This chapter draws upon the normative resources of political community to construct an account of the 'antecedents' of statehood: the factual prerequisites that nascent entities characteristically must demonstrate in order to mount a plausible statehood claim. These antecedents, which will be familiar to doctrinal lawyers from sources such as the 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, are: a permanent population, a relatively determinate territory, an 'effective' government, and some degree of governmental independence. In addition to grounding each antecedent within both historical and contemporary practice, this chapter demonstrates their coherence with the ethical value of politics, thereby reconstructing these elements of international law into a normatively coherent whole. Several aspects of this reconstruction will strike readers familiar with state creation as controversial. In particular, I advance a novel conception of governmental 'effectiveness' that turns upon the capacity of nascent states to facilitate ethically valuable political action.

This conclusion briefly summarises the argument of the book before considering its implications for two connected questions: the 'nature' or 'essence' of statehood under international law and the principle of state continuity. In relation to the latter, it advances a tentative additional principle for political membership that might be taken to explain the presumption of continuity as it applies to contemporary states. It also considers, albeit briefly, the current position of small island states, many of which are at risk of losing their inhabitable land due to human-caused climate change. As regards the nature or essence of statehood, the conclusion takes a somewhat sceptical view of attempts to characterise states in relation to one or more discrete concepts, arguing that not even statehood as political community should be viewed as an exhaustive account of what states 'really' are.

The category of ‘human rights law’ is sometimes limited to bills and charters of rights on the model of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and to the case law of courts interpreting and applying these legal measures. This chapter argues that the measures that realise human rights in the law are the everyday, unremarkable measures that make up the full corpus of legal materials directing what may, must, and must not be done. The argument explores how all sound positive law finds its source in the human goods through one of two modes of derivation: deduction or specification. These are the same two modes of positive law’s derivation from natural law, for the reach of human rights law is more or less coextensive with the reach of positive law and the human goods from which are derived human rights law are the same human goods from which are derived natural law’s practical principles and precepts.

This chapter argues that an adequate account of group rights requires an embedded understanding of moral duties and rights within the context of common action for a common good. Drawing from Alasdair MacIntyre, I explain why group agency for a common good, through various social practices, grounds a framework of natural justice with correlative duties and rights, including various group moral rights. This account of natural justice is completed by an appeal to the common agency of an institutionalised political community for a political common good. I argue that human rights are a subset of moral rights, which ‘cry out’ as a matter of justice for political enforcement or realisation, whether against violations of fundamental natural law precepts or dereliction of core political responsibilities. These include group rights where the protected aspects of personal human flourishing are pursued through the common action of groups, such as families, trade unions, religious communities, and political communities. Moreover, group rights are essential to human rights – human rights presuppose the group moral right of political authority to administer justice for the common good.

The Philosophy of Freedom from Rousseau to Heidegger was not content with modern liberal individualism and materialism, but longed for a noble politics, and this longing for wholeness, while giving rise to brilliant cultural achievements, also fueled the catastrophes of violent revolution, tyranny and genocide on the far Left and Right from the French Revolution down to the present.

This chapter traces a rising national consciousness in English law and legal institutions, focusing on the implications of this for the broader shift from medieval privileges to modern intellectual property. The shift is presented through a narrative highlighting the roots of Parliament in the legal principles and transcendent appeals established in the wake of thirteenth century baronial revolts. We see the impacts of this nationalizing legal revolution in the thought-world of the great monastic chroniclers at the Benedictine abbey of St. Albans. And we see the historical legacy of this nationalizing legal revolution in the rise of statutory supremacy and positive legality. These interrelated developments occurred through processes of semantic legal ordering, in which Parliament appropriated traditional rights of prerogative kingship and the church, establishing itself as the guardian of property owned by an increasingly-vocal class of subjects invested (materially and spiritually) in the Protestant Reformation. Two statutory foundations for modern intellectual property resulted from these complex developments: the Statute of Monopolies (1624) and the Statute of Anne (1710).

Chapter Six analyses the De Justa Reipublicae Christianae Authoritate (1590) of the pseudonymous ‘Guiliemus Rossaeus’ to demonstrate how a deep analysis of the relationship between natural and divine law, in scholastic terms, was used to justify the deposition and assassination of Henri III. Rossaeus' rich engagement with Jesuit and Dominican casuistry, and the Thomist commentary tradition, made his rejection of heretic tyranny a question of individual conscience as well as of French heresy laws. This demonstrates that Leaguer analyses of papal power at this academic level were not simply a recapitulation of medieval ecclesiological debates but offered a fresh synthesis of the Thomist sources. Such theories were as much a contribution to European Catholic political-theological debate as they were an immediate polemical response to Henri III’s perceived tyranny.

This chapter explores the political aspect of the legal metaphors. The main question is how epistemic authority can be both individual and shared. The key metaphors in this chapter are the political community and the distinction between valid laws and arbitrary decrees. To understand this relationship, Møller considers the way we can conceive of the thinking self as a critical authority. On the political nature of pure reason, Onora O’Neill has provided a groundbreaking analysis, which Møller discusses in detail. The thought-provoking accounts of the legal structure of reason by Susan Meld Shell and Friedrich Kaulbach are also considered. Building on this discussion, Møller shows that the lawful nature of reason is a presupposition of its political use in debates and an enlightened community.

Having concentrated in the previous chapter on the foundation of Bodin’s political thought, in this chapter we turn to more specific questions regarding the relationship of politics and oeconomics and their relationship to ethics, and so reconstruct what Bodin was doing with the classical tripartite scheme of active philosophy. We will look closely at the difference between family and state and examine aspects of nature and necessity in Bodin’s thought. Far more than any other thinker, Bodin devoted considerable space to analysing the merits of the natural and the care for daily necessities for the political life. An analysis of Bodin’s understanding of wealth and of the relationship of private and public property leads to an examination of his notion of equality and to his notion of citizenship. Crucial for Bodin’s thought, these topics have not found much attention in scholarship. They are, however, most important for understanding who and what was included in and excluded from Bodin’s Renaissance commonwealth.