Sovereignty and Resistance: The Development of the Right of Resistance in German Natural Law

  • Frank Grunert
Chapter

Abstract

In the sixteenth century, Jean Bodin developed the idea that only a person who recognises no one but God as a higher authority can be a sovereign.1 On the one hand, he is then authorised to enact and repeal laws entirely independently; that is, without the intervention of any third party; on the other hand, he is not subject to his own laws. This model assumes that all power in the state is monopolised, and it abolishes the diversity of mutualist power relations characteristic of the Middle Ages.2 It also destroys the basis of the legal status which the subject had in the mediaeval network of power and which culminated in a right of resistance. A power monopoly is systematically incompatible with a right of resistance; that is, with a right to call the power monopoly into question. As Wolfgang Kersting notes in his analysis of Kant’s theory of resistance, ‘a right of resistance codified in positive law would amount to the self-dissolution of the state’.3

Keywords

Power Monopoly Late Eighteenth Century Constitutional State German Natural General Prohibition 
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Notes

  1. 2.
    Cf. J. Bodin, Sechs Bücher über den Staat, books I–III, trans. by B. Wimmer, ed. P.C. Mayer-Tasch (Munich, 1981), p. 75.Google Scholar
  2. On Bodin, see the detailed study: H. Quaritsch, Staat und Souveränität, vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main 1970),Google Scholar
  3. as well as the brief presentation in P. Nitschke, Einführung in die politische Theorie der Prämoderne 1500–1800 (Darmstadt, 2000), pp. 27–34.Google Scholar
  4. 3.
    W. Kersting, Wohlgeordnete Freiheit: Immanuel Kants Rechts- und Staatsphilosophie (Frankfurt am Main, 1993), p. 468.Google Scholar
  5. 4.
    M. J. Seidler, ‘“Turkish Judgment” and the English Revolution: Pufendorf and the Right of Resistance’, in F. Palladini and G. Hartung (eds), Samuel Pufendorf und die europäische Frühaufklärung (Berlin, 1996), p. 87.Google Scholar
  6. 19.
    K. Wolzendorff, Staatsrecht und Naturrecht, in der Lehre vom Widerstand des Volkes gegen rechtswidrige Ausübung der Staatsgewalt (Breslau, 1916; repr. Aalen, 1961), p. 249.Google Scholar
  7. 22.
    C. Link, Hugo Grotius als Staatsdenker (Tübingen, 1983), p. 31.Google Scholar
  8. 24.
    Cf. F. Grunert, Normbegründung und politische Legitimität (Tübingen, 2000), pp. 116 ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  9. 31.
    Cf. also T. Behme, Samuel von Pufendorf: Naturrecht und Staat (Göttingen, 1995), p. 157.Google Scholar
  10. 34.
    Cf. C. Link, Herrschaftsordnung und bürgerliche Freiheit (Wien, Köln, 1979). p. 193; idem, ‘Jus resistendi — Zum Widerstandsrecht im deutschen Staatsdenken’, in Convivium utriusque. Alexander Dordett zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. A. Scheuermann, R. Weiler and G. Winkler (Wien, 1976), pp. 55ff.Google Scholar
  11. 38.
    C. Thomasius, Kurtze Lehr-Sätze, § 26. On the relationship between religion and state, cf. P. Schröder, Christian Thomasius zur Einführung (Hamburg, 1999), pp. 109–34; as well as Chapter 5 (‘Thomasius and the desacralisation of politics’) in the comprehensive study by I. Hunter, Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 197–265.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2002

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  • Frank Grunert

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