Somos & Peters, eds., "The State of Nature: Histories of an Idea"

Brill has published The State of Nature: Histories of an Idea, edited by Mark Somos (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) and Anne Peters (Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law). A description from the Press:

The phrase, “state of nature”, has been used over centuries to describe the uncultivated state of lands and animals, nudity, innocence, heaven and hell, interstate relations, and the locus of pre- and supra-political rights, such as the right to resistance, to property, to create and leave polities, and the freedom of religion, speech, and opinion, which may be reactivated or reprioritised when the polity and its laws fail. Combining intellectual history with current concerns, this volume brings together fourteen essays on the past, present and possible future applications of the legal fiction known as the state of nature. 

The Table of Contents:

Introduction
   Mark Somos and Anne Peters

1 Thucydides, Hobbes, and the Melian Dialogue
   Benjamin Straumann

2 Missing Terms in English Geographical Thinking, 1550–1600
   Mary C. Fuller

3 Do Shepherds Live in a State of Nature? From Peculium to Civilization
   Francesca Iurlaro

4 After Vitoria Natural Law and the Spanish Ideology of Empire
   Daniel S. Allemann

5 Fleeing “ Polyphemus’s Den” Locke’s State of Nature as Sanctuary
   Ioannis Evrigenis

6 Invisible People The State of Nature in Hugo Grotius’ Account of Global Legal Order
   Emile Simpson

7 From the State of Nature to the State of Economy Pufendorf on Commerce and Natural    Law
   David Singh Grewal

8 The State of Nature, the Family and the State
   Simone Zurbuchen

9 Written in the Hearts of People? Natural and International Law during the Age of Enlightenment
   Edward J. Kolla

10 From Natural Equality to Frankpledge The State of Nature, Ancient Constitutionalism, and the Rupture of the Social Contract in Eighteenth-Century Antislavery Writings
   Sarah Winter

11 From the State of Nature to the Natural State Transforming the Foundations of Science and Civil Progress in Eighteenth-Century British Political Thought
   Pamela Edwards

12 Their Own State(s) of Nature The Enlightenment Social Imaginary and the Invention of Hungarian Ethnic Origins
   László Kontler

13 The Place of the Environment in State of Nature Discourses Reassessing Nature, Property and Sovereignty in the Anthropocene
   Tom Sparks

14 The State of Nature, Prehistory, and Mythmaking
   Karl Widerquist and Grant S. McCall

More information is available here. 

H/t New Books Network.

-- Karen Tani