Man, society, the state, and the world: how to write a public law textbook

‘Albrecht Dürer’s Hercules at the Crossroads (1498): Hercules and Virtue on the right attack Vice who reclines with a satyr on the left.’

Last summer, I read a new book by my Leiden colleague, the legal philosopher Andreas Kinneging. The book is a defense of and an introduction to the thinking of the Ancients. In doing so, as the author explains in the f…