William F Drischler

G.W. Leibniz. Double Revolution and Praefatio William F Drischler

The burgeoning literature on the political and legal philosophy of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) is reviewed in William F. Drischler's G. W. Leibniz. Double Revolution and Praefatio, sequel to his Leibniz contra Westphalia of 2015. Leading the way in recent Leibniz studies are the respective German-language collections edited by Friedrich Beiderbeck, Irene Dingel and Wenchao Li (January 2015) and Peter Nitschke (available in March 2015), both of which provide information on Leibniz 'Praefatio' to his 'Codex Diplomaticus' of 1693, said 'Praefatio' serving as a Foreword to an ambitiously broad collections of treaties and other documents dating back the better part of a millenium of European legal history. Drischler's revisionist "double revolutionary" interpretation of Leibniz political and legal agenda categorizes the Hanoverian philosopher as an "Utrecht Kipjakicizer," referring both to the 1713 Utrecht NOMOS (global legal spatial order) revolution described by Carl Schmitt in 1950 and the consolidation of the Kipjak Khanate of the Mongols of the Golden Horde in Russia (1260-1480), i.e., the institutional form of the Tartar Yoke in Russia described by Karl A. Wittfogel in 1957, this latter the model for the integration of Russian despotic practices into Europe during the era of Leibniz confederate Peter the Great. The unprecedented character of the Eurasian structure generated in 1713 by parties such as Leibniz colleague Eugene of Savoy and Leibniz correspondent Nicolaas Witsen of Amsterdam meant the new legal actors facilitated by the ILP (International Legal Personality) concept of the 'Praefatio' couldn't possibly be the German princes sometimes mentioned as the ultimate beneficiaries of ILP, but rather had to be those serving the new Blenheim-Utrecht network stretching from Muscovy to Amsterdam to London. Leibniz' most influential metaphysics statement - the 'Monadology' - is to be contextualized in the 1713 year of double revolution in which it was conceived. The radical implications of what Carl Schmitt termed the 'caesura' of 1713 means conventional commentaries stressing continuity of Leibniz' political and legal concerns from the 1670s to the philosopher's expiry in 1716 will have to be subjected to revision.