Natural Law and Enlightenment. Universities in East-Central Europe

The international conference Natural Law and Enlightenment. Universities in East-Central Europe, organised by the University of South Bohemia and the Institute of History of the Czech Academy of Sciences, will be held on 19 and 20 September at the Czech Academy of Sciences (Národní 1009/3, Prague). 

Programme    Poster

Following up the workshop on Eastern Europe that the Network Natural Law 1625–1850 organized in 2019 in Erfurt, the present conference will focus on the era of Enlightenment reforms in the 18th century. It was during this era that the reforming monarchies and the Rzeczpospolita institutionalized natural law at universities and then utilized this discipline in a wide range of legislative measures. Even in East-Central Europe, we can observe the same progress from an academic discipline to practical legislation. As Knud Haakonssen recently put it: ‘In sum, early modern natural law was first of all an academic discipline institutionalized for political reasons to discharge social, juridical and political functions.’ (Knud Haakonssen, Cambridge Companion to Natural Law Jurisprudence, p. 79). The workshop will focus on the institutionalization of natural law and related disciplines at institutes of higher education, it will explore the role of natural law in the drafting of first systematic legal codes and finally on the way natural law arguments were used in the discourse justifying the Enlightenment reforms. Our focus will cover the Habsburg monarchy, the Rzeczpospolita and the present-day Ukraine.