Volume 6 (2020), Edition 4

This article serves as an introduction to this special issue on Gottfried Achenwall (1719-1772). Section I briefly sketches Achenwall’s intellectual biography, outlines the disciplines he taught at Göttingen and closes by highlighting the...

Abstract The Elementa Iuris Naturae of G. Achenwall have been one of the most common and most successful textbooks of natural law at German universities in the 18th century, not­withstanding its lack of originality concerning the foundation of...

Achenwall’s textbook on ‘ius naturae’, first published in 1750 and subsequently often reprinted, was certainly one of the most powerful lecture-compendia in the second half of the 18th century in Germany, not at least because of its momentous...

In the first edition of his textbook on Natural Law (1750), Achenwall advocates a theory of obligation which reveals that he was a Wolffian before he came from Halle via Marburg to Göttingen in 1748: Obligation is essentially the connection of a...

Kant famously distinguished between an internal and an external relationship between humans and he limited law to the external relationship. However, this distinc­tion and limitation was not invented by Kant but the outcome of a long development of...

The doctrine of imputation is at the centre of Gottfried Achenwall’s theory of natural law. Together with obligation (obligatio), imputation (imputatio) is, according to Ach­enwall, one of the two basic forces of a law. In contrast to Samuel von...

In § 116 of Achenwall/Pütter Elementa Iuris Naturae the following possibilities of conflicts of duties are listed: “There can be a conflict 1. of prohibiting laws with each other, 2. of prescribing laws with each other, 3. of prescribing laws...