Kirstin Bunge: Gleichheit und Gleichmaß. Equality and Equitability

On the threshold of the Middle Ages and the modern era, there was a revolutionary idea: The claim that all human beings have rights is regarded as the normative basic idea of modernity. Kirstin Bunge analyses Francisco de Vitoria’s (1483–1546) philosophy of law which ambiguously oscillates between subjective rights and natural law. Based on the terms of dominium and aequalitas, she reconstructs an impressive conceptual network as the basis of subjective rights and systematically defines Vitoria’s relationship between law and liberty, equality and justice, common and private property, war and peace. Kirstin Bunge thereby convincingly demonstrates the constitutive complexity and the challenges of the modern philosophy of law in the work of Vitoria.