All at Sea: Locke's Tyrants and the Pyrates of Political Thought
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Amirell, SE
Buchan, B
Hägerdal, H
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Abstract
Although the concept of pirates as hostes humani generis appears to be axiomatic, it is argued in this chapter that piracy elicited more ambiguous responses from philosophers and lawyers in late seventeenth-century Britain. Pirates were merely one among a pantheon of archetypal enemies of good order. By examining references to piracy in the work of the English political philosopher John Locke in particular, it is argued here that pirates vied with tyrants for the title of “common enemy of all humankind.” Locke’s prevarications were mirrored by continuing doubts and legal debates about who the hostis humani generis really was.
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Piracy in World History
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© The authors / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2021. This is an Open Access publication distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) License, which permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, providing that the work is properly cited.
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Copyright permissions for this publication were identified from the publisher at https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/53019.
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Historical studies
Historical studies of crime
Arts & Humanities
History
hostis humani generis
John Locke
law
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Buchan, B, All at Sea Locke's Tyrants and the Pyrates of Political Thought, Piracy in World History, 2021, pp. 61-83