Bücher von Dr Patrick (University of Wisconsin Madison) Riley

For the first time Leibniz' political, moral, and legal thought are extensively discussed here in English. The text includes fragments of his work that have never before been translated. Riley shows that a justice based on both wisdom and love, "wise charity", has at least as much claim to be taken seriously as the familiar contractarian ideas of Hobbes and Locke. For Leibniz, nothing is more important than benevolence toward others, which he famously equates with justice and which he insists is morally crucial. Because Leibniz was the greatest Platonist of early modernity, Riley argues, his version of Platonic idealism serves as the bridge from Plato himself to the greatest modern "critical" idealist, Kant. With Leibniz' Universal Jurisprudence we now have a fuller picture of one of the greatest general thinkers of the seventeenth century.

At the heart of representative government is the question: "What makes government and its agents legitimate authorities?" The notion of consent to a social contract between the citizen and his government is central to this problem. What are the functions of public authority? What are the people's rights in a self-governing and representative state? Patrick Riley presents a comprehensive historical analysis of the meaning of contract theory and a testing of the inherent validity of the ideas of consent and obligation. He uncovers the critical relationship between the act of willing and that of consenting in self-government and shows how "will" relates to political legitimacy. His is the first large-scale study of social contract theory from Hobbes to Rawls that gives "will" the central place it occupies in contractarian thinking.