Natural Law and Natural Rights in Early Enlightenment Copenhagen

This chapter discusses the earliest teaching of post-grotian natural law by Henrik Weghorst and Christian Reitzer in Copenhagen in the decades around 1700. This teaching has often been presented as merely derivative of the ideas of Hugo Grotius or Samuel Pufendorf. In contrast, this chapter argues that Weghorst and Reitzer developed two very different, and antagonistic, forms of natural law, reflecting academic teaching in Kiel and in Halle. However, it also shows how Weghorst and Reitzer illustrate the common ground of much Lutheran natural law theorising in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Thus, for all their differences, both gave primacy to natural law and focused on duties, rather than rights, as constitutive of social and political life.