Esclarecimento e absolutismo. As aporias do direito natural de Christian Thomasius

Abstract

The paper aims at presenting the tension between two constituent elements of the political philosophy of German Aufklärung which are presented in an author who is crucial to the period, namely Christian Thomasius (1655-1728). This tension can be formulated as follow: on the one hand the claim to, without the assistance of the theology, ground the law and the political community on the mere authority of human reason not through the revealed law, but instead through a natural law accessible to every rational being, that is, a secular natural law based on the rational nature of every man; and on the other hand the unrestricted submission to the enlightened sovereign, whose authority is absolute and analogous to God’s, that is, a political form of domination traditionally known as enlightened absolutism. This aporia or even contradiction arises in Thomasius, but in a way or another permeates all political theory of German Aufklärung, as for instance in Wolff and above all Kant.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.21747/21836892/fil33a18