Origen y desarrollo de la concepción del derecho de gentes en Kant. Reflexiones en torno a la Vorlesung Naturrecht Feyerabend y a los Elementa Iuris Naturae de Gottfried Achenwall

My aim in this paper is to examine the genesis and development of the notion of law of peoples (ius gentium) in Kant’s thought. For that purpose, I reconstruct first the main tenets of Gottfried Achenwall’s thought in his work Elementa Iuris Naturae. In a next step, I analyze Kant’s 1784 Feyerabend Lecture on Natural Right in which he exposes but also engages in a very critical way –without having yet his own full-blown legal theory– with many of Achenwall’s theses regarding the law of peoples and, in particular, with what Achenwall has to say regarding the ius belli. Finally, in the last part of this paper, I aim to show that many of Kant’s ideas in his mature works on legal and political philosophy of the 1790s can be traced back to the lecture he delivered based on Achenwall’s treatise on natural law, and are much better understood under that light. In the end, I establish that both the continuities and ruptures between Achenwall and Kant disclose a profound bond between the two authors, which is susceptible of being further studied.