Jean Barbeyrac

Jean Barbeyrac (* March 15, 1674 in Beziers, France, † March 3, 1744 in Groningen, The Netherlands ) was a French-Swiss jurist, law historian and prominent representative of natural law and the western Swiss Natural Law School ( Ecole Romande du droit naturel ). He became known through the translations of the natural law writings of Samuel Pufendorf.

Life

Barbeyrac Jean was born on March 15, 1674 in Beziers in Lower Languedoc, and was the nephew of Charles Barbeyrac, a famous doctor from Montpellier. He came from a Calvinist Huguenot family, and therefore fled to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV in 1685 with his family in the Protestant Lausanne in Switzerland. There he took up the study of Law, where he attended the lectures of the philosopher and mathematician Jean -Pierre de Crousaz. She then studied abroad in Geneva at the Académie de Genève and at the Viadrina in Frankfurt an der Oder. Finally he got a reputation as a professor of history and civil law at the Académie de Lausanne and was later, after he had accepted a call as professor of constitutional law at the University of Groningen, settled in Groningen in the Netherlands, where on March 3 he 1744 died.

To his notoriety Barbeyrac was probably mainly due to the introduction and notes to his French translation of the treatise of the German natural law philosophers Samuel von Pufendorf, " De Jure Naturae et Gentium " ( 1706). In basic principles he followed with his views to the views of John Locke and Pufendorf. However, he also developed his own theories of moral obligation, which he referred to the bid or the will of God. His theories have been perfected as to the legal and moral quality of the actions of Christian Thomasius and Immanuel Kant. Principles of international law, he reduced to those of natural law and disagrees with many positions of the Dutch philosopher Hugo Grotius. He pointed back the view that sovereignty in all respects the same ownership, and saw the marriage as a mere matter of civil contract.

Furthermore translated Barbeyrac the work " De Jure Belli et Pacis " of Hugo Grotius, " De Legibus Naturae ' of the English philosopher Richard Cumberland and Pufendorf's smaller treatise " De Officio Hominis et Civis. " My works were a treatise, " De la morale des peres ", a presentation of historical treaties, which were included in the " Supplement au grand corps diplomatique " and the failed treatise " Traite du jeu " (1709 ), in which he defended the morality of gambling.