the central biblical–Christian doctrines of sin, justification, and
redemption. He achieves this end by elaborating a structurally ambiva-
lent position for revealed doctrine, treating it as both required to com-
pensate for the limits of human reason, yet sharing in these limits. On
the one hand, therefore, the biblical story of the Fall answers to and
compensates for the inability of natural philosophical reason to compre-
hend the original corruption of man’s moral nature: ‘Evil can have orig-
inated only from moral evil (not just from the limitations of our nature);
yet the original predisposition (which none other than man himself
could have corrupted, if this corruption is to be imputed to him) is a pre-
disposition to the good; for us, therefore, there is no conceivable ground
from which moral evil could have first come into us’ (.; RRT, ). On
the other hand, the fact that the Bible compensates for the limits of tem-
poral human reason via a temporal analogy – the story of the Fall as a
singular historical event rather than as an ever-present timeless occur-
rence – means that it too must be purified, if reason is to overcome its
temporal–sensible limits and rise to its highest pure form.
The instrument of this purification is a specific metaphysical herme-
neutics. Through this hermeneutics Kant treats biblical history as the
analogical vehicle of metaphysical truths, thence proceeding to winnow
the temporal husks of the history in order to reveal its ‘rational’ kernel,
as Kant exemplifies in the following remarkable passage:
The Scriptures express this incomprehensibility [of man’s original corruption],
together with a more accurate specification of the depravity of our species, in
the historical narrative thus: it projects evil into the beginning of the world, not,
however, within man, but in a spirit of an originally more sublime destiny. The
absolutely first beginning of all evil is thereby represented as incomprehensible
to us (for whence the evil in that spirit?); man, however, is represented as having
lapsed into it only through temptation, hence not as corrupted fundamentally . . .
but, on the contrary, as still capable of improvement, by contrast to a tempting
 The pure religion of reason 
spirit, i.e. one whom the temptation of the flesh cannot be accounted as a miti-
gation of guilt. And so for man, who despite a corrupted heart yet always pos-
sesses a good will, there still remains hope of a return to the good from which he
has strayed. (.–; RRT, –).

Despite the neglect of it in many modern commentaries, Kant’s phil-

osophical biblical hermeneutics is actually the intellectual method or
spiritual exercise through which his rational theology performs the core
task of university metaphysics; that is, reconciling moral philosophy and
revealed theology within a single discipline in accordance with the apol-
ogetic purposes of Christian metaphysics itself. Hence, if Kant places
his philosophical interpretation of the Bible outside the bounds of scrip-
tural exegesis, he does so in order to raise it above the latter, treating his
metaphysical hermeneutics as the means by which human reason
purifies itself of the historical conditioning in which orthodox exegesis
remains mired.
That this is so is clear from the remarks ‘Concerning the restoration
of its power of the original predisposition to the good’, with which Kant
concludes Part . For these remarks, organised as a mirror image of the
metaphysical analogy of the Fall into moral evil, are intended to show
how the doctrine of divine grace may be incorporated in a philosophy
of religion that yet remains ‘within the boundaries of reason alone’. Like
the original corruption of human nature, the means by which humans
can restore their lost good disposition are quite incomprehensible to
them: ‘How it is possible that a naturally evil man should make himself
into a good man surpasses all our concepts’ (.–; RRT, ). The cor-
ruption of our disposition occurs outside time, and this means that none
of the improvements that we make to ourselves as temporal beings can
restore our good disposition. For this requires a complete and instanta-
neous ‘revolution’ in our disposition, not the kind of gradual improve-
ment in conduct recommended by the civil philosophers, which occurs
in accordance with the ignoble desire for happiness; for example, when
‘an unjust man [converts] to civic righteousness for the sake of peace or
profit’ (.; RRT, ).
At this point, having demonstrated both the necessity and the incom-
prehensibility of man’s revolutionary moral renovation, Kant begins to
use the biblical language of spiritual rebirth: ‘And so a “new man” can
come about only through a kind of rebirth, as it were a new creation
(John, :; compare with Genesis, :) and a change of heart’ (.;
RRT, ). This provides the avenue through which Kant introduces the
 Kant and the preservation of metaphysics
doctrine of grace into his ‘pure rational religion’. For, although man is
incapable of saving himself as an empirical being – his temporal ethical
progress always falling short of a timeless moral disposition – still, ‘if by
a single unalterable decision a man reverses the supreme ground of his
maxims . . . and thereby puts on a new man’, he may render himself
receptive to a renovation of his nature coming from a higher source.
This occurs when a noumenal being, possessing the capacity for a-tem-
poral intellectual intuition, intelligises the incomplete unfolding of tem-
poral man’s deeds as an instantaneous unity, thereby completing them
and rendering them adequate to the timeless disposition.
For him who penetrates to the intelligible ground of the heart (the ground of all
maxims of the power of choice), for him to whom this progress is a unity, i.e.
for God, this is actually the same as actually being a good man (pleasing to him);
and to this extent the change can be considered a revolution. For the judgment
of human beings, however, who can assess themselves and the strength of their
maxims only by the upper hand they gain over the senses in time, the change is
to be regarded only as an ever-continuing striving for the better, hence as a
gradual reformation of the propensity to evil, of the perverted cast of mind
[Denkungsart]. (.; RRT, )

The full elaboration of this philosophical version of justification and

salvation, however, is reserved for Section  of the Religion, where it
takes place via the figure of Christ. Here Kant establishes a complex
analogical interplay between his own metaphysical anthropology of
man’s intelligible and sensible natures, and Christian metaphysics of
Christ’s two natures and one person. On the one hand, he argues that
the figure of Christ as the incarnation of the divine being in human
nature provides an appropriate analogy for the incomprehensible pres-
ence of the idea of the pure moral disposition – the archetype of a
‘humanity pleasing to God’ – in sensible man. Kant thus executes a
Christological reconfiguration of the central idea of his moral philoso-
phy – the notion of the moral principle as ‘rational being in man’ –
which he can do because this ‘humanity’ is already conceived as a quasi-
divine being resident in the human:
In the practical faith in this Son of God (so far as he is represented as having
taken up human nature) the human being can thus hope to become pleasing to
God (and thereby blessed). In other words, the only human being who is enti-
tled to consider himself as something not unworthy of divine pleasure is the one
conscious of such a moral disposition in himself as enables him to believe and
self-assuredly trust that, under similar temptations and afflictions (so far as these
 The pure religion of reason 
are made the touchstone of that idea), he would unswervingly cleave to the
archetype [Urbilde] of humanity and, by faithful emulation, remain true to his
exemplar. (.; RRT, –)
On the other hand, we must not think of the figure of Christ as literally
signifying the embodiment of God in man at some point in time; for this
would result in a God–man whose holiness is so far above the human
that it could serve no moral purpose for us. We must therefore regard the
incarnation as an analogical representation of Christ’s personification of
the pure moral disposition ‘through his teachings and actions’, which
occurs in us at all times. This practical representation of the moral prin-
ciple in Christ the human teacher thus makes divine righteousness avail-
able for human appropriation, even though this righteousness ‘is not our
own’, and ‘rendering this appropriation comprehensible to us is still
fraught with great difficulties’ (.; RRT, ).
In fact there are three such difficulties (.–; RRT, –). First,
how can man become adequate to the personified image of the holy law
in him given that ‘the distance between the goodness which we ought to
effect in ourselves and the evil from which we start is . . . infinite, and, so
far as the deed is concerned . . . is not exhaustible in any time?’ Next,
given that we can have no empirical insight into our moral condition and
moral fate – such as the images of heaven and hell appear to provide
those seeking incentives for their conduct – how can we find the assu-
rance and comfort that heartens us to maintain a good way of life?
Finally, given that each man is responsible for fulfilling the commands of
duty, yet that man’s corrupt condition means that he must depend on
another’s righteousness to render him adequate to the holy law, how can
he atone for his own corruption through the goodness of another? In
posing and resolving these problems Kant seeks to incorporate the
central doctrines of Protestant theology – rebirth, justification through
Christ, and vicarious satisfaction – into his hermeneutic metaphysics.
Kant has already sketched an answer to the rebirth problem in his
metaphysics of grace, given at the end of Part . The only difference
between that discussion and this one is that here Kant uses the figure of
Christ’s ‘two natures and one person’ in order to show how the grace
required for moral rebirth can be both supranatural yet internal to the
person. In combining a divine (noumenal) and a human nature, the
figure of Christ offers an analogical image of the manner in which ‘pure
intellectual intuition’ renders the deed adequate to the disposition within
a single person (.–; RRT, –). For its part, the problem of finding
 Kant and the preservation of metaphysics
comfort in Christ can be solved if we treat the images of heaven and hell
not as objective incentives, but as practical analogies for the steadfastness
with which we should hold to the moral disposition by living a good life
(.–; RRT, –). Finally, Kant makes the most elaborate use of
his metaphysical hermeneutics to offer a ‘rational religious’ interpreta-
tion of the doctrine of vicarious atonement. This obstacle to the human
appropriation of divine goodness can be overcome if we treat Christ’s
suffering and atonement as an analogy for the suffering that all men must
undergo during the process of moral regeneration. Through this
analogy, the relation between man’s noumenal and phenomenal selves is
regarded as simulating the relation between Christ and man:
The emergence from the corrupted into the good disposition is, in itself (as ‘the
death of the old man’, ‘the crucifying of the flesh’), a sacrifice and entrance into
a long train of life’s ills. These the new man undertakes in the disposition of the
Son of God, that is, simply for the sake of the good, yet they are really due as
punishments to someone else, namely the old man (who morally is another
being). Although physically (considered in his empirical character as a sensible
being) he is still the same human being liable to punishment and must be judged
as such by a moral tribunal and hence by himself; yet, in his new disposition (as
an intelligible being), in the sight of a divine judge for whom the disposition
takes the place of the deed, he is morally another being. And this disposition
which he has incorporated in all its purity, like unto the purity of the Son of
God – or (if we personify this idea) this very Son of God – bears as vicarious
substitute the debt of sin for him, and also for all who believe (practically) in
him. (.; RRT, –)
Far from being a rational purification of revealed theology, therefore,
Kant’s philosophical theology is the means by which he attaches the elite
metaphysical paideia to the broader culture of biblical Christianity.
Through his improvisation on the figure of the incomprehensibility of
man’s moral corruption and regeneration, Kant effects both a religious
reconfiguration of his metaphysical anthropology and a metaphysical
reinterpretation of the central Christian doctrines of rebirth and
justification. If he thereby achieves a philosophical rationalisation of the
revealed doctrines, then he simultaneously makes their sacralising
powers of conversion and purification available for his practice of spec-
ulative self-transformation.
Both dimensions of the change are present in Kant’s insistence that,
while the purified doctrines of radical evil, rebirth, and justification do
not increase our theoretical understanding, they nonetheless play a
crucial role in ‘moral ascetics’ (.–; RRT, ). They do so by destroy-
ing confidence in the naturalistic ethics of moral self-restraint. For those
 The pure religion of reason 
who learn to govern only their external conduct – for example, presum-
ably, the Königsberg law students undergoing a Pufendorfian or
Thomasian (quasi-Epicurean) ethical formation – remain evil at heart.
In this way Kant’s students, destined to staff the Lutheran churches and
schools of East and West Prussia, are compelled to seek moral salvation
in a profound and total transformation of the inner self, to be achieved
through the self-purifying method of Kant’s own metaphysical herme-
neutics (.–; RRT, –). In other words, Kant’s ‘moral religion’
emerges not as a rational purification of revealed Christian doctrine, but
as a use of such doctrine to reconfigure the metaphysical paideia in a
manner that would better allow it to function as the religion of a specific
intellectual elite.
Kant and his modern followers regard his rational theological doc-
trines as ultimately grounded in a fully rational principle – the formal
idea of the moral law – hence as supplements to an autonomous ethics.
We have shown, however, that his moral principle is itself a Christian
metaphysical construct whose ultimate role also lies in the domain of
‘moral ascetics’. Here it forms part of a spiritual exercise designed to
turn individuals away from worldly prudential ethics towards an ethos
of contemplative self-purification. Kant’s religious reconfiguration of
this construct, via the rationalised doctrines of radical evil, rebirth, and
justification, is thus designed to allow his metaphysics itself to function
as the vehicle of self-sanctification and moral renewal.
Seen in this light, Kant’s philosophical theology – like his moral phi-
losophy more broadly – must be regarded as a powerful renewal of
metaphysical ethics against the detranscendentalising doctrines of the
civil philosophers. Through his philosophical simulacra of the doctrines
of sin, justification, and moral regeneration, Kant seeks to destroy all
ethics grounded in man’s indifferent or passionate nature – that is, all
ethics whose horizon is the management of man’s external conduct in
civil life. Further, through this synthesis of philosophy and theology, uni-
versity metaphysics is able to resume its long campaign to resacralise pol-
itics, insisting that the state serve an end far higher than security – in fact
the end of man’s moral regeneration. Kant provides his blueprint for the
resacralised state in the second half of the Religion.

.. Building the moral state

The transition from Kant’s metaphysical hermeneutics (rational theol-
ogy) to his metaphysics of the church (philosophical ecclesiology) occurs
 Kant and the preservation of metaphysics
in the opening pages of Part  of the Religion. The doctrine through
which he effects this transition – the doctrine of the corrupting influence
of human society – might be described as Rousseauean, were it not
for the likelihood that, in formulating this doctrine, both philosophers
were drawing on the same metaphysical conception of an ideal moral
community.
In Kant’s version, as soon as human beings begin to associate with
each other, they are assailed by ‘envy, addiction to power, avarice, and
the malignant inclinations associated with these’; for, given their predis-
position to satisfy their sensuous inclinations, human beings simply as
human beings ‘will mutually corrupt each other’s moral disposition and
make one another evil’ (.–; RRT, ). Individual moral striving is
incapable of combating this social corruption. Bearing in mind the inca-
pacity of the Rechtsstaat to touch the inner disposition, human beings are
therefore duty-bound to form a society that is both founded on the laws
of virtue and is capable of making men virtuous. The fact that these laws
must be publicly proclaimed and adhered to means, however, that this
moral union will also be a civil society, consisting in fact of the members
of the polity, but organised in accordance with virtue rather than coer-
cion:
In accordance with its leitmotif, a union of human beings merely under the laws
of virtue can be called an ethical society and, so far as these laws are public, an
ethico-civil (in contrast to a juridico-civil) society, or an ethical commonwealth
[gemein Wesen]. It can exist in the midst of a political commonwealth and even
be made up of all the members of the latter (indeed, without the foundation of
a political commonwealth, it could never be brought into existence by human
beings). It has however a special unifying principle of its own (virtue) and hence
a form and constitution essentially distinct from those of the other. There is
nevertheless a certain analogy between the two . . . and with respect to this
analogy the ethical commonwealth can also be called an ethical state, i.e. a
kingdom of virtue (of the good principle). (.–; RRT, )

In marked deviation from Pufendorf ’s ‘collegial’ and Thomasius’ ‘ter-

ritorial’ conception of the church, Kant does not regard this ethico-civil
society as one of several such associations, existing as private corpora-
tions inside the state and under its control. Rather, he treats it as the one
true form in which the people may be morally governed, as a hidden
moral state co-extensive with the political state, and dedicated to
remoulding the latter in its own image. For, from the metaphysical stand-
point, human beings in the political state are in an ‘ethical state of
nature’, ceaselessly corrupting and preying on each other. This means
 The pure religion of reason 
that they must leave the political state, submitting their wills to a ruler
who governs not just their conduct but their inner dispositions: ‘Hence
an ethical commonwealth is conceivable only as a people under divine
commands, i.e. as a people of God, and indeed in accordance with the
laws of virtue’ (.; RRT, ). Here we see the nucleus of Kant’s pro-
gramme to resacralise the state, which takes shape as an anti-political
‘enclave politics’, eroding the desacralised state of the civil philosophers
from within – in fact from within the state-pacified zone of civil society
(Koselleck ).
Just as all societies under public laws entail the subordination of their
members, so too does the ethical society, whose members constitute a
congregation under the direction of teachers and spiritual shepherds.
Adapting the Protestant topos of the invisible and visible church to his
own metaphysical ends, Kant stipulates that the intelligible ideal of a
moral community under divine law constitutes the ‘church invisible’,
while the existing ‘church visible’ is to be seen as the empirical approxi-
mation of this ideal. Given the need to the close the gap between the
empirical and the ideal, then: ‘The true (visible) church is one that dis-
plays the (moral) kingdom of God on earth so far as the latter can be
realised through human beings’ (.; RRT, ). Accordingly, says
Kant – improvising on the standard formula of the ‘one, holy, catholic
and apostolic church’ – the true visible church must be universal (sub-
suming all confessions); pure (grounded in morality alone); free (inter-
nally and with regard to the state); and unchanging (grounded in a priori
principles which may be publicly proclaimed ‘as it were through a book
of laws’) (.–; RRT, ). Kant’s conception of a metaphysical
reunification of the faith may thus be regarded as an updating of
Leibniz’s reunion project.
Kant’s use of the topos of the visible and invisible church differs
significantly from that of Pufendorf and Thomasius, this difference
pointing to the gulf separating the metaphysical and civil conceptions of
the governance of civil society. For Pufendorf and Thomasius, we can
recall (., .), the invisible church consists of an unspecifiable commu-
nity of teachers and auditors, held together by bonds of love and emu-
lation, and by a faith incapable of philosophical formulation or public
proclamation. For its part, the visible church consists of the plurality of
historical confessions, tolerated by the state as voluntary associations in
civil society, but precluded from even the smallest share in civil author-
ity through the state’s constitutional indifference to the truth of their
teachings. As far as the civil philosophers are concerned, the notion of a
 Kant and the preservation of metaphysics
‘true visible church’ or an ‘ethico-civil commonwealth’ – that is, a civil
society purporting to make men moral as well as law-abiding – is a dan-
gerous contradiction in terms. Arguing that the political neutralisation
of religion and society required the segregation of the ‘kingdom of
truth’ and the civil state, Pufendorf and Thomasius reject the figure of
the church as a model for civil society, justifying state control of the
‘visible’ churches as secular institutions subordinate to the end of social
peace.
Kant’s way of separating church and state – ‘But woe to the legisla-
tor who would want to bring about through coercion a polity directed to
ethical ends!’ (.; RRT, ) – thus points in a different direction to
Pufendorf ’s and Thomasius’. Like the Lutheran ecclesiastical jurists
who preceded him, Kant draws this distinction primarily to protect the
‘true visible church’ from political governance, thereby preserving its
role as a (non-coercive) polity directed to ethical ends (Schlaich ,
–). The civil philosophers, however, draw this distinction in order
to defend the state from religious infiltration, and to protect individual
Christians from confessional coercion (Heckel , ; Wiebking ,
–). Kant’s use of the figure of the church to conceive of a morally
governed civil society is thus inimical to the central theological, juridi-
cal, and political postulates informing the civil philosophers’ strategy for
the descralisation of the state. We shall now see that this is because
Kant’s moral communitarianism is the direct expression of his rational
theology; that is, of his metaphysical hermeneutics as an intellectual dis-
cipline designed to reconfigure the culture and role of the university
metaphysician.
Kant constructs his conception of a faith capable of founding a moral
society or ‘universal church’ – the ‘pure religious faith’ or ‘pure rational
faith’ – via the distinction between statutory and ‘purely moral’ laws.
Unlike Thomasius’ use of this Protestant distinction, however, Kant’s is
designed not to divorce private morality from public religious creeds but,
in fact, to reconcile the two. This is because Kant’s distinction is gov-
erned by his metaphysical anthropology – rather than by a political-
jurisprudential analysis of confessional religion – and is oriented to the
harmonisation of moral philosophy and religion. Kant thus treats credal
religion – that is, the religion grounded in revealed historical doctrines
and oriented to gaining God’s grace and favour through public ritual –
as arising from man’s lower sensible nature. The moral laws though are
grounded in each individual’s reason, and may be acceded to without
any invocation of God – save that of course that which comes through
man’s awareness of the holiness of the laws themselves, and from his
 The pure religion of reason 
need for the Divinity to procure their full realisation in the world
(.–; RRT, –).
This way of drawing the distinction between revealed statutory and
pure moral laws sets the scene for its overcoming through Kant’s central
speculative exercise – the posing and reconciling of an antinomy or
contradiction. On the one hand, the moral law requires no statutory
rites for the worship of God: ‘For in pure religious faith it all comes down
to what constitutes the essence [Materie] of God’s veneration, namely the
observance of all duties as his commands, which occurs in the moral dis-
position’. For ‘citizens in a divine state on earth’, though, things are
different: ‘A church, on the other hand, which is the union of many
human beings with many dispositions in a moral commonwealth, needs
a public mode of obligation – a certain kind of experience-based eccle-
siastical form, which, being contingent and manifold, cannot be recog-
nised as a duty without divine statutory laws’ (.; RRT, ). Far from
leading Kant to follow Thomasius in repudiating the very idea of a
public statutory religion of divine dispensation – a move Kant calls
‘arrogant’ – this antinomy points him in a quite different direction. In
fact it leads him to seek a credal religion that contains the revealed stat-
utes required for the ‘moulding of men into an ethical commonwealth’,
but that also harbours the pure moral religion within it, in a form that
allows for its refining over time, as men themselves are refined.
He does not have to look far afield. Given that men must be moulded
into an ethical commonwealth through ecclesiastical statutes before they
can accede to the pure moral meaning contained in these statutes, then,
Kant argues, only a scriptural religion could possess the required histor-
ical durability and powers of diffusion. Further, among the religions of
the book, only (New Testament) Christianity contains the pure moral
religion within it. This means that the Christian Scriptures and the
church founded on them are providential:
How fortunate, when one such book, fallen into human hands, contains com-
plete, besides its statutes as laws of faith, also the purest moral doctrine of relig-
ion [reinste moralische Religionslehre] – a doctrine which can be brought into perfect
harmony with those statutes (which are the vehicles of its introduction). In this
event, both because of the end thereby to be attained, and the difficulty of
making intelligible through natural laws the enlightenment of the human race
proceeding from it, the book can command the same regard as a revelation.
(.; RRT, )
The pure religious faith capable of grounding a universal moral society
is thus not biblical Christianity as such. Rather, it consists in the herme-
neutic recovery of the pure moral faith from the ‘empirical religion’ in
 Kant and the preservation of metaphysics
which it was first introduced as a compensation for man’s sensuous under-
standing: ‘Now to unite the foundation of a moral faith . . . with such an
empirical faith which, to all appearances, chance has dealt us, we require
an interpretation of the revelation we happen to have, i.e. a thorough-
going understanding of it in a sense that harmonises with the universal
practical rules of a pure religion of reason [reinen Vernunftreligion]’ (.;
RRT, ).
In this audacious move Kant thus grounds the historical purification
of Christian statutes, responsible for creating moral society, in the ratio-
nal purification of revealed doctrine through his own metaphysical her-
meneutics. In doing so he not only precludes the state interpreting the
Bible for its ends (contra Hobbes), he also accords priority to the meta-
physical hermeneut (the ‘scriptural interpreter’) over the biblical exegete
(the ‘scriptural scholar’). For the former opens the door to humanity’s
moral future by ‘forcing’ the religion of reason from its historical vehicle,
whereas the latter’s task is only to present the historical doctrine that
contains man’s moral past:
There is, therefore, no norm of ecclesiastical faith except Scripture, and no
other expositor of it except pure religion of reason and scriptural scholarship
(which deals with the historical side). And of these two, the first alone is authen-
tic and valid for the whole world, whereas the second is merely doctrinal; its aim
being the transformation of the ecclesiastical faith for a given people at a given
time into a definite and self-maintaining system. (.; RRT, )
Kant regards this programme for the progressive metaphysical
purification of biblical Christianity as resolving what he takes to be the
central cultural antagonism of his time – roughly that between
Protestant religiosity and civil ethics. On the one hand, says Kant, there
are those who, conscious that the renovation of man’s corrupt nature
requires a transcendent influx of righteousness, maintain faith in the
vicarious justification revealed in Bible, but thereby slight the imperative
to live a good life. On the other hand, there are those who cultivate a
good way of life but, in refusing to accept the need for a vicarious reno-
vation of their moral natures, lack the faith required to realise their
moral end: ‘The first principle is accused (often not unjustly) of ritual
superstition, which knows how to reconcile a criminal life conduct
with religion; the second, of naturalistic unbelief, which combines
indifference, or, indeed, even antagonism to all revelation with an other-
wise perhaps exemplary conduct of life’ (.–; RRT, ).
According to Kant, only his metaphysical hermeneutics shows the
way out of this cultural impasse. It does so, as we have already seen, by
 The pure religion of reason 
insisting (against ‘naturalistic unbelief ’) that faith in the revealed figure
of the Saviour is indeed necessary for the renovation of man’s moral dis-
position. But it simultaneously argues (against ‘ritual superstition’) that
Christ is actually an ‘archetype of reason’ in us, which means that we
qualify for grace only through living the good life. It is therefore meta-
physical hermeneutics itself that controls the passage from credal eccle-
siastical religion to pure moral faith, thereby constituting the religion
required for the ethical society in which man will reach his highest moral
destiny – the perfection of his moral disposition through the kingdom of
God on earth:
The basis for the transition to the new order of things must lie in the principle
of the pure religion of reason, as a revelation (though not an empirical one) per-
manently taking place within all human beings, and this basis, once grasped
after mature reflection, will be carried to effect, inasmuch as it is to be a human
work, through gradual reform . . . We have reason to say, however, that ‘the
Kingdom of God is come into us’, even if only the principle of the gradual tran-
sition from ecclesiastical faith to the universal religion of reason, and so to a
(divine) ethical state on earth, has put down roots universally and, somewhere,
also in public – though the actual setting up of this state is still infinitely removed
from us. (.; RRT, )
It is clear from this passage that Kant regards his hermeneutic
metaphysics as differing fundamentally from both orthodox biblical
Christianity and naturalistic ethics. He presumes this metaphysics to be
dependent neither on inculcated doctrine nor on man’s empirical moral
nature, representing instead the self-revelation of divine reason occur-
ring timelessly ‘within all human beings’.
In fact Kant constructs an explicit argument to this effect in the fourth
and final part of the Religion. He does so through one last antinomy, this
time between natural religion and erudite or learned religion. Learned
religion is dependent on the transmission, by a clerical elite, of a set of
historically revealed doctrines held to be necessary for salvation. It is
therefore always the religion of a particular people and lacks the univer-
sal communicability necessary to qualify as the universal religion of a
world ethical society. Natural religion, however, because it can be arrived
at by all individuals reflecting on their own moral natures, is in a different
position:
Natural religion, as morality (with reference to the freedom of the subject),
combined with the concept of that which can actualise its ultimate end (the
concept of God as moral originator of the world), and referred to a duration of
the human being proportionate to the entirety of this end (immortality), is a
 Kant and the preservation of metaphysics
pure practical concept of reason which, despite its infinite fruitfulness, yet pre-
supposes only so little a capacity for theoretical reason that, practically, we can
sufficiently convince every human being of it and everyone can expect its effect
at least, as duty. (.; RRT, –)
In this formulation we can of course recognise an elliptical presenta-
tion of core concepts common to Kant’s metaphysics of morals and
religion. In comparison with Pufendorf ’s and Thomasius’ conception of
natural religion – which reduces to the bare maxims of loving God and
one’s neighbour – Kant’s thus conceals a sophisticated doctrinal
specificity, focused in the intellectualist conception of the moral law and
the three religious postulates required for its realisation. Moreover,
unlike theirs, Kant’s natural religion is not intended to be a non-salvific
social pedagogy, radically distinct from ecclesiastical religion, and under
state control. On the contrary, it is envisaged as a morally regenerative
pure rational faith destined to be reconciled with ecclesiastical faith in a
religion that will outstrip all political supervision. For, Kant argues, while
erudite religion can indeed degenerate into a sacramental clerical prac-
tice lacking all inner moral efficacy, the limits of man’s sensuous under-
standing mean that he nonetheless requires the inculcation of public
doctrines in order to begin the task of moral self-transformation. This
need not be a problem, however, if the doctrinal formulas simply intro-
duce an intellectual discipline that men would have eventually imposed
on themselves:
Accordingly a religion can be natural, yet also revealed, if it is so constituted
that human beings could and ought to have arrived at it on their own through
the mere use of their reason, even though they would not have come to it as
early or as extensively as is required. Hence a revelation of it at a given time
and place might be wise and very advantageous to the human race, for then,
once the thereby introduced religion is at hand and has been made publicly
known, everyone can henceforth convince himself of its truth by himself and
his own reason. (.–; RRT, )
Once again Kant both poses and resolves the antinomy through his
metaphysical anthropology. For this is what allows him to treat revealed
Christian doctrine as the empirical form in which man’s divine intelli-
gible being reveals itself to his material self, still mired in the prudential
life of corrupt society. This revelation triggers the process of speculative
hermeneutic purification that will eventually, at the end of historical
time, make revealed doctrine redundant. Once again, Kant uses this
anthropology to induce the desire for a profound reshaping of the self –
this time carried out through the hermeneutic exercise itself, and
 The pure religion of reason 
designed to form a specific inner deportment towards both public sac-
ramental Christianity and personal everyday conduct.
Indeed, it is only through the formation of this deportment that the
antinomy between revealed credal and natural moral religion is
resolved. For this allows those undergoing the metaphysical paideia to
participate in such sacraments as baptism, holy communion, and public
prayer as morally edifying contemplative occasions, rather than as mag-
ically transformative rituals. Yet it also allows them to treat everyday
actions as an occasion for religious observance. All such actions, it will
be recalled, are to be regarded as repeating the fall from innocence to
corruption, and thus as offering the opportunity for the renovation of
sensible man’s moral nature through self-transcending participation in
his higher intelligible being (.–; RRT, –). This is of course
in sharp contrast to Thomasius’ Staatskirchenrecht which treats the sacra-
ments, one and all, as ‘indifferents’ or adiaphora. According to the civil
philosopher, the state may tolerate sacramental religions for the pur-
poses of maintaining religious calm, but it must never grant any of them
public recognition, or allow them to dictate the terms of civil ethical
governance.
We have already seen that, far from being something that ordinary
consciousness arrives at of its own accord – independent of doctrinal
inculcation, and therefore rationally and universally – awareness of
Kant’s inner moral principle is induced through a powerful metaphysi-
cal paideia. This is a spiritual pedagogy that requires individuals to relate
to their true selves as pure intelligible beings, tied for the moment to their
impure sensible natures, but destined for purifying self-recovery through
the speculative exercises of metaphysics. In making his moral principle
into the core of his conception of natural religion, Kant was not there-
fore showing how revealed sacramental religion would be purified
through progressive recovery of a rational principle already contained
‘within all human beings’. Rather, confronted by a biblical Christianity
unleashed from controlling orthodoxy – through the desacralisation of
the state and the broader dissemination of religious writings – he was
outlining a programme that would allow university metaphysics to
defend its claim to provide an account of the meaning of religion which
‘alone is authentic and valid for the whole world’.
Under these changed cultural circumstances this would no longer
be achieved through the proclamation of definitive and binding doctri-
nal interpretations. Instead, Kant argues, the unification of the faith
will take place by qualifying metaphysicians – now in the guise of the
 Kant and the preservation of metaphysics
philosophical–historical hermeneut – to undertake the continuous
reinterpretation of doctrine in accordance with their diagnosis of
humanity’s current level of spiritual development. The genius of Kant’s
hermeneutic metaphysics is that it allows the elite religion of the univer-
sity (Kant’s own metaphysical paideia) and the broader biblical–religious
culture to be continuously adjusted in relation to each other. This adjust-
ment, of course, remains under the control of metaphysical hermeneut
himself who, through his own speculative reinterpretation of Scripture,
displays the current stage of the ongoing revelation of intelligible being
in empirical history.
We should be sceptical then of those accounts that treat Kant’s
metaphysics as occupying a higher philosophical–historical level than
other such late-eighteenth-century religious–intellectual movements as
Neology. Stephen Lestition, for example, has argued that Kant’s formal
moral philosophy allowed him to grasp the philosophical–historical
underpinnings of these rival movements, and that his mastery of antin-
omy allowed him to understand the historical dialectic governing their
future reconciliation (Lestition ). In fact, this kind of interpretation
bears an uncanny resemblance to Kant’s own claim to discern the rela-
tive historical maturity of human reason. We have shown, to the con-
trary, that Kant’s formal philosophy may itself be regarded as a spiritual
exercise competing with other such (religious) exercises. Further, we have
seen that Kant’s antinomies – such as those between external orthodoxy
and inner moral faith, and between ecclesiastical and natural religion –
far from capturing an intrinsic historical dialectic, in fact seek to impose
such a dialectic as a means of absorbing and neutralising the rivals to
Kantian metaphysics. In this regard, Kant’s religious philosophy fell
quite naturally under the Wöllner edict, concerned as it was to prevent
sectarian theologians and intellectuals from public proselytising.
In developing his intellectual and cultural strategy, Kant was simulta-
neously attacking the rival strategy that had been elaborated by
Pufendorf and Thomasius. For theirs was premised on partitioning a
religion beyond all reach of philosophical formulation and public proc-
lamation, from a politics whose singular end of security dictates its
indifference to religious truth and ensures its immunity to moral critique.
Kant’s Religion, though, is dedicated to elaborating a metaphysical her-
meneutics capable of functioning as the public theology of an ‘ethical
commonwealth’, and thereby evading the desacralisation of politics
sought by Pufendorf and Thomasius. Kant’s programme thus preserves
the longstanding role of university metaphysics as the intellectual archi-
 The pure religion of reason 
tect of confessional society; that is, society conceived of as a single ‘true
visible church’, or, as the morally perfecting ‘kingdom of God on earth’.
Given the actual post-confessional religious indifference of the state,
though, Kant conceives the ethical state in a new way. He construes it
not in terms of the political enforcement of the true religion, but as
‘rational religion’s’ gradual displacement of the state altogether, through
the creation of a people no longer in need of political coercion.
From here arose the anti-political enclave politics so central to
modern dialectical history and ‘critical’ social theory. These disciplines
could take over Kant’s philosophical hermeneutics and use it to diagnose
the historical signs of progress towards a moral or rational society, typi-
cally configured in terms of non-coercive intellectual communication
and community, or a ‘rational public sphere’. This is one of the main
forms in which university metaphysics has been carried into the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries, allowing the Christian–metaphysical
demand for the resacralisation of politics to be voiced in the registers of
dialectical philosophical history and anti-positivist social theory.
 Postscript: the kingdom of truth and the civil kingdom

We began this book by contesting the view of early modern German

intellectual history as a dialectical progression leading to Kant. We have
since discovered that this historiography is anything but a mistake. It is,
in fact, a central weapon in the ongoing intellectual civil war between
civil and metaphysical philosophy.
This historiography first appeared in the dialectics through which
Kant represents his own transcendence of the philosophies that pre-
ceded his. In using the figure of homo duplex to organise his intellectual
antinomies, Kant was able to reduce the colliding cultural worlds seen
at Halle to a series of neatly paired intellectual oppositions – between
rationalism and voluntarism, idealism and empiricism – which could be
resolved through the cultivation of a particular intellectual deportment.
This method was then used by his early adherents – such as the theolo-
gian Carl Friedrich Stäudlin – to write Kant-centred histories of philos-
ophy (Hochstrasser , –). Like Kant, Stäudlin was centrally
preoccupied with reconciling moral philosophy and Christian theology;
and he was among the first to use the metaphysical hermeneutics of
Kant’s Religion to marginalise Pufendorf for ‘failing’ to achieve this goal
(Stäudlin ). Never forgiven for its detranscendentalising of ethics
and desacralising of politics, at the end of the eighteenth century civil
philosophy was driven from Protestant arts faculties by Kant’s renewal
of Schulmetaphysik, finding itself increasingly restricted to the teaching of
law and politics. If, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, many
historians still treat the civil philosophers as failing to reconcile rational-
ism and voluntarism in a morally grounded politics, this is surely testi-
mony to the long hegemony of post-Kantian philosophical history,
which is perhaps only now beginning to break down.
In making its own contribution to this disintegrative process, this book
has offered a redescription of Kant’s practical philosophy, including its
dialectics. Kant’s philosophy is best understood as a modification of a

 The kingdom of truth and the civil kingdom 
longstanding metaphysical paideia, grounded in the pathos of homo duplex,
and dedicated to the ethos of intellectual self-purification. By presenting
human experience as governed by a realm of pure intelligences, while
simultaneously insisting that this realm lies beyond human understand-
ing, Kant’s metaphysical anthropology is the programme for a particu-
lar kind of intellectual grooming. This is one that requires its bearers to
maintain faith in the metaphysical noumena, but only as regulative
‘ideas of reason’ or as ‘deontological’ moral laws. At the same time, those
undergoing this formation must accept the independence of empirical
experience, but only as the mode in which the noumena appear to a
being with our ‘human’ kind of sensibility.
The grooming of this ‘critical’ intellectual deportment – surely a
modern form of Hadot’s Platonic exercises in ‘mental concentration and
renunciation of the sensible world’ – holds the key to understanding the
cultural role and historical significance of Kant’s philosophy. In forming
an intellectual estate capable of both entertaining the positive sciences
(of law, politics, theology), while simultaneously treating them as mani-
festations of a recessive power of creative intellection, this philosophy
was responsible for a momentous double transformation of intellectual
culture: the simultaneous rationalisation of religion and sacralisation of
reason. With this transformation, German university metaphysics was
able to reassert its claim to moral oversight of civil ethics, law, and poli-
tics. These sciences would now all be subject to the imperious gaze of a
personage who claimed privileged access to the pure laws from which
they devolved on the basis of his own intellectual purity – the ‘critical’
intellectual.
It was this reincarnation of the metaphysical personage that recom-
mended Kant’s philosophical theology to modernising theologians like
Stäudlin. Not only did the critical deportment permit the reconciliation
of moral philosophy and Christian theology – through the subordina-
tion of civil conduct to a quasi-divine intellectual self-governance – it
also sealed the cultural settlement that Neology sought between meta-
physical rationalism and theological voluntarism. It did so via the
anthropology of self-legislating rational being; for this assimilated theo-
logical voluntarism while simultaneously transposing moral regenera-
tion into the philosophical register, where it could be administered by
metaphysicians. In this way, the ‘Kantian settlement’ allowed university
metaphysics to re-attach itself to the cultural power of ecclesiastical
Protestantism, by providing ‘rational’ explications of biblical doctrines
for the religious intelligentsia. At the same time, it allowed Christian
 Postscript
metaphysics to penetrate civil ethics, law, and politics. Here metaphysics
would appear in the form of the ‘critical’ recovery of the pure moral law,
the pure principle of justice, and the ideal general will that would even-
tually lead to the ‘withering away of the state’.
This transformation in our understanding of Kant’s practical philos-
ophy lies at the centre of the essay that we now bring to a close. It was
in order to effect this change that we sketched the history of metaphys-
ics as an academic Lebensform (.), tracing its modifications through
Leibniz (.) and Wolff to Kant, whose formal–transcendental ethics we
described as an elaboration of the metaphysical paideia (., .). At the
same time, through a parallel reconstruction – by treating its anthropol-
ogy as an alternative irrefutable mode of spiritual grooming – we have
been able to rescue civil philosophy from its present marginalisation in
the history of moral philosophy (., ., .). In stepping outside the
engrossing but self-enclosed theatre of dialectical philosophical history,
we have been able to encounter the ‘rival enlightenments’ of civil and
metaphysical philosophy in their true unreconciled forms. Each, we have
argued, may be regarded as an attempt to reconfigure the relations
between religious and civil governance in the wake of their politi-
cal–jurisprudential separation, but in divergent forms and in accordance
with conflicting interests. Each executed this reconfiguration via a
reshaping of the academic disciplines through which religious and civil
intellectuals acquired their characteristic ethical deportments and intel-
lectual expertise.
Herein lies the significance of their two fundamentally different atti-
tudes to the relation between theology and ‘philosophy’. In continuing
to hybridise the two fields – whether via Leibniz’s monadology, Wolff’s
rational psychology and theology, or Kant’s metaphysical ethics and
philosophical theology – early modern university metaphysics main-
tained its demand for the resacralisation of politics, in the form of a
morally grounded state. It did so by treating the political community as
the devolved ‘sensible’ form of the moral or spiritual community. As a
result, in rationalist political metaphysics, political and legal rule appear
as a debased mode of governance, required only until the moral com-
munity regains its capacity for reciprocal collective self-governance,
which will appear in the form of the general will of a total or ‘unlimited
society’. At this point the need for law and state will wither away, dis-
placed by the moral sovereignty of the community of rational beings,
who, in accordance with a revivified political ecclesiology, will form an
‘ethico-civil society’ or ‘kingdom of God on earth’.
 The kingdom of truth and the civil kingdom 
Conversely, in partitioning theology and ‘philosophy’ – via their ‘spir-
itualist’ theology and statist natural law – Pufendorf and Thomasius
were seeking to separate the pursuit of moral regeneration from the
exercise of civil sovereignty. Their object was to reshape the academic
intelligibility of civil authority, treating it in terms of the maintenance of
social peace by a government exercising supreme power in a religiously
or morally indifferent manner. In making this task central to his natural
law, Pufendorf was giving philosophical expression to the desacralisation
of politics that had been achieved by the political jurists seeking a way
out of religious civil war. The civil philosophers were thus not attempt-
ing to institute a new integral moral–political governance of a total
society – one based on a secular political philosophy – but to separate
the maintenance of political order from the pursuit of moral regenera-
tion. From now on these were to belong to different moral personae –
the sovereign–subject and the teacher–auditor – inhabiting incommen-
surate moral worlds: the civil kingdom and the kingdom of truth. The
latter would be unconditionally free unless it disturbed social peace; the
former would be governed ‘absolutely’, on the condition that the sove-
reign power remained indifferent to all transcendent truths.
Given our fundamental concern to demonstrate the intellectual and
institutional autonomy of civil and metaphysical philosophy, we shall
not, of course, be closing this book by anticipating their future harmon-
isation. There is no shortage of such anticipations. Rather we shall con-
clude by reprising our prime object, to contribute to a chastened
historical understanding of these cultures in their unreconciled state. We
do so by sketching four themes for further research.
Our first theme is that of the statist or authoritarian character of early
modern liberalism. We have touched on this theme several times and, of
course, the notion of an authoritarian liberalism is familiar to readers of
Carl Schmitt (Cristi ). Pierre Manent and Blandine Kriegel have
also illuminated our understanding of this issue (Kriegel ; Manent
). Despite this, to the extent that it remains committed to a politics
founded in rational moral self-governance, much modern moral and
political philosophy remains uncomprehending of the statist character
of early modern liberalism. As we have seen, however, Pufendorf and
Thomasius did not derive the founding liberal rights – to security of the
person and freedom of religion – from the moral capacities of rational
individuals or moral communities. Rather they grounded them in the
state’s capacity to pacify such communities, by withdrawing civil power
from the moral domain and concentrating it solely in the maintenance
 Postscript
of external order (., .). Conversely, early modern doctrines of
popular sovereignty were typically not liberal, as we saw in the case of
Althusius (.). In grounding the exercise of civil sovereignty in a com-
munal moral will – a will that could only be formed through the avail-
able religious pedagogies – these theories were incapable of making the
separation between moral and political governance on which the first
liberal rights depended. Under these circumstances, in which the legiti-
macy of civil power is held to depend on the general will of a self-per-
fecting moral community, it is always possible to envisage such power
being exercised to ensure the existence of this will.
After the Kantian cultural settlement, the statist character of early
modern liberalism vanished from sight in post-Kantian arts and theol-
ogy faculties. At this point, the central reality of historical liberalism –
that personal security and religious toleration depended on the pacifica-
tion of fratricidal moral communities by a desacralised state – passed
into the metaphysical looking-glass. On the other side of this inverting
mirror – held up to society by the new alliance of rationalist philosophy
and enlightened theology – security and toleration appeared as rights
against the state, achieved by self-governing moral communities. From
the end of the eighteenth century onwards, the state’s liberal withdrawal
from the moral domain would thus be subject to a profound and system-
atic misunderstanding. It would appear in post-Kantian histories of lib-
eralism not as the means by which the state achieved the religious
neutrality required to govern confessionally divided moral communities
– not, that is, as the exclusion of the church from the exercise of civil
power – but as an expression of the moral community’s transcendent
resistance to the state.
In considering Jacobi’s wide-eyed claim that it was the ‘ceaseless striv-
ing of reason’, not law and state, that put an end to the wars of religion
– and in recalling his Kantian relegation of all ‘externally imposed laws’
in favour of those self-imposed by free rational beings – we obtained a
snapshot of the self-deluding history that ‘critical’ intellectuals would
entertain in the wake of Kant’s inversion of the dependency of freedom
on security (Jacobi , –). For it was not philosophical reason that
put an end to religious civil war but, in fact, law and politics, and the
forms of reason peculiar to them. Specifically, as Heckel has argued, it
was positive Staatsrecht that permitted the formation of a ‘non-confes-
sional or supra-confessional order of coexistence between the two great
confessional blocks’ (Heckel , ). This was achieved, ironically
enough, by treating law as externally imposed for the sake of peace,
 The kingdom of truth and the civil kingdom 
hence as neutral with regard to inner moral truth. Only inside this polit-
ically imposed jurisprudential order of coexistence would the first liberal
rights appear.
Our second theme – that of the historical independence and persis-
tence of civil philosophy – is one to whose exploration we have contrib-
uted in this book. We have done so by arguing that there was no
dialectical supersession of metaphysical rationalism and civil voluntar-
ism – Leibniz and Pufendorf, Wolff and Thomasius – except in the
minds of Kantian philosophers and historians. They of course under-
take the dialectical exercises precisely in order to achieve this superses-
sion ‘in thought’. The fact that Pufendorfian–Thomasian natural law
and political jurisprudence survived its recurrent metaphysical critiques
– continuing to form jurists and politici for the Brandenburg-Prussian
state throughout the eighteenth century – is a longstanding theme of his-
torical research (Rüping ; Rüping ; Wiebking ). We have
also taken note of Stephen Lestition’s more recent exploration of a
similar theme, in his timely account of the continuing role of civil phi-
losophy in the formation of a ‘juristic civic consciousness’ in the law
faculty of Kant’s own university during the mid-eighteenth century
(Lestition ). To the extent that we have contributed to this theme, it
is by clarifying the radical autonomy of civil philosophy – as an instituted
intellectual paideia – from all projects for its philosophical (metaphysical)
‘critique’. Grounded in its own ‘Epicurean’ anthropology, and self-con-
sciously opposed to the ‘Platonic’ recovery of transcendental grounds for
knowledge and morality – a recovery which it regarded as the danger-
ous illusion of a rival intellectualist anthropology – Pufendorfian and
Thomasian civil philosophy was immune to all attempts to reveal its
transcendental grounds.
To the extent, then, that statist natural law and positive political juris-
prudence did undergo philosophical critique and transformation, this
was not the outcome of any weakness in its intellectual foundations.
Rather, it resulted from the erosion of the institutional boundary
between political jurisprudence and ‘critical’ philosophy, brought about
by the spread of Kantianism as an academic enclave-culture. This is the
lesson to be learned from accounts of the manner in which a group of
Kantian legal philosophers – Hufeland, Feuerbach, Thibaut – domi-
nated the Jena law faculty during the s (Lingelbach ). For in their
core doctrines – their insistence on the centrality of the moral law to
jurisprudence, their refusal to derive justice from existing law, their insis-
tence on the sanctity of the person as an end in itself, their relegation of
 Postscript
political–legal utility in favour of Kantian moral autonomy – we identify
not the philosophical critique of positive jurisprudence, but something
quite different: the institutional subordination of jurisprudence to the
prestigious culture of Kantian philosophical critique. This subordina-
tion, we recall, is precisely what Kant’s Rechtslehre is designed to inflict,
reserving insight into the pure ‘principle of justice’ for intellectuals pre-
pared to purify themselves of all positive jurisprudence. The Kantian cri-
tique of positive jurisprudence thus represents the anti-juridical revenge
of a metaphysics dedicated to reversing the law’s desacralisation of civil
governance. Moreover this is how several anti-Kantian ‘popular philoso-
phers’ saw the matter, as is clear in Friedrich Nicolai’s attack on the
Rechtslehre for substituting moral philosophy for jurisprudence (Nicolai
).
The continuing importance of Pufendorfian natural law and positive
Staatsrecht in other environs – ‘devoted not to the university but to gov-
ernment’ – indicates their grounding in an autonomous institu-
tional–intellectual culture. In the early s, at the very moment when
the Jena Kantians were insisting that the state conform itself to the inner
moral autonomy of its citizens – and when Kant himself was publishing
his account of a future ethical state bearing the form of the ‘true visible
church’ – the privy councillor Carl Gottlieb Svarez was instructing the
Prussian crown princes in a very different conception of the state’s rela-
tion to the religious and moral cultures of its citizens: ‘Insofar as we
regard the Regent simply as the head [Oberhaupt] of civil society, all his
rights over religious associations flow solely from the rights of general
supervision, through which he must ensure that no associations are tol-
erated in the state that are contrary to the ends of the state and endan-
ger public peace and security.’ On this basis, Svarez builds the state’s
rights of religious supervision: the right of the state to examine religious
systems with a view to determining their impact on public tranquillity
and security; to ensure that religious teachers are also well disposed to
the state; to ensure that religious associations attempt to exercise no cor-
porate rights apart from those enunciated by state law; and to prevent
the controversies of opposed religious parties from breaking out into dis-
turbances of civil order. If Svarez’s construction of the state’s supervi-
sory right is thus immediately reminiscent of Thomasius’ defence of the
religious rights of Protestant princes, then so too is the manner in which
the statesman limits this right: ‘The state can never and under no
circumstances be justified in prescribing what a religious association
should teach or how it should order its form of worship.’ Further, ‘The
 The kingdom of truth and the civil kingdom 
state can never prohibit the practice of a religion merely on the grounds
of its dogmatic principles . . . Purely dogmatic concepts and opinions of
God and divine things, of the relation of man to the Godhead, of his
condition after death, no matter how false and incorrect, can never have
a harmful influence on civil life and the duties that a man owes to his
neighbour or the state’ (Svarez , –). In other words, a century
after Pufendorf ’s death, and regardless of its metaphysical critique, civil
philosophy continued its task of forming the deportment of those
charged with governing the desacralised state.
The third theme we have identified as worthy of further exploration
is that of the quasi-religious character of enlightenment rationalism. We
have seen that German civil and metaphysical philosophy were both
deeply rooted in Protestant religious culture, which each nonetheless
sought to reconfigure for its own ends. In referring to the quasi-religious
character of early modern rationalism, we are thus indicating the re-
configuration characteristic of rationalist metaphysics. This recon-
figuration imbues ‘rational’ metaphysics with a religious function by
treating reason as that part of human being linking it to its divine intel-
lectual archetype; for, in doing so, it deploys philosophy as an exercise in
self-purifying, self-transcending moral regeneration.
At the heart of the religious function of metaphysical rationalism lies
the metaphysical anthropology of homo duplex – the figuration of man as
a pure intelligence temporarily embodied in a sensible being. This
anthropology is responsible for the inward intellectualist character of
the whole line of metaphysical philosophies, from Leibniz through Wolff
to Kant and beyond. In requiring its initiates to view themselves as ‘sen-
sibly affected rational beings’, the anthropology induces the pathos of
metaphysical longing, driving them to renounce their civil surroundings
and begin the endless task of intellectual self-purification. Yet this quasi-
religious function of metaphysics is simultaneously the source of its
rational ‘scientific’ claims; for it is through self-purifying abstraction that
certain individuals gain access to the pure a priori concepts of which
empirical things are the supposed manifestation. Both functions of
metaphysical rationalism – the religious and the scientific – are captured
in Leibniz’s conception of transcendent concepts as ‘perfections’ whose
knowledge perfects the beholder. This is a knowledge promising access
to the divine intellection of the pure concepts – of things, of morality,
of justice, of regeneration – prior to their impure embodiment in the
empirical prudential world (PW, ; Gr, , –). This privileged par-
ticipation in a quasi-divine pure thinking holds the key to the moral and
 Postscript
epistemological authority of the metaphysician, which is in turn the
source of this personage’s claims to exert influence in a variety of intel-
lectual and social domains, including those of law, politics, and religion.
Modern Kantians generally argue that Kant achieved the rational
emancipation of philosophy by effecting the final transition from a
quasi-religious metaphysics to a fully formal transcendental philosophy.
In the case of Kant’s moral philosophy, this transition is supposed to
entail the relegation of all substantive metaphysical anthropology and
cosmology in favour of a formal concept of morality derivable from
ordinary consciousness. Nonetheless, in our reconstruction of Kant’s
Groundwork (.), we have shown that the process of deriving the formal
concept from ‘ordinary consciousness’ is itself a spiritual exercise, one
deeply informed by the self-formative use of the anthropology of ‘sen-
sibly affected rational being’ and the cosmology of the spiritual commu-
nity. Even at its most formal – indeed, especially here – Kant’s practical
philosophy retains its metaphysical anthropology and quasi-religious
ethos. For it is through their self-formative use of this anthropology –
through their renunciation of prudential ethics and purgation of all sen-
sible inclinations and ends – that Kantian philosophers presume to
accede to a universally binding (‘holy’) rational moral law; presume, that
is, self-transcending access to a universe of rational beings whose commu-
nio is the moral law. Moreover, through this turning inwards – away from
externally imposed civil duties and towards an absolute inner ‘human-
ity’ bearing all the features of the metaphysical God – Kantian ethical
rationalism inherits the religious purism of its neoscholastic and
Leibnizian predecessors. The faint chill of zealotry thus surrounds
Kant’s treatment of suicide as sensible man’s sacrilegious assault on his
own ‘humanity’, which ‘is conceived as an intelligible substance . . . as a
subject that is destined to give moral laws to man, and to determine him:
as occupant of the body, to whose jurisdiction the control of all man’s
powers is subordinated’ (.; LE, ).
Rather than accepting the modern account of Kant’s supposed for-
malisation of a quasi-religious metaphysics, we should in fact begin to
look for the quasi-religious aspects of modern Kantian formalism. Were
we to consider John Rawls’s theory of justice in this light, for example,
then we might well adopt a different view of the supposedly formal char-
acter of his central methodological strategies – in particular the ‘veil of
ignorance’ required to enter the so-called ‘original position’ needed for
the choice of principles of justice (Rawls , –). In requiring the
philosopher to abstract from all forms of knowledge relevant to extant
 The kingdom of truth and the civil kingdom 
civil ends and personally interested desires – in stipulating the philoso-
pher’s ignorance of his or her social position, natural abilities, moral
beliefs, historical and cultural location – might not the veil of ignorance
simulate Kant’s spiritual exercise in self-purification and ascent to the
spiritual community? After all, what is a community of mutually dis-
interested beings – beings whose rational calculations of interest come
to form a reciprocating totality through abstraction from their personal
and social ‘embodiment’ – if not a simulacrum of Kant’s community
of intellectual beings? In other words, to the degree that knowledge of
Rawls’s pure principles of justice requires the intellectual purification of
those charged with knowing them, we have prima facie reasons for inves-
tigating whether modern Kantian formalism might not conceal the
same quasi-religious metaphysics as its prototype. Further, might not the
intellectual and moral prestige of the modern formal philosopher owe
something to the religious deportment of the metaphysical personage?
For how else does this philosopher accede to formal principles of justice
except via the cultivation of a self-purifying transcendence of all instru-
mental social ends and positive laws? These at least are questions for
further research.
Finally, our last theme draws attention to what might be called the
neo-confessional character of rationalist political metaphysics. By ‘neo-
confessional’ we mean the preparedness to declare metaphysical philos-
ophy necessary for living a good life and, sometimes, the willingness to
make assent to this philosophy compulsory, as the condition of forming
a good society. The neo-confessional character of early modern politi-
cal metaphysics is grounded in its intellectualist ethics. In modelling
ethical conduct in terms of the self-legislating self-governance of an
intellectual being – rather than, for example, in terms of the capacity to
restrain external behaviour in accordance with public decorum or pos-
itive law – there is a tendency to treat the doctrine held to be responsible
for intellectual self-governance as necessary for the good life. For as long
as the metaphysics of morals is understood as a formal theorisation of a
moral law in principle available to the ‘ordinary consciousness’, then the
problem of a metaphysical confessionalism remains invisible. As soon,
however, as we uncover the self-formative role of the metaphysical
paideia – the moment we see that metaphysics programmes the exercises
in abstraction and self-purification required to deport oneself as a self-
governing intelligence – then its neo-confessional character becomes
starkly apparent. For, if it is only intellectually self-governed conduct that
is going to count as moral – and if metaphysics contains the doctrine and
 Postscript
discipline required to become a self-governing intellectual being – then
metaphysics itself must be necessary for living a good life. It is only a
short step from here to making metaphysical ethics compulsory and to
declaring other forms of ethics not just erroneous but morally corrupt-
ing, hence deserving of prohibition or even of punishment.
We first encountered this chain of consequences in Leibniz’s remarks
on the issue of whether heresy is a crime (..), written, it will be
recalled, as a criticism of Thomasius’ negative answer to this question.
The twin grounds of Thomasius’ answer – his voluntarist denial that
ideas can affect the will, and his statist insistence that only external civil
actions be punishable – encapsulate the religious and political disposi-
tion of civil philosophy. Conversely, it is Leibniz’s rationalist insistence
that the goodness of the will is determined by the purity of the mind’s
ideas – his fundamental teaching that humans are perfected through
contemplation of the intellectual perfections – that leads him to regard
heresy as culpable and punishable. For, in establishing a continuity
between intellectual purity and civil conduct – without which, says
Leibniz, we would be forced to the absurd Pufendorfian conclusion that
good acts may come from bad dispositions – the way is open to exercise
civil force to achieve the required intellectual purity. In Wolff’s discussion
of the relation between the sage and the prince, we encountered an even
more pronounced tendency to give civil force to metaphysical doctrine.
Wolff treats metaphysics as both the key to knowledge of the true end of
the state – the perfection of man’s intellectual nature – and as the means
of acquiring the pure disinterested disposition required to direct govern-
ment to this end. In other words he collapses the distinction between the
sage and the prince – metaphysics and politics – and, on the basis of the
continuum between the pursuit of moral perfection and the exercise of
civil power, envisages his own natural theology forming the basis of a
state religion (Link , ).
As we have seen (..), Kant also regards metaphysics as necessary
for leading the good life, treating prudential–empirical ethics not just as
erroneous but as morally corrupting, and metaphysics as both true and
morally purifying: ‘We know well that without possessing such a meta-
physics it is . . . impossible . . . to ground morals on their genuine prin-
ciples and thereby to create pure moral dispositions, grafting them onto
human souls [Gemüthern] for the highest good of the world’ (.–;
PP, –). Like its Leibnizian and Wolffian precursors, Kantian meta-
physics may thus also be regarded as neo-confessional. Despite his
attempt to open a gap between ethical cultivation and juridical coercion,
 The kingdom of truth and the civil kingdom 
in treating the latter as a devolved version of the former Kant leaves the
way open for juridical laws to be ‘elevated and absorbed’ into moral
ones. Once this pathway has been opened, then it is possible to envisage
a state governed by ethical laws.
In Kant’s account of this ‘ethical state’ or ‘kingdom of God on earth’
– whose blueprint is sketched in the Religion, the essays on world peace
and cosmopolitan citizenship, and the Conflict of the Faculties – we see the
full and final neo-confessional character of his metaphysics. For, unlike
Pufendorf and Thomasius, who treat all moral societies or churches as
voluntary associations permanently encased in a morally indifferent
political state, Kant envisages the emergence of an ‘ethico-civil society’
that is co-extensive with the political state and destined eventually to dis-
place it from within. There must be, Kant argues, a publicly proclaimed
religious doctrine in order to form individuals into an ethico-civil society,
even if such a public historical doctrine threatens to straitjacket the inner
freedom of the moral law and corrupt the purity of ‘rational faith’. In
fact, it is in overcoming this threat – via the progressive hermeneutic rev-
elation of the rational faith contained in historical religion – that Kant’s
metaphysics inherits its full confessional role, constituting itself as the
rational theology of a ‘true visible church’ or emergent ethical state.
Kant’s political metaphysics thus resiles from the ideological neutral-
ity of the desacralised state not by directly giving this state moral ends,
but by envisaging its progressive withering in favour of the moral state
hidden within, giving rise to ‘a union of human beings merely under the
laws of virtue . . . an ethical commonwealth [gemein Wesen]’ (.; RRT,
). In proposing a state run on laws of virtue Kant is of course adopt-
ing a position antithetical to Pufendorf ’s fundamental separation of the
kingdom of truth and the civil kingdom, which entails that: ‘there need
not be established a particular state in order to propagate and preserve
truth, no more than it is necessary to set up a separate commonwealth
where philosophy and the other sciences are to be taught’ (DHR, ). For
Pufendorf and Thomasius there can be no ethical state, because the con-
dition of bringing tranquillity to religiously divided communities was the
radical moral indifference of the state and the equally radical privatisa-
tion of religion. Hence, despite his insistence that the members of the
ethical state are united by non-coercive moral laws, Kant’s political
metaphysics compromises both the religious neutrality of the state and
the political neutralisation of religion.
It is here that the neo-confessional character of Kantian metaphysics
is most fully evident and its difference from civil philosophy most fully
 Postscript
apparent. This difference – approaching incommensurateness – is given
symptomatic expression in the different uses that the two cultures make
of the distinction between private and public. For Pufendorf and
Thomasius it is religion and morality that define the private domain, their
inward and unenforceable character defining the kingdom of truth
inhabited by the teacher and auditor; just as use of coercion to preserve
social peace defines the civil kingdom inhabited by sovereign and subject
– there being no interstitial world or persona. In Kant’s Conflict of the
Faculties, however, it is the individual’s official duties that define the
private domain, while the public domain is constituted by scholars in free
intellectual exchange. Moreover, it is envisaged that one day the free
exchange of ideas will itself make the official exercise of power redun-
dant, as the persona of the scholar displaces that of sovereign and subject.
This inversion of the usual conception of private and public has
understandably struck many commentators as anomalous. It makes
perfect sense, however, as soon as the community of scholars or repub-
lic of letters is seen as an avatar of Kant’s spiritual community and as an
analogue of his ethical state. Under these circumstances, the official use
of reason, for the purposes of church and state, indeed appears limited
and restricted – ‘private’ in comparison with the spontaneous and trans-
parent ‘public’ communications of the community of pure intelligences.
It is, therefore, in envisaging the moral renovation of political govern-
ance through the figure of the rational community – the figure known
today as ‘rational communication in the public sphere’ – that Kantian
metaphysics assumes its full neo-confessional form. For here, an anti-
political enclave politics, grounded in the metaphysics of rational com-
munity, envisages its own expansion into the ‘true visible church’.
In this setting, under such intense pressure to make the state ethical
and accountable, the hard-won separation of the pursuit of moral
regeneration and the exercise of civil authority threatens to collapse, at
least ‘in thought’. Here too the gap between civil and metaphysical cul-
tures is at its widest. For, while the former treats this separation as the
condition of governing a liberal society, the latter regards it as something
to be overcome, in order to facilitate the self-governance and self-per-
fection of a democratic moral community. At this boundary, where, from
one side, the division of the kingdom of truth and the civil kingdom
appears as the fundamental condition of a pluralistic liberal society and,
from the other, as the unleashing of an instrumental repressive state, the
rival intellectual cultures remain as far apart as they did in the eighteenth
century.
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 Index
absolutism, , ; and the desacralisation of
politics, –; and liberalism, , ,
–, –, –, –; in Pufendorf,
, –
adiaphora (indifferents), , , –, 
Ahnert, Thomas, , , 
Albert the Great (Albertus Magnus), –, ,
, –
Alberti, Valentin, –, , , , ff,
–, –, , 
Albrecht, Michael, ; Eklektik, , –
Allison, Henry, ; Lessing and the
Enlightenment, 
Alsted, Johann, , 
Althusius, Johannes, , –, , , ,
; Politica, 
anamnesis, , 
Arnauld, Antoine, 
Arnisaeus, Henning, , , ff, 
Arnold, Gottfried, Unparteiysche Kirchen- und
Ketzerhistorie, 
Augsburg, Peace of, , , 
Barbeyrac, Jean, , , , 
Barreau, Hervé, –
Baumgarten, A. G., Metaphysica, ; Initia
Philosophiae Primae, 
Bayle, Pierre, 
Beck, Lewis White, , , , ; Early
German Philosophy, 
Bernard, Jacques, Nouvelles de la Republique des
Lettres, –
Bodin, Jean, ff, 
Bohatec, Josef, –
Brückner, Jutta, Staatswissenschaften,
Kameralismus und Naturrecht, –
Budde(us), Johann Francis, –
Buhle, J. G., 
Caritas ordinata (doctrine of ‘well-ordered love’),
–, 

Carmichael, Gershom, 
Carpzov, Johann Benedict, , –
civil philosophy, ix, –, –; and civic
republicanism, –; and
deconfessionalisation, , , ff,
–, –; and electicism, –;
histories of, ix, –, –; and
jurisprudence, –, , –, –; and
natural law, , –; and politics, ,
, –; marginalisation of, , ,
–, , ; rivalry with
metaphysics, x, –, , , –, ,
–, , –, , , , –,
–; as self-culture (paideia), , ,
–, –; Thomasius and, –,
–, –
church, –; and state, , –, –; as
model for society, –, , , , ,
–, –
confessionalisation, , ; and the
confessional state –, –, ; and
religious civil war, , , 
Conring, Hermann, ff, 
communitarianism, , , , , ;
and confessionalism, –, ;
theological origins of, – (see also,
public sphere)
Cramer, Daniel, 
deconfessionalisation, xi, , –, –,
–, , –; and the desacralisation
of politics, –, , ff, –, –,
–, , , , , , –,
–, ; and the resacralisation of
politics, xi, , –, –, –, ,
, –, –, , , –,
–, 
Denzer, Horst, , –, –, 
Döring, Detlef, , , , 
Dreitzel, Horst, , , , , –, 
Duns Scotus, Johannes, 
 Index
ecclesiology: Lutheran, –; Thomasius’, –
eclecticism, ; and civil philosophy, –; and
scholasticism, –; Thomasius and, ,
, –; history of, –
Enlightenment (Aufklärung), , , ; civil, –,
, ; debate over, , , ; Kant and,
, ; metaphysical (philosophical),
–, –, , , , ; multiple
forms of, , –, , –, , -;
periodisation, –, –, –; and
theology, –, , –
Eschweiler, Karl, 
Fischer, Kuno, 
Foucault, Michel, 
Friedeburg, Robert von, 
Gerhard, Ephraim, –
Gerhard, Johann, 
Geßner, Salomon, 
gnoseomonism, 
Goclenius, Rudolf, 
Gregor, Mary J., –
Grotius, Hugo, , –, –; De Jure Belli ac
Pacis, , 
Grunert, Frank, 
Haakonssen, Knud, , 
Habermas, Jürgen, 
Hadot, Pierre, , , 
Heckel, Martin, –, , –, 
Hegel, G. W. F., , 
Heimsoeth, Heinz, , –, –, 
Henrich, Dieter, , 
heresy, , , ; and the desacralisation of
politics, , –, ; Leibniz on,
–, , ; Thomasius on, , –,
–, , 
Hinrichs, Carl, 
Hinske, Norbert, –, –, , –
history, –; Begriffsgeschichte (conceptual
history), –, , ; Kantian (dialectical),
ix-x, –, –, , –, –,
, ; and metaphysics, –, –,
–, –, 
Hobbes, Thomas, ; and Pufendorf, , ,
–, –
Hochstrasser, T. J., , , , –
Hofmann, Daniel, ; and the ‘two truths’
doctrine, ; De Usu et Applicatione Notionum
Logicorum ad Res Theologicus, 
Horn, J. F., –; De Civitate, –
Hotman, Francis, 
Huguenots, , 
humanism, –

intellectuals, , –, ; critical, –,
, , , , , –; juristic,
, , , , ; metaphysical, ,
‒, –, , –, , –
Jacobi, F. H., –, 
Jasinowski, Bogumil, –
Jesuits (Society of Jesus), ; and metaphysics,
–
justice, ; Kant on, –; Leibniz on, ,
; Pufendorf on, –
Kant, Immanuel, ix, , ff; anti-
consequentialism, , –, ; ‘ascetic’
(self-transformative) character of his
philosophy, , ff, –, –,
–, –, –; autonomy in, –,
–; on the Bible, –; categorical
imperative, , –, –; his
Christology, , –; on the church
(philosophical ecclesiology), , –,
; and civil philosophy, –, ,
–, , , –; Conflict of the
Faculties, –; on crime and
punishment, ; and the critical
intellectual, –, –, , ,
–; Critique of Pure Reason, , ;
Critique of Practical Reason, , ; Dreams
of a Spirit Seer Elucidated by Dreams of
Metaphysics, –, ; on duty
(obligation), –, , –; General
Natural History and Theory of the Heavens,
–, ; on the general will, , ,
–; on the good will, –;
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, ,
–, , , ; hermeneutics,
–; on humanity (and personhood),
, –, –; kingdom of ends, ,
–, ; and Leibniz, , –;
–, ; on lying, –; as
metaphysician, –, , , –;
metaphysics of law, –; metaphysics
of morality, –, , –, –;
Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Rechtslehre,
–; moral anthropology, , ,
–, –, –, –, –,
–, , ; on moral feeling, ,
, ; morality and law, , –;
morality and religion, –, –; on
natural religion, –; on natural
rights, , –, ; and Neology,
–, –, ; noumena (and
phenomena), , –, ; on
noumenal possession, –;
philosophical theology, –; on
 Index
Kant, Immanuel (cont.)
political legitimacy, –; on the
principle of right/justice, –; and
prudential ethics, , , –, –;
his purism, , –, , , ; on
radical evil, , –; Religion within the
Boundaries of Reason Alone, , –;
‘Remarks on Observations on the Feeling of the
Beautiful and the Sublime’, , –; and
the resacralisation of politics, , –,
, –, –, –; his
sectarianism, ; on sovereignty, –;
spiritual community, –, –,
–, –, –; spiritual exercises
in, ff, ff; on the state, –; on
suicide, , ; and Swedenborg,
–, ; and university metaphysics,
–, –, , , –; and
Wolff, –, ; and the Wöllner edict,
–, –, 
Keckermann, Bartholomaeus, , , 
Kelley, Donald J., 
Kennet, Basil, 
Kersting, Wolfgang, –, –, 
Kimmich, Dorothee, 
Klippel, Diethelm, 
Knutzen, Martin, , 
Kobusch, Theo, 
Koselleck, Reinhart, –
Kriegel, Blandine, –, , 
Lange, Joachim, –
law: church (Kirchenrecht), –, , –;
Imperial, ; and juridification, –, ;
and morality, , , –, , –;
and politics, , –; Roman, , , ,
–, ; teaching of, , , –
(see also, political jurisprudence, jus
publicum, Staatsrecht)
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, xi, ff;
abstraction in, –, –; attack on
Pufendorf, –, –, , ;
‘Catholic Demonstrations’, ; and
Christian philosophy, , , –,
–, , ; and Christian natural
law, , , –; and Christian unity,
–, , –; Confessio Philosophi, ,
ff; Discourse on Metaphysics, , , ,
; on the Eucharist, –; on evil, ,
–, –; on heresy, , –; and
Hobbes, ; on justice, , , –;
and Kant, , –; ‘Meditation on the
Common Concept of Justice’, –;
Monadology, –, , , , ;
moral anthropology, xii, , , ,
–; natural law, –, –; Opinion
on the Principles of Pufendorf, –, –;
philosophical theology, , –, ;
principles of reason, –; and the
resacralisation of politics, xi-xii, –,
, , , –, –; Roman law in,
–; the sage (and the prince), –,
–, , –; and scholastic
metaphysics, , –, ; spiritual
exercises in, , , , ; and the
spiritualisation of law, –; and Steno,
–; on the state, –, –; Systema
Theologicum, , ; Theodicy, , 
Lestition, Steven, , , , 
Lewalter, Ernst, –
liberalism, , –; and absolutism, , ,
, –, –, –; Pufendorf ’s,
, , –; Thomasius’, –;
Link, Christoph, 
Lohr, Charles, –, 
Lombard, Peter, , 
Luther, Martin, Disputation Against Scholastic
Theology, –
Manent, Pierre, 
Martini, Cornelius, , 
Martini, Jacob, , 
Meisner, Balthasar, , ff, 
Melanchthon, Philip, –
Merlan, Philip, 
metaphysics, ; abstraction in, , –;
Albert the Great’s, –, , –;
anthropology of (homo duplex), , , ,
–, , –, –, , ; and
anti-consequentialism, –, –, ;
Aristotle’s, ; Calvinist, –, ; and
Christology, , –; and
confessionalism, , –, –, ,
–, , –, , , , –;
and the contemplative life, –, –;
enlightenment, –, , –, ,
; of the Eucharist, –; of evil,
–, –, –; of God, , ,
–, ; history of, , –; ‘Jesuit’,
–; Kant’s, –, ff; Leibniz’s,
–, –, –; Lutheran, –,
, –, ; Luther’s attack on, –,
–; of morality, –; and ontology,
, , ; Protestant, , –, –,
–; and the prudential life, –;
rationalist, –, –, –, ,
–; rivalry with civil philosophy, ,
–, –, –, , , –, ;
sacral character of, –, , –, –,
–, , –, , , –;
 Index
scholastic, , , ; Scotist, , –,
; as self-culture (paideia), , , –,
–, , –, –, , , –,
, –, –, –; as spiritual
discipline, , , –, ; and the
subjectivity of space and time, –; and
theology, –, –, –, , ;
Thomasius’ attack on, , –, –,
–; Thomist, ; university
(Schulmetaphysik), –, –, –, ,
, , –, –; Wolff’s, –
Mevius, David, , ff
moral philosophy, –, –; Aristotelian,
, , –; civil reconstruction of, ,
, –, , –, , –, –;
history of, –, –, –; Kantian,
; metaphysical, –; and political
jurisprudence, –, , –, –
Müller, Philipp, , 
natural law, –; Christian (metaphysical), ,
–, , –, –, –; civil, , ,
–, –, , ; as civil philosophy,
–, ; and the desacralisation of
politics, –, , , –, , , –,
–, ; Leibniz’s, –, –; and
moral philosophy, , , –, –;
and politics, –; and positive law
(Staatsrecht), , , , –, ;
Pufendorf ’s, , –, , , –,
; rationalist, ; and sovereignty, ,
, , , , ; Thomasius’, ,
–; transformation of, , , –,
, –; voluntarist, 
Neology, –, –, –, 
Nicolai, Friedrich, 
Nicolas of Cusa, 
Nizoli(us), Mario, –
obligation (duty), –, –, –
Oestreich, Gerhard, , 
Othmer, Sieglinde, –
pancosmism, 
pantheism, 
person (and personae), , ; Christian
conception of, , , , –; and
Christology, , –, –; and imago
Dei, , , , , , , ; Kant
on, , , –, –; Leibniz on,
–, ; and moral anthropology, ;
Pufendorf on, xi, , –; Thomasius
on, – (see also, subject)
Petersen, Peter, , 
philosophical ascesis (‘ascetic’ philosophy), ;

civil philosophy as, , , , , ,
–; as deportment formation (paideia),
, –, , –, , , , –,
, , , –, ff, , –,
–; and epistemology, –; and the
history of philosophy, x-xi, –; Kant’s
Groundwork as, –; metaphysics as, ,
, , , –, , –, , –;
role of moral anthropology in, x, –,
–, , –; and self-transformation,
, , ; and spiritual exercises, , ,
, –, 
philosophical theology (natural theology), ,
–, , ; civil attack on, –, ;
Kant’s, –; Leibniz’s, , –,
; Wolff’s, 
philosophy, ; Christian, –, –, ,
, –, , –, ; history of,
; rival conceptions of, ; and theology,
‒, ‒, ‒, ‒, ‒, ‒,
‒, ‒, ‒; Thomasius’ reform
of, ‒, ‒; in the university,  (see
also, philosophical ascesis)
Pietism, at Halle, , ff; and Kant, ,
; and Thomasius, –; and Wolff,
–
Placcius, David Vincenz, , , 
Pocock, J. G. A., –
political jurisprudence (public law) (jus
publicum, Staatsrecht), , , ; Kant and,
–, ; Imperial, , ; and
juridification (secularisation) xi, –,
–, ; and natural law, , , ,
; and religious conflict, –, ,
–, –; Thomasius on, , –,
, , , –
politics, –; desacralisation of, –, , ff,
–, –, –, , , , , ,
–, , ; and law, –; and
morality, –, –; resacralisation of,
xi, , –, –, –, , , –,
–, , , –, –, , 
Prasch, Johann Ludwig, , , ff, 
public sphere (Öffentlichkeit), –, , , 
(see also, communitarianism)
Pufendorf, Samuel, ix, –, , –, ff;
and absolutism, , –; church law
(Staatskirchenrecht), , ff; citizen (and
sovereign), –, , –; De Habitu
Religionis Christianae ad Vitam Civilem, ,
, –, , ; De Jure Naturae et
Gentium, , , , , ; De Officio
Hominis et Civis, –, , , ; and
the desacralisation of politics, xii, –,
, –, –, , –, –; De
 Index
Pufendorf, Samuel (cont.)
Statu Hominum Naturali, ; government,
–, –; and Grotius, –; and
Hobbes, , , –, –; Jus Feciale
Divinum, ; and liberalism, , ,
–; on metaphysics, , , –,
, –; and modern moral
philosophy, , , –, –,
–, ; moral anthropology, xii,
–, –, –, ; on moral entities,
, , , –; natural law, , ,
, , –, –; on natural
rights, –, –; obligation (duties),
, –, ; on ‘offices’, –; on
person and personae, xi, , –,
–, –; political legitimacy, –;
political pact, , –, , ,
–; and the privatisation of religion,
, , , ; and reason of state, ;
on security, , , –, , –,
, ; sociability, –, , ‒,
‒; on sovereignty, , , ,
–, –; and Spinoza, ; state of
nature, –; voluntarism in, –,
; on resistance, –; on toleration,
, –; on utility, 
Rachel, Samuel, , , , ; De Jure
Naturae et Gentium Dissertationes, –
rationalism, , , ; and the history of
philosophy, –; Kant’s, –;
Leibniz’s, , –; metaphysical, , ;
Wolff’s, –; religious character of,
–; theological grounds of, –, –,
–, –,  (see also, voluntarism)
Rawls, John, –
reason of state (Staatsräson), , 
Reformation (see confessionalisation)
religion: credal, , ; natural, , , ,
–; and politics, –, ;
privatisation of, , –, , –;
wars of, xi, , , , , , 
rights, ; against the state, , –, ; Kant
on, , –, ; natural, , , ,
–, ; as state creations, , ,
, –
Riley, Patrick, –, , , , , 
Röd, Wolfgang, 
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, , 
Sahme, Reinhold, –, –
Salmonowicz, Stanislaw, 
Scheibler, Christoph, , ; Opus
Metaphysicum, –
Schilling, Heinz, 
Schlaich, Klaus, –
Schmidt, James, –
Schmidt-Biggemann, Wilhelm, –, –,
–, –
Schmitt, Carl, –, 
Schmucker, Joseph, , 
Schneewind, J. B., , , –; The
Invention of Autonomy, 
Schneider, Hans-Peter, ff
Schneiders, Werner, –, –, , ;
Naturrecht und Liebesethik, –
scholasticism, ; ; Luther’s attack on,
–; and metaphysics, – Protestant,
, , –, ; second-wave, , ;
Thomasius’ attack on, –, , –;
Wolffian, –
Schröder, Peter, 
Schultz, F. A., , 
secularisation, , ; of the church, –,
different forms of, –, –; as
juridification, –, –, ; of politics,
–, 
Sève, René, 
Siep, Ludwig, –
Skinner, Quentin, 
society, , , ; as church, –, –, ,
, , –, –;
deconfessionalisation of, –, , ,
–; and the state, , –, –,
–
sovereignty, ; Althusius on, –; divine,
–; Kant on, –; popular, –,
, ; Pufendorf on, –, –;
territorial, , , 
Sparn, Walter, , –, –, , ;
Wiederkehr der Metaphysik, ff
state, –; and church, , –, ; civil
conception of, –, –, –;
confessional, , –, –; ethical, ,
, –, ; legitimacy of, –, ,
–, –; metaphysical conception
of, –, –, –, –, –;
religious neutrality of, , , , –,
, –; and society, , –, –,
–; and sovereignty, , , –, ,
, –, –
state of innocence (status integritatis), , –,
–
state of nature, –
Staüdlin, Carl Friedrich, , 
Steno, Nicolaus, , ff
Stolleis, Michael, 
Strimesius, Samuel, , 
Stuke, Horst, –
Sturm, Johann, 
 Index
Suárez, Francisco, , , –, , , , 
subject, the, , , –, –, 
Svarez, Carl Gottlieb, –
Tennemann, W. G., 
theology, Calvinist, ff, , ; Catholic,
ff, , –; Christological, , –,
–; and confessionalism, ;
Eucharistic, –; Lutheran, ff, –,
–, –; and philosophy, –,
–, –, –, –, –, –,
–; spiritualistic, –, –, –,
– (see also, philosophical theology)
Thirty Years War, xi, , , , , 
Thomasius, Christian, ix, –, , ff; anti-
clericalism, –, –; anti-
scholasticism, , –, , , –,
–; attack on metaphysics, –, –,
, –, , –, , –, –;
Ausübung der Sittenlehre, , , ‒,
; church law (Staatskirchenrecht), , ,
, –; church and state, –, –;
Das Recht evangelischer Fürsten in theologischen
Streitigkeiten, , –; and
deconfessionalisation, –, , ,
–, –; decorum, , –,
–; and Descartes, –, –; and
the desacralisation of politics, , ,
, , –, –; and the
detranscendentalising of ethics, –;
–; doctrine of ‘offices’, , ,
–; doctrine of the passions
(Affektenlehre), , , –, , ,
–, –; and electicism, , , ;
Einleitung zur Sittenlehre, , –;
Einleitung zur Vernünft-Lehre, ; ethical
therapeutics, , , –; ‘Foreword’
(to Grotius’ De Jure Belli ac Pacis), –,
–, , , –; Fundamenta Juris
Naturae et Gentium, , , –;
Fürstlichen Personen Heirat, ; and Grotius,
, ; on heresy, , –, –, ;
his history of philosophy, –; on
Hobbes, ; on the indifferents
(adiaphora), , –, ; Institutiones
Jurisprudentiae Divinae, –, , ,
–; Introductio ad Philosophiam Aulicam,
, , –; Kleine Teutsche Scriften, ;
on law (and morality), –, –; and
Locke, ; on lying, –; on marriage
law, –, –; and modern moral
philosophy, –, –, –, –,
–; moral anthropology, –, , ,
–, –, –, ; natural law,
–, , –; on natural rights, –;

and the Pietists, –; on philosophical
sectarianism, , –; Preliminary
Dissertation (to the Institutiones Jurisprudentiae
Divinae), –, –; on priestcraft, –,
–, ; and Pufendorf, –, –,
–, , –, –, –; on
the sage (and the fools), –; spiritualist
theology, –, –, –;
Summarischer Entwurf der Grundlehren, ; on
toleration, , –; Vollständige
Erläuterung der Kirchenrechts-Gelahrtheit, ff;
voluntarism in, , , , –; Vom
Recht evangelischer Fürsten in Mitteldingen oder
Kirchenzeremonien, , –; Von den
Mängeln der aristotelischen Ethik, –; Wie
ein junger Mensch zu informieren sei, –;
and Wolff, 
Thomasius, Jacob, 
Thomassen, Beroald, –, , , 
Timpler, Clemens, , 
toleration, , , –
Tooke, Andrew, 
Tuck, Richard, , ; Philosophy and Government
–, , –
Tully, James, , , , 
universities, xi-xii, ; and confessionalisation,
, ; Frankfurt an der Oder, ;
Gießen, ; Göttingen, ; Halle, ,
, , ff; Helmstedt (Academia Julia),
; Jena, , –; Königsberg, ,
–, ; Leipzig, , –, ; and
state-building, , , ; Wittenburg, 
Veltheim, Valentin, , , , 
Velthuysen, Lambert, –
Versor, Johann: Epitome Metaphysicae Aristotelicae,

Vitoria, Franciso de, , 
voluntarism, –, , , ; civil, ,,
–, , , –; as ethos, ,
; theological, –, –, ,
–, – (see also, rationalism)
Weigel, Erhard, 
Westphalia, Treaty of, , , , , , ,
, 
Wolff, Christian, –, ff; civil religion,
–, ; ethics, –; and Leibniz,
–; metaphysics, –; natural
theology, , ; and Neology, –,
–; and the Pietists, –; politics,
–; on the sage (and the prince),
–, ; and the return of
scholasticism, –; and
 Index
Wolff, Christian (cont.) Glückseeligkeit, ; Von den Regenten, die sich
Thomasius, , ; Vernünftige Gedanken Weltweisheit befleißigen, und von den
von dem gesellschaftlichen Leben der Menschen Weltweisen, die das Regiment führen, –
und insonderheit dem gemeinen Wesen, ; Wittgenstein, Ludwig, , , 
Vernünftige Gedanken von Gott, der Welt und der Wöllner, Johann Christoph, , –
Seele des Menschen, auch allen Dingen Wundt, Max, , , 
überhaupt, ; Vernünftige Gedanken von der
menschen Tun und Lassen zu Beförderung ihrer Zurbuchen, Simone, , 
    

Edited by Q S  (General Editor)

L    D , D  R   ,
and J    T   

    , . .  , and      

(eds.)
Philosophy in History
Essays in the historiography of philosophy
pb:    
 . .  .   
Virtue, Commerce and History
Essays on political thought and history, chiefly in the eighteenth century
pb:    
 .  .   
Private Vices, Public Benefits
Bernard Mandeville’s social and political thought
hb:    
   (ed.)
The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe
pb:    
   
The Judgment of Sense
Renaissance nationalism and the rise of aesthetics
pb:    
    
Hegel: Religion, Economics and the Politics of Spirit, –
pb:    
  
Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order
hb:    
     
Gassendi the Atomist
Advocate of history in an age of science
hb:    
       (ed.)
Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe
hb:    
  
Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology
pb:    
     ,   , and      .     (eds.)
Political Innovation and Conceptual Change
pb:    
      et al.
The Empire of Chance
How probability changed science and everyday life
pb:    x
  
That Noble Dream
The ‘objectivity question’ and the American historical profession
pb:    
      
The Province of Legislation Determined
Legal theory in eighteenth-century Britain
hb:    
        
Faces of Degeneration
A European disorder, c. –c. 
pb:    x
     
Inventing the French Revolution
Essays on French political culture in the eighteenth century
pb:    
  
The Taming of Chance
pb:    
     ,       , and  
(eds.)
Machiavelli and Republicanism
pb:    
    
The Origins of American Social Science
pb:    x
       
The Rise of Neo-Kantianism
German Academic Philosophy between Idealism and Positivism
hb:    
         
Interpretation and Meaning in the Renaissance
The Case of Law
hb:    
  
From Politics to Reason of State
The Acquisition and Transformation of the Language of Politics –
hb:    
      
The Political Thought of the Dutch Revolt –
hb:    
     and        (eds.)
Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain
hb:    x
    
An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts
pb:    
     
Philosophy and Government –
pb:    
   .  
Defining Science
William Whewell, Natural Knowledge and Public Debate in Early Victorian
Britain
hb:    
      
The Court Artist
The Ancestry of the Modern Artist
hb:    
  . 
Defining the Common Good
Empire, Religion and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain
hb:    
           .    
The Idea of Luxury
A Conceptual and Historical Investigation
pb:    
 . . 
The Enlightenment’s ‘Fable’
Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society
hb:    
   
Englishness and the Study of Politics
The Social and Political Thought of Ernest Barker
hb:    
     
Strategies of Economic Order
German Economic Discourse, –
hb:    
      
The Transformation of Natural Philosophy
The Case of Philip Melancthon
hb:    
   ,     , and      
(eds.)
Milton and Republicanism
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  
Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought –
hb:    
      
The Social and Political Thought of Bertrand Russell
The Development of an Aristocratic Liberalism
hb:    
    ,        ,     , and     
.   
Otto Neurath: Philosophy between Science and Politics
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      
Riches and Poverty
An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, –
pb:    
       
A History of Sociological Research Methods in America
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      (ed.)
Enlightenment and Religion
Rational Dissent in Eighteenth-Century Britain
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 . .  .   
Adversaries and Authorities
Investigations into Ancient Greek and Chinese Science
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     
The Reportage of Urban Culture
Robert Park and the Chicago School
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    
Liberty, Right and Nature
Individual Rights in Later Scholastic Thought
hb:    
   .    (ed.)
William Robertson and the Expansion of Empire
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             
Rousseau and Geneva
From the First Discourse to the Social Contract, –
hb:    
          
Pluralism and the Personality of the State
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      
Early Modern Liberalism
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            
Equal Freedom and Utility
Herbert Spencer’s Liberal Utilitarianism
hb:    
      and     (eds.)
Pedagogy and Power
Rhetorics of Classical Learning
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        
The Shaping of Deduction in Greek Mathematics
A Study in Cognitive History
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     and         (eds.)
Models as Mediators
pb:    
      
Measurement in Psychology
A Critical History of a Methodological Concept
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   .  
The American Language of Rights
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            
The Development of Durkheim’s Social Realism
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   
Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I
Queen and Commonwealth –
hb:    
       (ed.)
Renaissance Civic Humanism
Reappraisals and Reflections
hb:    
 . .      
Natural Law Theories in the Early Enlightenment
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   
The Ideological Origins of the British Empire
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   
Rival Enlightenments
Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany
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