1
“The Idea of a Human Right to Sexual Satisfaction:
Reactions to K. F. Bahrdt”
Prepared for delivery at the Political Theory Colloquium at
U.C. San Diego, November 3, 2009.
John Christian Laursen
Department of Political Science
University of California
900 University Avenue
Riverside, CA 92521
johnl@ucr.edu
951 8276390
John Christian Laursen is Professor of Political Science at
the University of California, Riverside. He is the author
of dozens of articles and, recently, co-editor of
Monarchisms in the Age of Enlightenment: Liberty,
Patriotism, and the Common Good (University of Toronto
Press, 2007) and Denis Veiras’s The History of the
Sevarambians (Sate University of New York Press, 2006).
2
It is not widely known that a book came out in 1792 in
German demanding a right to sexual satisfaction as a human
right. Along with rights to life, nourishment, common goods
such as air and the public streets, and other things, Carl
Friedrich Bahrdt’s Rights and Duties of Rulers and Subjects
called for just such a right.1 Society is guilty of a crime
against God if it denies this right, he asserted.
I am a political theorist or historian of political
thought, and I naively thought that the story of Bahrdt’s
right would be of interest to people in the human rights
community. As a “coda” to this essay, I report on the
negative reactions of three human rights journals. They
were such a surprise to me that they have provoked some
thought about the mind-set of the human rights community
which I will also share with you. Maybe you can help me
figure out why the history of this particular political
idea has been received with such disdain.
One would think that such a right would be the topic
of a large scholarly literature, especially in the subfield of human rights studies. Yet Lynn Hunt’s recent
Inventing Human Rights: A History does not know anything
about Bahrdt, nor does it mention this particular human
right.2 Micheline Ishay’s collection of human rights texts
and her recent monograph do not mention it.3 It is almost
3
too easy to compile a list of books on and surveys of the
various declarations of human rights that do not mention
Bahrdt or a human right to sexual satisfaction.4 Yet it does
not seem too controversial to count among the preliminary
desiderata of any field of scholarship that it get its
history right. Here we have a declaration of a human right
from more than two centuries ago, and almost no recognition
of the right in the literature.
Bahrdt’s right is a right that might deserve attention
in contemporary times. In 1996 Isabel Hull wrote that
“today” there is “an ideology proclaiming it [sexual
fulfillment] a basic human right and a sign of personhood”.5
When Kwame Anthony Appiah sets out to provide a list of
“basic human rights” in 2006, he started with “certain
options they ought to have: to seek sexual satisfaction
with consenting partners”.6 In case it is thought that a
right to sexual satisfaction might be frivolous, unworthy
of inclusion among the more serious human rights, it should
be noted that this is the umbrella right that would justify
a right to divorce and decriminalization of various
victimless sexual activities. It might be more valuable to
more people than the right to vote or freedom of the press.
But it is not mentioned in the UN Declaration of Human
Rights (1948). The closest that document gets to defending
4
anything like it is quite indirect. Article 12 provides
that “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference
with his privacy, family, home or correspondence”. Article
16 provides that “Men and women of full age… have the right
to marry and to found a family”. Article 25 provides that
“All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall
enjoy the same social protection”, which may be understood
as an indirect protection of sexual satisfaction simply by
removing one of the barriers to it.7 Other 20th-century
declarations prohibit sexual discrimination against women
and homosexuals, along with other abuses, but there is no
open declaration or discussion of a right to sexual
satisfaction for women or for men.8 Have the Puritans, the
prudes, and religious opposition to such things as divorce,
homosexuality, sexuality outside of marriage, and so forth
thoroughly dominated the human rights community? We shall
return to some possible explanations below.
How and why did a German writer of the late eighteenth
century demand this right, and why has it been forgotten?
Bahrdt’s right to sexual satisfaction was not widely
recognized in his day. Because of the difficulties of
proving negatives, it probably cannot be claimed that he
was the first to call for this right as a human right. But
regardless of whether he was the first or only one of the
5
first, Bahrdt’s claim raises any number of interesting
questions. The first of these is, why Bahrdt? Why did a
marginalized and scandalous figure, trained in theology and
philosophy but making a very modest living as a writer and
innkeeper at the time, come up with this right before the
establishment lawyers, doctors, political scientists, and
philosophers in the German academy? Of course, one
interpretation of Bahrdt’s human right to sexual
satisfaction is that it was an invitation to corruption and
sin. If it was, Bahrdt at least deserves credit for
innovation in human rights theory.
Does it really matter what the professional training
and interests of an innovator are? Or is it a matter of
personal experience? It turns out that Bahrdt had a lot of
trouble throughout his life in satisfying his own sexual
drive. Could it be that personal factors are most likely to
determine who is going to be an innovator in human rights
circles today?
Bahrdt’s Right
Let us start with the text. Bahrdt called for a human
right to sexual satisfaction in a book which came out the
year he died. To give it its full title, Rights and Duties
6
of Rulers and Subjects in Relation to the State and
Religion was published as volume three of Bahrdt’s System
of Moral Religion for the Final Calming of Doubters and
Thinkers, Readable by all Christians and Non-Christians,
the first two volumes of which had come out in 1787. It was
published at Riga by Kant’s publisher, Johann Friedrich
Hartknoch. In the preface, he observed that “I speak here
as a philosopher, and not as a statistician
[Statistiker]... I am no Schlözer, nor a Mirabeau. I am –
Bahrdt”. We learn three things here: that he considered
himself a philosopher; that he distinguished himself from
August Ludwig von Schlözer and Statistik; and that he knew
that many readers would recognize the name “Bahrdt”. Later
scholarship referred to him as “the notorious Dr. Bahrdt”,
and we shall see why.
Bahrdt also added in the preface that he was living
“in times and in a state where the candid and thereby
decisive faith of subjective truth is not hemmed in by any
laws”. This from a man who had just spent over a year in
prison as a result of a ribald satire of Prussian Prime
Minister Woellner, the play The Edict of Religion (1788).9
In the first few pages of his text, Bahrdt establishes
that there never was such a thing as a state of nature, but
that all men have always been in society. This means that
7
we do not need to make a Hobbesian trade of our original
freedoms for security. Society is governed by rules, of
which the highest and most important are the “laws of
nature”, also known as the “laws of God”. They are “the
first, most important, holiest, and most irrevocable”. We
know them through the spirit of God, which is reason (5).
They are distinguished from positive laws which merely
represent free choices of men. The natural and godly laws
are grounded on two things: “first, their general
indispensability to the existence and welfare of people;
and second, on the common interests of the society” (6).
The principle is that “every person has a natural right
that God himself gave him to that for which all men have an
absolute and natural need, because God himself gave him the
power, drive, and object –because God himself as Creator of
nature made him with irresistible needs” (4-6).
Bahrdt goes on to say that “society” [die
Gesellschaft] is responsible for supplying these “rights of
mankind” [Rechte der Menscheit]. Then follow the rights.
The first is the right to be [Recht des Daseyns], or to
live (7). The next is the right to eat and drink, and here
we learn that society must supply food and drink to those
who do not have it and cannot otherwise get it (9). Then
there is the right to clothing, which society is bound to
8
provide, and to common goods such as air and the public
streets (10). The right to free activity [freyen
Thätigkeit] includes a right to free use of abilities and
talents and a right to “choose a useful job in society”
(11).
In this context we get to the right to satisfaction of
the sexual drive [Recht zur Befriedigung des
Geschlechtstriebes] (12). It is on the same grounds as the
previously mentioned rights, Bahrdt says, that the right to
satisfaction of the reproductive drive [Fortpflanzungstrieb] is based. Society is culpable if it hinders this
drive, “so long as satisfaction of it does not harm other
human and natural rights and freedoms, that is, so long as
he follows nature and satisfies his drives with the free
will of a person of the other sex, without harming public
morals [öffentliche Sittlichkeit]” (12).10 Bahrdt relies on
traditional Protestant Aristotelian teachings when he
insists that the Creator gave us this drive not only
minimally in order to reproduce the human race, but also
“by passionate love to tighten the bands of household
society between the loving couple and their children, and
thus to warm their concern for raising the children” (12).
From this, he concludes, “it is clear that every man
has the right to satisfy this drive through his own free
9
choice and with pleasure and enjoyment: and that thus
society is culpable if it obstructs this choice and this
pleasure” (12). It follows that “all positive laws which
punish the satisfaction of this drive and hinder this
pleasure... are unjust [Ungerecht] and contradict the
natural law” (13). To these belong, for example, the laws
that constrain “love and sexual intercourse” [Liebe und
Beischlaf] through “the indissolubility of the marriage
bond” (13). It need hardly be said that this last is not
the traditional Aristotelian teaching. Here it is clear
that the right of divorce is what is at stake.
Bahrdt’s book goes on to speak of a right to property,
a right to compete for honor, and a right to publicity
defined as a right to think and to speak freely (13-16).
Then he turns to the other side of the question, the rights
of society that must be respected by all individuals. There
is something in it for the sex drive, too, to respect the
rights of society, because “the isolated man cannot satisfy
his sexual drive without society” (17). If someone lives in
a society full of “unhealthy people [unter ungesunden
Menschen], the satisfaction of his sexual drive will make
him unhealthy, too, and cause the birth of unhealthy
children” (18). Thus, among other things, society can limit
10
the satisfaction of sexual needs in order to prevent the
spread of venereal disease (45).
Antecedents
In order to appreciate Bahrdt’s contribution to human
rights theory, we must sketch out the ideas of his
predecessors. There were at least three previous bodies of
attention to sexuality that may have provided the
intellectual background for Bahrdt’s right to sexual
satisfaction. One was the tradition of natural law. A
second was Protestant Christian understandings of sex as a
gift from God, designed to bring us together.11 This ranged
from Luther and Calvin, who defended sexual pleasure in
married life, to radical groups such as the Family of Love,
who called for sexual communalism. The third was
seventeenth and eighteenth century radical, libertine, and
Spinozist thought, ranging from the Levelers of the English
Civil War to the French libertines and Spinozist radicals.
Natural law
Bahrdt refers to his right to sexual satisfaction as a
right, drawing on the tradition of natural law. Yet natural
11
law theorists had not made an issue of sexual satisfaction.
A survey of a few key natural laws texts suggests that most
writers were concerned rather to regulate and curb this
appetite than to satisfy it. The shorter version of Samuel
Pufendorf’s De jure naturae et gentium (1672), his muchtranslated De officio hominis et civis [On the Duty of Man
and Citizen] (1673), which was widely used for the
education of young men, refers exactly once to sex, under
“Duties to oneself”. There the duty is of restraint and
moderation: “we must avoid gluttony, drunkenness, excessive
sex, and so on”.12 This attitude was not likely to lead him
to a positively-valued right to sexual satisfaction: he
seems to have thought that the danger was too much
satisfaction.
The major German figures in eighteenth century natural
law were Christian Thomasius and Christian Wolff.13 The
former of these developed an ethic of love as the driving
force in nature. The latter wrote a great deal about human
perfection, giving a positive spin on the development of
all of our faculties. Both of these authors expressed a
relatively positive attitude toward sexual pleasure, but
neither of them went as far as to make it a human right.
Hunt makes the point that most of the foregoing
natural rights thinkers might have benefited from their
12
marginal location vis-à-vis the dominant intellectual and
cultural centers of the day, which gave them a certain
independence which allowed for innovation in other
respects.14 Nevertheless, they did not innovate with respect
to sexual satisfaction. But perhaps the marginal location
of Bahrdt can help explain his innovation. He was not tied
to the group-think of the established centers and
institutions.
Natural law theory in German eventually developed into
what was known as Statistik, or political science. August
Ludwig von Schlözer was one of the pioneers in this field,
building on the theories of Johann Christian Claproth,
Herman Conring, and his teacher Gottfried Achenwall (whose
text on natural law was used by Kant for his lectures) in
order to develop the theory of the use of statistics in
political science.15 Although he started in the more
traditional vein of assuming individuals in a state of
nature, he also relied on the reproductive instinct to
explain the rise of small groups. But instincts do not
necessarily make rights and none of this needs to survive
the artificial creation of polities. Schlözer was
interested above all in administration and the statistics
that could make up history, not individuals. Following
13
Wolffian happiness theory, he argued for a kind of welfare
state, but under paternalistic management.
Schlözer edited several influential journals in his
time, so it is not surprising that he matched Bahrdt with a
claim for a human right to publicity or freedom of the
press.16 But his concern was always politics and group
rights, not individual rights. He evidently had little
conception of the idea that the personal or the sexual is
the political.
Finally, we may mention Theodor Gottlieb Hippel, who
came out with On Improving the Status of Women in the same
year that Bahrdt declared his right.17 Hippel sought to
establish and justify the human rights of women, but did
not include a right to sexual satisfaction among those
rights.
Protestant theology
Catholicism generally took a negative view of sexual
pleasure, but Luther and Calvin accepted the existence of a
universal sexual appetite as a sign of God’s goodness.18 Of
course, they wanted to channel it into marriage, and at
least one Reformer, Martin Bucer, came up with a universal
right to marriage. Later Protestant Christians like John
14
Milton argued for a right to divorce, disagreeing with
Bucer on the indissolubility of marriage, and maintained a
positive view of sexual pleasure, but did not come up with
a human right to sexual satisfaction. More radical
Protestants such as the Family of Love practiced (or at
least were accused of practicing) something closer to what
we might think of as “free love”, but they did not express
this as a human right.19 Although Bahrdt may have known
something of these minority traditions within Christianity,
he does not draw on them expressly to justify his right.
It is a somewhat neglected fact that the theologians
were among the foremost social reformers of the eighteenth
century. This was the profession you went into if you
wanted to serve a community by ministering to its hopes and
needs. Idealistic students who would now go into sociology
or social work went into theology faculties then. Bahrdt
surely belongs in this tradition of Christian social
activism.
We have a recent claim by Michael J. Perry that the
idea of human rights is ineliminably religious.20 He
examines the claims of Ronald Dworkin, Richard Rorty, and
many others to the effect that we can have a secular idea
of the sacredness of other people (to use Dworkin’s
language) that justifies attributing human rights to them.
15
But this is a misuse of language, he says. “Sacred” means
something connected to religion. Definitional moves and
appeals to long-term self-interest just do not convince
most people that they should respect others, says Perry. An
intellectual like Dworkin may think it is enough to claim
that every human being is “a creative masterpiece” to give
us a sense of our sacredness, but non-intellectuals (and
even many intellectuals) are not likely to go along with
that. Rorty thinks we can abandon “human rights
foundationalism” and still have human rights, but Perry
does not.
Whether this is true or not, Bahrdt did not hesitate
to use the language of theology and religion to promote his
right. Almost every time he refers to nature and reason he
rephrases them as God’s nature and God’s spirit. He drew on
the tradition of Protestant Aristotelianism that led Luther
to the obligation of the authorities to procure the
material conditions for welfare and happiness of the
people. This is particularly piquant because we have some
reason to believe that Bahrdt himself was not much of a
believer toward the end of his life when he was writing our
text. He was trained as a theologian and understood himself
as a Christian in his youth. But he came under the
influence of the neology or new theology of his day, and by
16
the time of his Confessions [Glaubensbekentniss] of 1779,
he had become something of a naturalist or deist. His Life
of Jesus of 1784 presented Jesus as a good man, and nothing
more. In his autobiography of 1791 Bahrdt indicated that he
thought of himself as an unbeliever at least concerning
Christian dogma. Of course, naturalists and deists are not
atheists and are still religious on many accounts. It is
hard to tell how much of his training and practice as a
theologian survived as some form of religion in his heart,
or whether he became an atheist, but it is clear that even
in Rights and Obligations he was willing to use the
language and rhetoric of religion to argue for his right to
sexual satisfaction. If he had eliminated all of it from
his book, it might not have been read or been convincing to
anybody.
At this point, we can agree that it is possible that
in his heart, Bahrdt was an atheist like a Dworkin or a
Rorty who thought that human rights could be justified on
secular grounds, but the important point is that he did not
rely on that route in print. Over and over, he asserts that
his right to sexual satisfaction is derived from God.21
Libertine and Spinozistic philosophy
17
Yet another vocabulary from the 17th and 18th centuries
could have inspired Bahrdt to develop his theory of the
right to sexual satisfaction. That is philosophy, in the
form of Epicurean libertinism and Spinozism, recently
brought back to our attention by Jonathan Israel’s Radical
Enlightenment and Enlightenment Contested.22 Spinoza also
ran together nature and God –the famous Deo sive natura- in
a way which has been described as pantheism. The relevant
argument from Spinoza is that right is coterminous with
power. If you have the power to do something, you have the
right. In a letter, Spinoza wrote that he had been more
consistent than Hobbes in equating power and right.23 As he
put it in his Theologico-Political Treatise (1670), “the
natural right of every man is determined not by sound
reason, but by his desire and his power”.24 Bahrdt used this
argument in defense of freedom of the press when he argued
that because we have the desire and power to think and to
talk, we have the right to express what we think.25 The
argument is easily extended to the claim that if you have
the desire and power to satisfy your sex drive, you have
the right to. As we have seen, that is what Bahrdt did in
his justification of the right to sexual satisfaction.
Many of the so-called “libertines” of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries were attracted to Spinoza’s ideas.
18
Ishay mentions Henry Neville’s utopian Isle of Pines
(1668), which justified polygamy. To this we can add Denis
Veiras’s History of the Sevarambians (1675-79), which
includes polygamy at one point and has been called
“Spinozistic”.26 At several points Veiras recognized the
importance of women’s sexual desires.27 Ishay calls such
thought-experiments “ephemeral”, and says they were
supplanted by a conservative backlash (109).28 At any rate,
it is clear that their opponents charged that “Spinozist”
and “libertine” were interchangeable words for immoral
rakes, hedonists, and selfish Epicureans. To the critics,
Robert Darnton’s pornographers and Spinozists were the same
people. There were plenty of examples. Everyone knew that
German-speaking Danish Prime Minister Johann Struensee’s
combination of La Mettrie’s Spinozistic materialism and
Haller’s physiology led him to “free love” with the Queen
of Denmark, so it was legally not undeserved when he was
drawn and quartered for lèse majesté in 1772.29
Other writers cited by Israel as Spinozists in favor
of sexual liberation include Bernard Mandeville, EtienneGabriel Morelly, and Denis Diderot. In The Virgin Unmask’d
of 1709, Mandeville decried the slavery that marriage was
for women, but his only solution is spinsterhood.30 In his A
Modest Defence of Publick Stews (1724), Mandeville
19
justified prostitution in order to prevent rape and, at
least ostensibly, in order to defend the institution of
marriage.31 As his modern editor points out, the
satisfaction of female sexual desire was not on his agenda,
and the only reason he arranges for the satisfaction of
male sexuality is to prevent violence and other dangers to
civil society.32
Morelly’s Basiliade of 1753 is a more or less typical
utopian story in which “Amour” is taken as a “Passion
divine” designed by God to procreate the race.33 Nothing
should be considered adultery or prostitution or incest,
because everything that nature inspires is permitted.
Similarly, Denis Diderot’s Supplément au Voyage de
Bougainville decried European limitations on sexual freedom
as a violation of nature.34 But both seemed to think that
satisfaction would come of itself if prohibitions were
ended. All of the foregoing writers foresee sexual equality
and value sexual pleasure, but none of them refer to a
human right to sexual satisfaction.
Bahrdt never calls himself a Spinozist or refers to
him by name, but there are good reasons for that. As Israel
documents so thoroughly, Spinoza was one of the most
reviled thinkers of the period. He was the subject of a
major literary scandal in 1782 when Friedrich Heinrich
20
Jacobi accused the playwright Gotthold Ephraim Lessing of
being a Spinozist and followed that up with a book critical
of Spinoza in 1785, so literate Germans would have been
well aware of language that resonated with Spinoza. In his
Story and Diary of My Imprisonment of 1790, Bahrdt spells
out how he had learned to live with Spinozistic materialism
and determinism: “determinism is irrefutable, but I want to
tell you how I deal with it and feel happy. In theory I
firmly believe in it and so become very tolerant toward
people’s mistakes, but I myself act as if I am a fully free
creature whose reason commands my acts and fate.”35 The
upshot of all of this is that Bahrdt, going beyond the
other Spinozists and libertines, formulates a human right
to sexual satisfaction based on the desire and power to do
it, and writes in his preface that this is a philosophical
justification for that right.
The wild life of Bahrdt himself
The final factor to be considered in explaining
Bahrdt’s innovative understanding of human rights is his
own personal life. He did not earn the sobriquet “the
notorious Dr. Bahrdt” for nothing.36 For insight into his
life, we have his four volume autobiography, many of the
21
stories of which are retold in English in Flygt’s
biography.37 Bahrdt began conventionally enough as one more
university student, but soon evolved into an unconventional
life. At age 19, he has his first affair of the heart,
passionately kissing the young wife of a pastor who has
befriended him.38 He approaches several women in his efforts
to marry well, partly in order to solve his financial
problems.39 But he is soon forced to leave his hometown of
Leipzig because of a scandal at a whorehouse.40
Bahrdt did eventually marry, and he describes his
wife’s jealousy of his time and energy because of her
extraordinary sexual needs.41 But then he was dismissed from
two university teaching jobs for his heterodox ideas, and
from two progressive schools for irresponsibility,
heterodoxy, and debts. This sort of instability in
professional matters led him to make much of his living as
a writer, penning more than 130 books and pamphlets, some
in several volumes.42 This was at a time when it was very
difficult to make a living as a writer because publishers
could not pay substantial royalties because of the everpresent danger of book piracy. Bahrdt’s response was a
prolific pen, and he was not above repackaging the same
materials for sale under different titles. He also founded
the German Union, suppressed by the authorities as a
22
subversive society, but founded largely as a money-maker
which would allow Bahrdt to collect subscriptions for his
writings.
This was not all. Bahrdt was also very sociable, a
convivial drinker, fond of fine wines. Satisfying this
particular desire regularly drove him into debt, and he
fled several of his employments just ahead of the debtcollectors. He ended his life as an inn-keeper near Halle,
living with his maid-servant and reportedly surrounded by
admiring students as he drank, sang, and made fun of the
political authorities, as in his play The Edict of
Religion.
Bahrdt was married for most of his adult life, and
fathered several legitimate children of whom he says that
he was very fond. In one sense, he was something of a
proto-feminist: he wrote a book of advice for women,
published six issues of a journal for female readers, and
the only two characters with any sense in his play The
Edict of Religion were women. But he also left at least two
children fathered on his housemaids as foundlings on church
doorsteps. Evidently he was not able to satisfy his urges
with one woman alone.
In his open sexuality, Bahrdt contrasts nicely with
many of the other great philosophers of the day. There is
23
the faintest of evidence that Spinoza may have felt
homosexual longings, but other than that he was suspicious
of passion and lived an apparently celibate life.43 Hume may
have had an affair with the Countess of Boufflers, but
remained unmarried. As far as his biographers know, Kant
never had sex.44 In any case, none of these was open or
public about their sexuality, nor called for a human right
to sexual satisfaction.
Lynn Hunt’s Inventing Human Rights makes the case that
the reading of novels was one of the main factors that gave
people in the eighteenth century the sensitivity and
sensibility to recognize the humanity in others, preparing
the way for widespread recognition of human rights. Bahrdt
surely read novels, and he wrote five novels himself.45 But
they were fiercely satirical novels, often romans à clef
attacking Bahrdt’s various enemies, and, like much satire
of the personal sort, not likely to encourage sensitivity
to the human rights of others in their readers.46 If some
have thought his autobiography was intended to invoke the
sympathy of readers, others have observed that many readers
concluded, without much sympathy, that he was selfish and
repugnantly self-indulgent. How much of Bahrdt’s
sensitivity to human rights came from reading novels about
others and how much came from living his life as he lived
24
it and writing about it will remain an open question for
lack of reliable measures which would distinguish the
influence of the one from the other.
The total picture of Bahrdt as a man is of one who
lived large, talked, wrote, drank, and sang a lot, and then
ended the day with sex. It is not hard to speculate that
Bahrdt’s own sexual urges played a major role in
instigating his innovative view of sexual rights. Someone
with less of a sex drive might not have considered the
issue worth developing into a right. Maybe innovation and
progress requires the sort of caring about an issue that is
deeply lived and felt. I suppose it is an empirical
question. Who has been more innovative and progressive in
matters of political and human rights? Activists who are
just as likely to be underemployed theologians or
philosophers? Or academic lawyers, philosophers, and
political scientists? I leave it to others to tally up the
answer to this empirical question. What I have done is
explore some of the reasons why theologian and philosopher
Carl Friedrich Bahrdt was more innovative and progressive
than others in respect to human rights in late eighteenthcentury Germany.
Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality summarized
the mechanism of knowledge and power centering on sex from
25
the beginning of the eighteenth century as consisting of
four categories: a hysterization of women’s bodies, a
pedagogization of children’s sex, a socialization of
procreative behavior, and a psychiatrization of perverse
pleasure.47 Bahrdt’s call for sexual satisfaction as a human
right would seem to fall into none of these categories, and
indeed represent a counter-discourse to one or more of
them. To him, women’s desire was not pathological; he did
not deal with children on this issue; sexual satisfaction
could be had outside of marriage as long as no harm was
done; and he did not think there was anything perverse
about the pleasures he had in mind. There is little that
can be interpreted as enkrateia or active self-mastery,
little self-disciplined “care of the self”, and little need
for “true love” as in Foucault’s account of the ancient
Greeks.48
Bahrdt’s call does seem to fit another of Foucault’s
descriptions: the bourgeois “creation” of satisfaction in
the body.49 Whether sexual satisfaction should be understood
as a “bourgeois” need, or rather one that is felt in all
classes of all societies throughout the world, is an open
question. In any case, Foucault’s assertion that “the
‘right’ to life, to one’s body… to the satisfaction of
needs… which the classical juridical system was utterly
26
incapable of comprehending- was the political response to
all these new procedures of power” seems like it was
tailor-made for describing Bahrdt, even if he thinks it
came a few decades later.50
Bahrdt’s failure to have an influence
As we have seen, Bahrdt’s life and writings earned him
the sobriquet “the notorious Dr. Bahrdt”, and that may be
the reason for the failure of his claim for a human right
to sexual satisfaction to take off. His theological
writings endured: Albert Schweitzer liked his biography of
Jesus.51 His autobiography and other more literary writings
earned him a permanent place in German literature, whether
respected or infamous. But oddly enough, with very few
exceptions, he seems to have dropped out of the history of
political ideas and of human rights.52 One reason for this
may be that just as his claim for a human right to sexual
satisfaction came out in 1792 in a book which also
justified rebellion against unjust kings, reaction against
the French revolution set in. But that would not explain
why Bahrdt’s work never came back into fashion the way
other pro-revolutionary works that were originally
suppressed eventually did.
27
One reason for the suppression of Bahrdt and Bahrdt’s
claim for a human right to sexual satisfaction is that it
violated then and still violates now certain proprieties,
which may be described as “Victorian” or “Puritan” or
“prudish”. Another is that it is not mainstream in the
legal profession. Bahrdt is not mentioned in definitive
works on the history of German law which might have been
expected to at least mention his claims, perhaps because he
did not make them in a academic treatise, he was not a
trained jurist nor a university professor, and lived a
scandalous life.53 In addition, many scholars and
politicians who are interested in political rights are not
interested in sexual rights.
As already mentioned, the U.N.’s Universal Declaration
of Human Rights of 1948 did not mention a right to sexual
satisfaction. Studies of the history of that Declaration do
not mention any debate over such a right.54 The authors of
the U.N. Declaration may have had enough on their hands to
deal with what they did. “Victorian” prudery, cultural
taboos from numerous religions, and widespread norms of
propriety may have made it politically unwise to try to add
such a right.
In the summer of 2003, a German court order garnered
international attention by ordering the social services to
28
provide the potency-enhancing medicine Viagra to a welfare
client.55 The “Viagra case” ran the risk of confirming the
maxim that “bad cases make bad law” because the 50something client was impotent largely because he was an
alcoholic and there were allegations that his purpose in
seeking the medicine was to resell it on the black market,
neither of which makes one very sympathetic with the
outcome. The court order was based largely on two points.
One was the medicalization of the client’s condition –that
is, it should be treated like any other medical condition.
The other was the welfare authorities’ failure to document
their claims about the client’s intention to sell the
medicine –that is, any medicine can be resold and denial of
it on that ground must be subject to appropriate safeguards
and procedures.56 Since it was working within the mental
world of contemporary welfare law, the German court felt no
need to justify its verdict with any reflections on larger
natural, universal, or human rights to sexual satisfaction.
If it had, one cannot help wondering if it would have known
that there was a precedent in the German tradition that
would have supported such a right.
A definitive history of human rights has not been
written, partly because the history of ideas has not been
29
canvassed exhaustively. This article brings an early claim
for a human right to sexual satisfaction to the attention
of scholars. The claim does not come from Freud or from the
expected sources in England and France of liberal human
rights ideas, but from late eighteenth century Germany.
Coda
In this part, I present several referee reports. I
have included them entire, but only wish to comment on a
few things about them, which I will insert in brackets.
Human Rights Quarterly:
To: <johnl@ucr.edu>
From: Nancy Ent <entns@law.uc.edu>
Subject: Re: Human Rights Quarterly submission
Dear Prof. Laursen:
We have completed our review of your manuscript entitled "The Human
Rights to Sexual Satisfaction: An Early Modern German Theory," and
decided against publication. The Quarterly is able to accept less than
one in ten manuscripts submitted and, unfortunately, we must reject a
number that would be significant contributions to the human rights
literature. We appreciate your giving us an opportunity to consider
your manuscript and hope that we may have the benefit of future
submissions from you.
Sincerely,
Bert B. Lockwood
Reviewer's Comments:
[Note that there is one referee only. The “industry
standard” is two to four. This seems to indicate that the
editor saw little or no merit in it.]
This is one of the most unusual manuscripts that I have ever been asked
to review. I believe that I am correct in my assessment. Nevertheless,
I am also prepared to acknowledge that I could be wrong as well.
The composition is acceptable, as indicated. There are times, however,
30
when the style is so casual and conversational that it is distracting.
The real debate over this manuscript, however, will be on the subject
itself: is "sexual satisfaction" a "human right" and is it significant?
I do not believe that it is. Regardless of my opinion, however, others
have reached the same conclusion. Although the author bemoans the fact
that this issue has been ignored by scholars, by activists, by the
international community, by declarations, and by standard setting
instruments, there is a reason for this. When one thinks of all of the
struggles fought over issues like the right to life, the right to be
free from torture, the right to vote, the right to have freedom of
speech, the right of self-determination, the right to have equal
protection under the law, etc., etc., the claim of sexual satisfaction
seems to almost trivialize the sacrifices made by others in the name of
human rights.
[That matters of sexuality are trivial is certainly
debatable, and it is remarkable that this seems to be the
main reason for finding the article unsuitable.]
Another problem concerns the balance between theory and facts. I do not
believe that a sufficient discussion has been made about the range of
theory about human rights or about the range of historical writing
about human rights. The readers of Human Rights Quarterly who know the
field of human rights will see this immediately.
This is not to say that the manuscript should not be published. It is
to say that it should not be published in Human Rights Quarterly. It is
an interesting and certainly original piece. That does not make it
significant for human rights, however. My suggestion would be that the
author consider publishing this piece in an interdisciplinary journal
that focuses on the period of the Enlightenment, or the history of
sexuality, or German philosophy and literature, or political theory, or
the history of political thought where he or she is likely to find a
more focused and appreciative audience.
Nancy Ent, Staff Assistant
Urban Morgan Institute for Human Rights
Human Rights Quarterly
University of Cincinnati College of Law
210040 Clifton Ave.
Cincinnati, OH 45221-0040
Human Rights Review:
Subject: Human Rights Review
From: G Herbert <gherbert@loyno.edu>
To: <johnl@ucr.edu>
John Christian Laursen
Department of Political Science
University of California
900 University Avenue
Riverside, CA 92521
johnl@ucr.edu
Dear Prof. Laursen,
31
The report from our referee on your article, “The Human Right to Sexual
Satisfaction: An Early Modern German Theory,” has returned.
[Again, only one referee. Is there something special about
the human rights journals, or is this just so far out of
their scope of interest?]
I am sorry to say that the referee does not recommend publication of
your article in Human Rights Review. The major objection of the
referee was the lack of sufficient exegesis of Bahrdt¹s work. The
referee¹s report is included at the end of this letter.
Thank you for allowing us to consider this paper. I appreciate your
submission and wish you the best of luck in placing your manuscript.
Sincerely yours,
Gary B. Herbert, editor
Human Rights Review
Rev. Guy LeMieux SJ SAK Distinguished Professor
Department of Philosophy
Box 138
Loyola University
New Orleans, La. 70118
Reader¹s remarks:
I'm sorry to say that this paper is definitely not ready for
publication. It is extremely erudite and surveys literature and ideas
that are not normally discussed. But the paper is far too cavalier in
its argumentation and in the end even the scholarship is not up to
grade. Here are some specific comments.
p. 2. top. That a view has not been discussed is not in and of itself a
reason to do so, for the view may be a crackpot one.
p. 3. top. I don't see why those who oppose this right to sexual
satisfaction must be either "Puritans, prudes, and religious" zealots.
p. 3. middle. The view being defended is not put in the negative so it
doesn't take "proving a negative" to establish it.
p. 6. bottom. and elsewhere. There is certainly a difference between
the right to the satisfaction of a sexual drive and the right to the
satisfaction of the reproductive drive. So, which is the focus of
Bahrdt's work? There is never enough exegesis of Bahrdt's work for his
view to get sufficiently clear.
p. 7. bottom. It is also never made clear if the right in question is
positive or negative.
p. 12. bottom. It is never made clear why the author feels entitled to
say that Bahrdt may have known of these minority traditions in
Christianity.
p. 13. middle. The author needs to cite properly to Dworkin here, as
well as to Rorty.
p. 15. top. It is very unclear what the author means by saying that the
"right to sexual satisfaction is derived from God."
p. 14. top. Is it really true that Bahrdt thought that we had the right
to anything that we had the desire and power for?
[As quoted, this was Spinoza’s view, too.]
If so, then I submit that the view is a crackpot one.
32
[Is “crackpot” a technical term in the human rights
literature?]
p. 19 following. The stuff about Bahrdt's "wild life" should either be
dropped altogether or reduced to a note.
[But my point is that personal life experiences may provoke
conceptual innovation, so I need the facts about his life.]
p. 23. top. The author needs to explain why he or she thinks that the
view canvassed is indeed a "progressive" one.
p. 25. bottom. Personal references to the private remarks of others is
not appropriate for an academic paper.
[I had quoted some remarks from a distinguished scholar,
but I suppose the referee is right that in scholarly work
we do not quote individuals. I have rephrased these remarks
without identifying the source.]
Journal of Human Rights:
Dear Professor Laursen,
Thank you for allowing us to consider “The Human Right to Sexual
Satisfaction” for possible publication in the Journal of Human Rights.
Having carefully considered the manuscript, I regret to tell you that
we cannot accept it for publication.
This piece is a very interesting piece of theoretical archeology, and I
think would properly be considered at a history of political theory
journal.
[We students of human rights are not interested in the
history of our chief idea?]
Your discussion of Bahrdt’s work and its historical and theoretical
context is illuminating, but it is never clear why this argument should
be seen as a human rights argument.
[Because Bahrdt calls it one?]
First, I think you need to deal with the usual (though barely
mentioned) critiques of expanding human rights begun by Bentham and
continued by Rorty, Cranston, Hart and others who claim that doing so
cheapens the whole idea of human rights. But, second, this right to
sexual satisfaction goes beyond the old—I think ultimately false—
distinction between positive and negative rights to suggest a right for
whom the addressee is quite literally possibly also a victim of sexual
abuse.
{I pointed out that Bahrdt limited his right to willing
partners.]
33
Perhaps you mean that government should be the addressee and therefore
guarantee sexual liberty to a greater extent than now.
[This is what Bahrdt meant, specifically by not prohibiting
divorce.]
But this cannot really be an individual right unless would-be sexual
partners are obligated to provide ‘satisfaction”. There has to be SOME
addressee for this right who can only be a sexual partner with her or
his own rights, one of which may be to refuse sexual contact. Otherwise
there is no corresponding duty for the right.
[I have quoted Bahrdt’s insistence that the right only
applies to those who can find willing partners. What he
wanted most concretely was for the government not to limit
satisfaction by prohibiting divorce. Note that Article 16
the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights would fall to the
editor’s critique here. I repeat it: “Men and women of full
age… have the right to marry and found a family.” I doubt
that anyone ever said that this means the government must
provide partners, or that unwilling partners might be
coerced into fulfilling this right. It only means the
government must not unnecessarily obstruct this right. As
far as I can see, it has the same structure as Bahrdt’s
right. If the editor is correct, he owes us an article or
book proposing amendment of the U.N. Declaration.]
So I think the argument is difficult to accept as an actual rights
argument, though it may plausibly be an argument not to be publicly
discriminated against for one’s sexual preferences or (non-abusive)
practices. But this I think would be a very different kind of paper,
probably not one much informed by your historical focus. I would
suggest you keep the interesting historical focus and make the case
less one that depends on the idea and definition of a human right.
My best wishes for your future research. Regards,
Richard P. Hiskes, Editor
Journal of Human Rights
[Observe that this editor does not send the manuscript out
to even one referee. He thinks he can reject it on his own
cognizance.]
So, what am I missing? Is this really the way the human
rights field works?
34
Now, I will pass on part of a report for another journal
(not human rights). I actually agree with this one.
[This paper] deals with a small chapter in the history of rights… [but]
it is written in an inappropriately sensationalistic manner…. The
reader is reluctant to trust the author as a reliable guide when the
matter is presented as a major ‘find’ and its neglect as cause for much
righteous huffing and puffing, as if something truly fundamental in the
history of civilisation was overlooked… Bahrdt’s suggested right is
obviously nothing but a curious detail in the history of German legal
and moral thought which had no significance in its time and has had no
subsequent influence.
[Bahrdt was a] German wildcard.
1
Carl Friedrich Bahrdt, Rechte und Obliegenheiten der
Regenten und Unterthanen in Beziehung auf Staat und
Religion (Riga: Johann Friedrich Hartknoch, 1792),
published as part III of Bahrdt’s System der moralischen
Religion zur endlichen Beruhigung für Zweifler und Denker.
Allen Christen und Nichtchristen lesbar, the first two
volumes of which had appeared in 1787. Selection in J.
Garber, ed., Revolutionäre Vernunft (Kronberg: Scriptor,
1974), 30-36.
2
Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York:
Norton, 2007).
35
3
Micheline Ishay, The Human Rights Reader (New York:
Routledge, 1997); The History of Human Rights from Ancient
Times to the Globalization Era (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2004).
4
E. g. Edward Lawson, Encyclopedia of Human Rights (New
York: Taylor and Francis, 1991); Janusz Symonides, ed.,
Human Rights: Concept and Standards (Paris: UNESCO, 2000);
Janusz Symonides and Vladimir Volodin, eds., A Guide to
Human Rights: Institutions, Standards, Procedures (Paris:
UNESCO, 2003); Gerd Kleinheyer, “Grundrechte, Menschen- und
Bürgerrechte, Volksrechte” in O. Brunner, W. Conze, and R.
Koselleck, eds., Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Stuttgart:
Klett, 1975), 1057-1070.
5
Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700-1815
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 48.
6
Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York:
Norton, 2006), 163. But a Google search for “Human Right to
Sexual Satisfaction” comes up with little more than Luc
Loranhe and his “Sexual Front Manifesto”. Google Scholar
and Google Books come up with nothing at all.
7
In Ishay, The Human Rights Reader, 407-412.
8
Albert P. Blaustein, R. Clark, and J. Sigler, eds., Human
Rights Sourcebook (New York: Paragon, 1987); Göran Melander
36
and Gudmundur Alfredsson, eds., The Raoul Wallenberg
Compilation of Human Rights Instruments (The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1997).
9
Carl Friedrich Bahrdt, The Edict of Religion. A Comedy and
The Story and Diary of My Imprisonment, eds. J. C. Laursen
and J. van der Zande (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2000).
10
Note that Bahrdt did not recognize a right to
satisfaction of homosexual desire. But his general right to
the satisfaction of sexuality could be used by later
generations to justify the decriminalization of laws
against consenting homosexuality.
11
Over and over, Bahrdt refers interchangeably to natural
rights and God-given rights. My division between natural
law and theology is merely a heuristic device, drawing on
different contemporary scholarly literatures. In the
eighteenth century, Bahrdt was not alone in running them
together: most natural lawyers drew on theology and
accounted for God in their natural law, and many
theologians drew on natural law and attempted to assimilate
it to their theology.
12
Samuel Pufendorf, On the Duty of Man and Citizen, ed.
James Tully (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991),
47.
37
13
See Werner Schneiders, Naturrecht und Liebesethik
(Hildesheim: 1971) and Christian Wolff, 1697-1754 (Hamburg:
Meiners, 1986). See also Christian Thomasius, Essays on
Church, State and Politics, eds. T. Ahnert, F. Grunert, and
I. Hunter (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2007). Jörn Garber
and Hanno Schmitt point out that Bahrdt’s human rights are
a development of the Wolffian tradition in “Affektkontrolle
und Sozialdisziplinierung” in Carl Friedrich Bahrdt (17401792), eds. Gerhard Sauder and Christoph Weiss (St.
Ingbert: Röhrig, 1992), 155-6.
The background is well covered in Alred Dufour, Le marriage
dans l’école allemande du droit naturel modern au XVIIIe
siècle (Paris, 1972) and A. Dufour, Le marriage dans
l’école romande du droit naturel au XVIIIe siècle (Geneva:
Librairie générale, 1976).
14
Hunt, Inventing Human Rights, 117.
15
See Merio Scattola, La nascità delle scienze dello stato:
August Ludwig Schlözer (1735-1809) e le discipline
politiche del settecento tedesco (Milano: FrancoAngeli,
1994) and Bernd Warlich, August Ludwig Schlözer (1735-1809)
zwischen Reform und Revolution. Ein Beitrag zur Pathogenese
frühliberalen Staatsdenkens im späten 18. Jahrhundert,
(phil. Diss. Erlangen-Nürnberg, 1972).
38
16
17
[deleted for blind refereeing]
Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel, On Improving the Status of
Women, tr. T. Sellner (Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 1979).
18
See Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society, 17-24.
Hull knows Bahrdt only for the rules of sexual moderation
in his System der moralischen Religion of 1787 (244), and
for his Handbuch der Moral für den Burgerstand of 1789
(219n).
19
See Alastair Hamilton, The Family of Love (Cambridge
University Press, 1981).
20
Michael J. Perry, The Idea of Human Rights: Four
Inquiries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
21
There is no indication that he derives it from Jewish
customs requiring a husband to satisfy his wife, etc. (see
Louis Jacobs, The Jewish Religion: A Companion [Oxford
University Press, 1995], 454-5).
22
Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and
the Making of Modernity, 1650-1750 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001); Enlightenment Contested (Oxford
University Press, 2006), 572-589.
39
23
Benedict de Spinoza, On the Improvement of the
Understanding, Ethics, and Correspondence, tr. Robert Elwes
(New York: Dover, 1977), 369.
24
Benedict de Spinoza, Theologico-Political Treatise, tr.
Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 180.
25
See Early French and German Defenses of Freedom of the
Press: Elie Luzac’s Essay on Freedom of Expression (1749)
and Carl Friedrich Bahrdt’s On Freedom of the Press and Its
Limits (1787) in English Translation, eds. J. C. Laursen
and J. van der Zande (Leiden: Brill, 2003). Bahrdt began
using the language of human rights in these earlier texts,
following other Germans who had used it in the early and
mid-1780’s (see “Introduction to Bahrdt” in the foregoing,
91-105). Unaware of German usage going back at least to
1784, Lynn Hunt’s Inventing Human Rights asserts that the
Germans got the language of human rights from the Dutch
after 1791, who got it in turn from debates between the
English and the French. For the period before 1789, see
Hans Erich Bödeker, “Menschenrechte im deutschen
publizistischen Diskurs vor 1789” in Grund- und
Freiheitsrechte von der ständischen zur spätbürgerlichen
Gesellschaft, ed. Günter Birtsch (Göttingen, 1987), 393433.
40
26
Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 591.
27
Denis Veiras, The History of the Sevarambians, (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 2006).
28
Ishay, The History of Human Rights, 109.
29
J. C. Laursen, “Spinoza in Denmark and the Fall of
Struensee, 1770-1772”, Journal of the History of Ideas 61,
2000, 189-202.
30
Bernard Mandeville, The Virgin Unmasked, ed. S. Good
(Delmar: Scholars’ Reprints, 1975).
31
Irwin Primer, ed., Bernard Mandeville’s “A Modest Defence
of the Public Stews” (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
32
Irwin Primer, “Introduction” to Bernard Mandeville’s “A
Modest Defense”, 21.
33
Etienne-Gabriel Morelly, Naufrage des isles flottantes, ou
Basiliade du célébre Pilpai (Paris, 1753), vol. 1, 16.
34
Denis Diderot, Political Writings, eds. John Hope Mason
and Robert Wokler (Cambridge University Press, 1992), 3175. Parts of this work came out in manuscript in Grimm’s
Correspondance littéraire in the early 1770’s, although it
was not printed until after Bahrdt, in 1796.
35
Bahrdt, The Edict of Religion, 114.
36
Sten Gunnar Flygt, The Notorious Dr. Bahrdt (Nashville:
Vanderbilt University Press, 1963); Sauder and Weiss, eds.,
41
Carl Friedrich Bahrdt (1740-1792). None of these works deal
with Bahrdt’s call for a human right to sexual
satisfaction.
37
Bahrdt, Geschichte seines Lebens, seiner Meinungen und
Schicksale (Berlin, 2 vols. 1790, 2 vols. 1791) [cited from
modern edition: C. F. Bahrdt – ein Abenteurer der
Aufklärungszeit, ed. Theresia Hagenmaier (Heidenheim,
1972)]; Flygt, The Notorious Dr. Bahrdt.
38
Bahrdt, Geschichte, ed. Hagenmaier, 72-77.
39
Bahrdt, Geschichte, ed. Hagenmaier, 77-82, 94ff.
40
Bahrdt, Geschichte, ed. Hagenmaier, 86-94.
41
Bahrdt, Geschichte, ed. Hagenmaier, 105.
42
See Otto Jacob and Ingrid Majewski, eds., Karl Friedrich
Bahrdt: Radikaler deutscher Aufklärer (25.8.1740-3.4.1792).
Bibliographie (Halle, 1992).
43
Making a weak case for Spinoza’s homosexuality, see
Margaret Gullan-Whur, Within Reason: a Life of Spinoza (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000).
44
Manfred Kuehn, Kant: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001), 116-8.
45
Bahrdt, Zamor oder der Mann aus dem Monde (1787) [only
half by Bahrdt], Ala Lama oder der König unter den Schäfern
(1790), Alvarao und Ximenes (1790) [French trans. Alvaro et
42
Ximenés ou les coups de la fortune (Paris: 1799-1800)],
Geschichte des Prinzen Yhakanpol (1790); Leben und Thaten
des weiland hochwürdigen Pastor Rindvigius (1790) [modern
edition, ed. Otto Mausser (Munich: Janus, 1913)].
46
Bahrdt’s satire in many of his writings earned him
attention from scholars of the history of comedy, in his
own time and 70 years later: see C. F. Flögel, Geschichte
des komischen Literatur (Leipzig, 1786), vol. 3, 547; F. W.
Ebeling, Geschichte der komischen Literatur in Deutschland
(Leipzig, 1862, vol. 1, 442-444.
47
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An
Introduction (New York: Random House, 1978), 104-5.
48
See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 2:
The Use of Pleasure (New York: Random House, 1985), 63ff.
and vol. 3, The Care of the Self (New York: Random House,
1986).
49
Foucault, An Introduction, 125-128.
50
Foucault, An Introduction, 145.
51
Flygt, The Notorious Dr. Bahrdt, dedicates a chapter to
Bahrdt’s posthumous reputation in theology and literary
studies: 327-346.
52
But see D. Klippel, Politische Freiheit und
Freiheitsrechte im deutschen Naturrecht des 18. Jahrhundert
43
(Paderborn: Schöningh, 1976), 123; J. Garber, “Vom ‘ius
connatum’ zum ‘Menschenrecht’” in R. Brandt, ed.,
Rechtsphilosophie der Aufklärung (Berlin: de Gruyter,
1987), 113; and the translations cited in notes 8 and 23.
53
Michael Stolleis, Public Law in Germany (Providence:
Berghahn, 2001); Geschichte des Sozialrechts in Deutschland
(Stuttgart: Lucius und Lucius, 2003); Staatsraison, Recht
und Moral in philosophischen Texten des späten 18.
Jahrhunderts (Meisenheim: Hain, 1972); Notker Hammerstein,
Staatsdenker im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert, ed. M. Stolleis
(Frankfurt: Metzner, 1987).
54
For example, Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor
Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
(New York: Random House, 2001).
55
Times, London, August
, 2003, p.
col.
.
56
Verwaltungsgericht Frankfurt am Main, 12 August 2003
Geschäftsnummer 10 E 5407/01(1). The precedent establishing
that “erectile dysfunction” is a medical condition covered
by medical insurers was a 1999 decision by the Federal
Social Court (Bundessozialgericht), September 30, 1999 (-B
8 KN 9/98 KR R -, BSGE 85, 36-56 = NJW 2000, 2764f.). I
would like to thank Dr. Peer Zumbansen of the Institut für
Wirtschaftsrecht of the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität,
44
Fachbereich Rechtswissenschaften, Frankfurt, Germany, for
providing me with these decisions.