IT IS WIDELY AGREED that in the course of the seventeenth century there took place an extensive re-casting of some of the most fundamental assumptions with respect to the nature of law that had come down from classical antiquity and had been incorporated into the principal philosophies of law of the High Middle Ages. What is not always so clearly understood is the fact that this change was effected as an internal transformation of the theory of natural law and that the writers whose names are most closely associated with this change---Grotius, Pufendorf, and others--were merely the most illustrious representatives of a flourishing school of natural law jurisprudence that dominated political and legal thought in Western Europe down to the end of the eighteenth century. Some commentators have suggested the special character of this modern theory of natural law by describing it as essentially a doctrine of natural rights. Others have argued that the crucial innovation that inspired that theory was a shift from a substantive to a formal interpretation of the norms on which the positive law depends for its moral validity. Such characterizations undoubtedly contain much that is both true and important and yet it must be admitted that they do not by themselves afford much insight into the properly philosophical motives that led to the change they summarize. Too often the explanations offered are more sociological or political than philosophical and relate the distinctive features of modern natural law theory to the preoccupations of some special interest group that needed a theory of law tailored to its own aspirations. This is unfortunate to the extent that it blocks an understanding of the genuine and unavoidable theoretical issues which the older, medieval theory of natural law posed for its continuators in the early modern period as well as of the reasoning by which the latter were led to re-formulate that theory in their own distinctive way. In this paper I propose to reconstruct some of the considerations that led to the reinterpretation of natural law as a set of formal or procedural directives and for this purpose I propose to use as my guide the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. This choice may occasion some surprise. There is a long tradition that attributes to Hobbes the view--also imputed, rightly or wrongly, to Machiavelli before him and later to the legal positivists from Austin onward--that the state and its laws are subject to no moral controls at all; and if this imputation were well-founded, then ttobbes would indeed have to be classified with those writers


This article proposes a comparison of the novels of Mary Redonnet ( Candy Story and Nevermore ) and Yves Ravey ( Moteur , Enlevement avec ranco n, L'Epave  and Un notaire peu ordinaire ). These novels are constructed around an enigma, resulting in a retrospective style that moves towards the unveiling of the past. This style hearkens back to the creation, in the 1980s, of a literary interest in returning to the heritage and norms of the novel as a genre, notably through the use of intertextuality. Nonetheless, these two authors have an almost conflicted relationship with the canon, as demonstrated by the highly ludic aspect of their work. Using the guise of the detective novel and by exploiting its forms (the investigation, strategies for creating rising and falling action), they express a certain mistrust of discourse, and leave the reader disconcerted by descriptions of viloence that have an impact not only on the plot but on the act of reading itself.