Baumgartner Frederic J. Declaring War in Early Modern Europe

Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. — 206 p.A noteworthy development in recent history has been the disappearance of formal declarations of war. Using primary sources, this book examines the history of declaring war in the early modern era up to the writing of the US Constitution to identify the influence of early modern history on the framing of the Constitution. This study explores the legalistic and religious traditions that undergirded the declaration of war from the ancient world through the eighteenth century. In particular, it focuses on the transformative developments in the sixteenth century. Readers will welcome Baumgartner's ability to intertwine theory and practice and to illustrate the disjunction between law and its realization, what the Germans called Rechtsverwirklichung. It illumines larger questions such as the development of the international state system and of international law and the evolution of the theory of just war, especially in the early modern period when war or the threat of war was so pervasive. This book adds to Baumgartner's impressive corpus of work on the early modern era.