socialist society founded in 1883–84 in London, having as its goal the establishment of a democratic socialist state in Great Britain. The Fabians put their faith in evolutionary socialism rather than in revolution. The name of the society is derived from the Roman general Fabius Cunctator, whose patient and elusive tactics in avoiding pitched battles secured his ultimate victory over stronger forces. Its founding is attributed to Thomas Davidson, a Scottish philosopher, and its early members included George Bernard Shaw, Sidney Webb, Annie Besant, Edward Pease, and Graham Wallas. Shaw and Webb, later joined by Webb’s wife, Beatrice, were the outstanding leaders of the society for many years. In 1889 the society published its best-known tract, Fabian Essays in Socialism, edited by Shaw. It was followed in 1952 by New Fabian Essays, edited by Richard H.S. Crossman. The Fabians at first attempted to permeate the Liberal and Conservative parties with socialist ideas, but later they helped to organize the separate Labour Representation Committee, which became the Labour Party in 1906. The Fabian Society has since been affiliated with the Labour Party. The national membership of the Fabian Society has never been very great (at its peak in 1946 it had only about 8,400 members), but the importance of the society has always been much greater than its size might suggest. Generally, a large number of Labour members of Parliament in the House of Commons, as well as many of the party leaders, are Fabians; and in addition to the national society, there are scores of local Fabian societies. The principal activities of the society consist in the furtherance of its goal of socialism through the education of the public along socialist lines by means of meetings, lectures, discussion groups, conferences, and summer schools; carrying out research into political, economic, and social problems; and publishing books, pamphlets, and periodicals. In 1931 the New Fabian Research Bureau was established as an independent body. The bureau and the society amalgamated in 1938 to form a new and revitalized Fabian Society. In 1940 the Colonial Bureau of the Fabian Society was established, and it produced a continuous stream of discussion and writing on colonial questions. The Fabian International Bureau was started in 1941 to cater to the growing concern of Fabians with foreign policy and the great issues of war and peace. Copyright © 1994-2002 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

in philosophy, system of right or justice held to be common to all humankind and derived from nature rather than from the rules of society, or positive law. Throughout the history of the concept, there have been disagreements over the meaning of naturallaw and over its relation to positive law.

Aristotle held that what was “just by nature” was not always the same as what was “just by law”; that there was a natural justice valid everywhere with the same force and “not existing by people’s thinking this or that”; and that appeal could be made to it from the positive law. He drew his instances of the natural law, however, chiefly from his observation of the Greeks in their city-states, with their subordination of women to men, of slaves to citizens, and of barbarians to Hellenes. The Stoics, on the other hand, conceived an entirely egalitarian law of nature in conformity with the “right reason,” or Logos, inherent in the human mind. The Roman jurists paid lip service to this notion, and St. Paul seems to reflect it when he writes of a law “written in the hearts” of the Gentiles (Romans 2:14–15).

St. Augustine of Hippo took up the Pauline mention and developed the idea of man having lived freely under the natural law before his fall and his subsequent bondage under sin and the positive law. Gratian in the 11th century simply equated the naturallaw with the divine law, that is, with the revealed law of the Old and the New Testament, in particular the Christian version of the Golden Rule.

St. Thomas Aquinas propounded an influential systematization. The eternal law of the divine reason, he maintained, though it is unknowable to us in its perfection as it is in God’s mind, is yet known to us in part not only by revelation but also by the operations of our reason. The law of nature, which is “nothing else than the participation of the eternal law in the rational creature,” thus comprises those precepts that humankind is able to formulate, namely, the preservation of one’s own good, the fulfillment of “those inclinations which nature has taught to all animals,” and the pursuit of the knowledge of God. Human law must be the particular application of the natural law.

Other scholastic philosophers, for instance John Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, and, especially, Francisco Suárez, emphasized the divine will instead of the divine reason as the source of law. This “voluntarism” influenced the Roman Catholic jurisprudence of the Counter-Reformation, but the Thomistic doctrine was later revived and reinforced to become the main philosophical ground for the papal exposition of natural right in the social teaching of Leo XIII and his successors.

The epoch-making appeal of Hugo Grotius to the natural law belongs to the history of jurisprudence. But whereas his fellow Calvinist Johannes Althusius (1557–1638) had proceeded from theological doctrines of predestination to elaborate his theory of lawnatural law “even if we were to suppose . . . that God does not exist or is not concerned with human affairs.” A few years later Thomas Hobbes was arguing not from the “state of innocence” in which man had lived in the biblical Eden but from a savage “state of nature” in which men, free and equal in rights, were each one at solitary war with every other. After discerning the right of nature (jus naturale) to be “the liberty each man hath to use his own power for the preservation of his own nature, that is to say, of life,” Hobbes defines a law of nature (lex naturalis) as “a precept of general rule found out by reason, by which a man is forbidden to do that which is destructive of his life” and then enumerates the elementary rules on which peace and society can be established. Grotius and Hobbes thus stand together at the head of that “school of natural law” which, in accordance with the tendencies of the Enlightenment, tried to construct a whole edifice of law by rational deduction from a fictitious “state of nature” followed by a social contract. In England, John Locke departed from Hobbesian pessimism to the extent of describing the state of nature as a state of society, with free and equal men already observing the natural law. In France, where Montesquieu had argued that natural laws were presocial and were superior to those of religion and of the state, Jean-Jacques Rousseau postulated a savage who was virtuous in isolation and actuated by two principles “prior to reason,” self-preservation and compassion (innate repugnance against the sufferings of others). binding on all peoples, Grotius insisted on the validity of the

The Declaration of Independence of the United States refers only briefly to “the Laws of Nature” before citing equality and other “unalienable” rights as “self-evident.” The French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen asserts liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression as “imprescriptible natural rights.” The philosophy of Immanuel Kant renounced the attempt to know nature as it really is, yet allowed the practical or moral reason to deduce a valid system of right with its own purely formal framework; and Kantian formalism contributed to the 20th-century revival of naturalistic jurisprudence.

On the level of international politics in the 20th century, the assertion of human rights was the product rather of an empirical search for common values than of any explicit doctrine about a natural law.

in philosophy, system of right or justice held to be common to all humankind and derived from nature rather than from the rules of society, or positive law. Throughout the history of the concept, there have been disagreements over the meaning of naturallaw and over its relation to positive law.

Aristotle held that what was “just by nature” was not always the same as what was “just by law”; that there was a natural justice valid everywhere with the same force and “not existing by people’s thinking this or that”; and that appeal could be made to it from the positive law. He drew his instances of the natural law, however, chiefly from his observation of the Greeks in their city-states, with their subordination of women to men, of slaves to citizens, and of barbarians to Hellenes. The Stoics, on the other hand, conceived an entirely egalitarian law of nature in conformity with the “right reason,” or Logos, inherent in the human mind. The Roman jurists paid lip service to this notion, and St. Paul seems to reflect it when he writes of a law “written in the hearts” of the Gentiles (Romans 2:14–15).

St. Augustine of Hippo took up the Pauline mention and developed the idea of man having lived freely under the natural law before his fall and his subsequent bondage under sin and the positive law. Gratian in the 11th century simply equated the naturallaw with the divine law, that is, with the revealed law of the Old and the New Testament, in particular the Christian version of the Golden Rule.

St. Thomas Aquinas propounded an influential systematization. The eternal law of the divine reason, he maintained, though it is unknowable to us in its perfection as it is in God’s mind, is yet known to us in part not only by revelation but also by the operations of our reason. The law of nature, which is “nothing else than the participation of the eternal law in the rational creature,” thus comprises those precepts that humankind is able to formulate, namely, the preservation of one’s own good, the fulfillment of “those inclinations which nature has taught to all animals,” and the pursuit of the knowledge of God. Human law must be the particular application of the natural law.

Other scholastic philosophers, for instance John Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, and, especially, Francisco Suárez, emphasized the divine will instead of the divine reason as the source of law. This “voluntarism” influenced the Roman Catholic jurisprudence of the Counter-Reformation, but the Thomistic doctrine was later revived and reinforced to become the main philosophical ground for the papal exposition of natural right in the social teaching of Leo XIII and his successors.

The epoch-making appeal of Hugo Grotius to the natural law belongs to the history of jurisprudence. But whereas his fellow Calvinist Johannes Althusius (1557–1638) had proceeded from theological doctrines of predestination to elaborate his theory of lawnatural law “even if we were to suppose . . . that God does not exist or is not concerned with human affairs.” A few years later Thomas Hobbes was arguing not from the “state of innocence” in which man had lived in the biblical Eden but from a savage “state of nature” in which men, free and equal in rights, were each one at solitary war with every other. After discerning the right of nature (jus naturale) to be “the liberty each man hath to use his own power for the preservation of his own nature, that is to say, of life,” Hobbes defines a law of nature (lex naturalis) as “a precept of general rule found out by reason, by which a man is forbidden to do that which is destructive of his life” and then enumerates the elementary rules on which peace and society can be established. Grotius and Hobbes thus stand together at the head of that “school of natural law” which, in accordance with the tendencies of the Enlightenment, tried to construct a whole edifice of law by rational deduction from a fictitious “state of nature” followed by a social contract. In England, John Locke departed from Hobbesian pessimism to the extent of describing the state of nature as a state of society, with free and equal men already observing the natural law. In France, where Montesquieu had argued that natural laws were presocial and were superior to those of religion and of the state, Jean-Jacques Rousseau postulated a savage who was virtuous in isolation and actuated by two principles “prior to reason,” self-preservation and compassion (innate repugnance against the sufferings of others). binding on all peoples, Grotius insisted on the validity of the

The Declaration of Independence of the United States refers only briefly to “the Laws of Nature” before citing equality and other “unalienable” rights as “self-evident.” The French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen asserts liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression as “imprescriptible natural rights.” The philosophy of Immanuel Kant renounced the attempt to know nature as it really is, yet allowed the practical or moral reason to deduce a valid system of right with its own purely formal framework; and Kantian formalism contributed to the 20th-century revival of naturalistic jurisprudence.

On the level of international politics in the 20th century, the assertion of human rights was the product rather of an empirical search for common values than of any explicit doctrine about a natural law.

also called Hansa, German Hanse, organization founded by north German towns and German merchant communities abroad to protect their mutual trading interests. The league dominated commercial activity in northern Europe from the 13th to the 15th century. (Hanse was a medieval German word for “guild,” or “association,” derived from a Gothic word for “troop,” or “company.”) Northern German mastery of trade in the Baltic Sea was achieved with striking speed and completeness in the late 12th and early 13th centuries. After its capture by Henry the Lion in 1158, Lübeck became the main base for Westphalian and Saxon merchants expanding northward and eastward; Visby, on the Swedish island of Gotland, was soon established as a major transshipment centre for trade in the Baltic and with Novgorod, which was the chief mart for the Russian trade. From Visby, German merchants helped establish important towns on the east coast of the Baltic: Riga, Reval (now Tallinn), Danzig (now Gdansk), and Dorpat (now Tartu). Thus, by the early 13th century Germans had a near-monopoly of long-distance trade in the Baltic. In the meantime, merchants from Cologne (Köln) and other towns in the Rhineland had acquired trading privileges in Flanders and in England. The decisive steps in the formation of the Hanseatic League took place in the second half of the 13th century. While overseas, the German merchants had tended increasingly to form associations (“hanses”) with each other in order to secure common action against robbers and pirates. From the mid-13th century this cooperation became much more extensive and regularized, and by 1265 all the north German towns having the “law of Lübeck” had agreed on common legislation for the defense of merchants and their goods. In the 1270s a Lübeck-Hamburg association that had acquired trading privileges in Flanders and England united with its rival Rhenish counterpart, and in the 1280s this confederation of German merchants trading in the west was closely joined to the association trading in the Baltic, thus creating the Hanseatic League. The Hanseatic League attempted to protect its ship convoys and caravans by quelling pirates and brigands, and it fostered safe navigation by building lighthouses and training pilots. Most importantly, it sought to organize and control trade throughout northern Europe by winning commercial privileges and monopolies and by establishing trading bases overseas. The league established permanent commercial enclaves (Kontore) in a number of foreign towns, notably Bruges in Flanders, Bergen in Norway, Novgorod in Russia, and the Steel Yard in London. The league’s principal trade consisted of grain, timber, furs, tar, honey, and flax traded from Russia and Poland to Flanders and England, which in turn sent cloth and other manufactured goods eastward to the Slavs. Swedish copper and iron ore were traded westward, and herring caught off the southern tip of Sweden was traded throughout Germany southward to the Alps. The Hanseatic League’s aggressively protectionist trading practices often aroused opposition from foreign merchants. The league typically used gifts and loans to foreign political leaders to protect its commercial privileges, and when this proved inadequate, it threatened to withdraw its trade and occasionally became involved in embargoes and blockades. Only in extreme cases did the league engage in organized warfare, as in the 1360s, when it faced a serious challenge from the Danish king Valdemar IV, who was trying to master the southwestern Baltic and end the league’s economic control there. The league’s members raised an armed force that defeated the Danes decisively in 1368, and in the Peace of Stralsund (1370) Denmark was forced to recognize the league’s supremacy in the Baltic. In the 14th century the Hanseatic League claimed a membership of about 100 towns, mostly German. Though basically a mercantile rather than a political organization, the league tried to ensure peace and order at home; warfare between member towns, civic strife within towns, and robbery on the roads were all suppressed as far as possible. The league had no constitution and no permanent army, navy, or governing body except for periodic assemblies (diets). These were convened less and less frequently from the early 15th century, as the towns’ peculiar and regional interests began to outweigh their common concerns. The Hanseatic League declined partly because it lacked any centralized power with which to withstand the new and more powerful nation-states forming on its borders. Lithuania and Poland were united in 1386; Denmark, Sweden, and Norway formed a union in 1397; and Ivan III of Moscow closed the Hanseatic trading settlement at Novgorod in 1494. The Dutch were growing in mercantile and industrial strength, and in the 15th century they were able to oust German traders from Dutch domestic markets and the North Sea region as a whole. New maritime connections between the Baltic and Mediterranean seas and between the Old World and the Americas caused a gradual diversion of trade westward to the great Atlantic ports. By the mid-16th century, Dutch ships had even won control of the carrying trade from the Baltic to the west, dealing a serious blow to Lübeck. The league died slowly as England contested with the Netherlands for dominance in northern European commerce and Sweden emerged as the chief commercial power in the Baltic Sea region. The Hanseatic League’s diet met for the last time in 1669.