Bibliographic record
Abstract
Even though the idea that there was a one-way secularization of natural law in 17th century has been abandoned, it is still possible to speak about an unintentional long-term secularization of legal thought. This is the position advanced recently by Knud Haakonssen. I argue here that this approach also requires a focus on specific classical works that had „secularizing effects“. The matter may be complicated by changes that a classical work underwent in re-editions during the author’s lifetime, or by reinterpretations of a classical work itself that may reveal previously unknown religious undertones. On the other hand, contextual or clandestine texts by the author should not be regarded as relevant, but merely as other religious interests displayed by the author during his lifetime. This review article surveys current valid secularization theories, and then focuses on the recent volume Sacred Polities, edited by Hans W. Blom (2022). It raises a new question about the parallel „Hebraist natural law“ which existed side by side with the post-Grotian „secular natural law“. Petrus Cunaeus’s De republica Hebraeorum of 1617, which coined the term „theocracy“, is especially important. The chapters on Humanist natural law before Grotius show that the Danish Lutheran Hemmingsen had used a deductive method long before Pufendorf and Wolff. Recent research on Catholic natural law has underlined that the Catholics made a significant contribution in their optimistic conception of rational human nature. This is partly reflected in Blom’s volume, which also explains why the Neapolitan school of natural law was interested in Grotius’s conception. Finally, the chapters on Pufendorf demarcate the limits of human agency vis-à-vis divine voluntarism, and then in terms of political coercion in matters of religion. New research has established that Pufendorf rejected coercion only in fundamental matters of revealed religion, but admitted the use of force in uncertain religious issues. It has also been proved that Pufendorf ’s natural law was not backed by God arbitrarily, but within the framework of a „hypothetical necessity“.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".