Four prominent ‘origin stories’ for the American musical intertwine with the history of American operetta, which bifurcated, through the American legacies of Gilbert and Sullivan (including Cohan’s musical comedies) and The Merry Widow, into two distinct types: fast-paced musical comedies with an American profile, and the more romantically tinged, Viennese-derived American operetta. In balancing elements of these types, the American musical stage fostered camp reception modes, overtly emergent especially in Naughty Marietta, but becoming more closeted in the 1920s, when the two types again reached an extreme point of separation, with Gershwin’s and other musical comedies on one side of the divide, and Romberg’s and Friml’s hit operettas (along with Deep River), on the other, with operetta (or the ‘musical play’) bolstered by Hammerstein’s rhetoric laying claim to the higher aesthetic ground. Show Boat marked a probably deliberate attempt to remix and fuse the two types in a hybrid form that eventually stabilized in the wake of Oklahoma! Throughout, the element of camp, often passing as unintentional, governed the negotiations between the two types, allowing them to coexist in the musical play as it (re)emerged in the 1940s.

The history of operetta in Italy is inextricably entangled with discourses about the status of Italian opera and the formation of an Italian national identity. In the 1860s, it was Offenbach, Hervé and Lecocq that conquered the Italian stages, then, later, the ‘Viennese’ imports of Suppé, Strauss Jr and Lehár. Italian operettas based on parodies of foreign works and combining elements of dialect and couleur locale flourished at this time but struggled to undermine both the foreign monopoly and the time-honoured tradition of opera buffa. The relationship between operetta and Italian opera – not only buffa but also seria – was central also to critical discourses about the rise of the Italian bourgeois, becoming closely intertwined with questions on the position of musical theatre between entertainment and art. Inevitably, discussions of operetta also took strong nationalistic undertones in a country that was struggling to find a unifying national identity and that recognized operetta as a foreign import that could contaminate opera or illegitimately undermine its primacy on Italian stages. The extraordinary success of La vedova allegra in Milan in 1907 and the growing political tensions between Italy and Austria-Hungary in ensuing years sparked new interest in the creation of a national operetta.

This chapter examines the work and significance of Offenbach in the field of French operetta. With the rise of Napoleon III in the 1850s, a combination of political optimism, renewed prosperity, an abundance of artistic talent and a cultural obsession with appearances made Paris the perfect environment for a new form of entertainment to appear and thrive – operetta. Pioneered by Hervé, it became an international sensation thanks to the creativity and determination of Jacques Offenbach, whose opéras bouffes remain the musical embodiments of France’s Second Empire. He composed and produced dozens of hits that took comic aim at the foibles of all levels of society, from beggars to the royal court. With France’s humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the Parisian public briefly turned against the German-born Offenbach. But he found new success by composing light-hearted spectacles. Composer Charles Lecoq, whose career took off thanks to Offenbach, achieved a major success with La fille de Madame Angot. Lecoq and others continued to compose operettas for Parisian audiences, but none matched the popularity French operetta had enjoyed with Offenbach.

The question of whether Judaism recognises a natural law independent of Jewish law (halakhah) is contentious, and pertains to the role played by revelation in the promulgation of law. While some scholars have argued that the very notion of natural law precludes the doctrine of revelation and its complex set of divinely revealed laws, others have tried to reconcile the essential components of natural law theory with a theory of divine revelation. In part, this question reflects, once more, the age-old tension between reason and revelation: whether the basic tenets of Judaism are rational, or are founded in revelation alone. In other words, can we somehow accommodate both reason and revelation within the fabric of Jewish law?

Natural law is part of an ethical theory, guiding our moral actions. The question I would like to discuss in this chapter is the implications of natural law theory for the political order. If someone were to take natural law ethics as a starting point, what principles of political life would flow from it?

This chapter will begin with a description of the fundamental principles of natural law ethics (in its classic form, in Thomas Aquinas), noting the importance of its integral connection with a virtue ethics and a philosophical anthropology. From there, I will try to unfold the moral principles that guide political and social life, drawing the connections between them and general natural law principles.

A brief preliminary point: the classical exposition of natural law in Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae occurs in a theological context, and philosophical and theological arguments overlap a good deal.

In the mid to late twentieth century, it was the norm for Protestant thinkers to reject natural law ethics. Karl Barth repudiated natural law as insufficiently Christocentric. Reinhold Niebuhr criticised natural law thinking for absolutising the relative. Stanley Hauerwas argued that ‘natural law functions ideologically to justify the assumption that Christians have a responsibility to fulfil the demands of the state and institutions associated with it’, thereby compromising loyalty to Christ. Natural law was regarded as an essentially Catholic approach to Christian moral thinking. It seemed to constrain divine freedom, deny the radical character of the Fall, render scripture secondary and interfere with the intimacy of the divine–human relation. The Reformers, as the story had it, embraced divine command morality, not natural law. Even if there were a natural law embodying God’s will for creation, the Fall rendered access to that law impossible.

During the seventeenth century, natural law theory became institutionalised as the leading approach to moral philosophy in Protestant Europe. Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) and Samuel Pufendorf (1632–94) were undoubtedly the most influential natural law theorists of the period. Their books went through hundreds of editions and were translated into most European languages. Grotius was widely praised for having been ‘the first to have systematised a science that, prior to him, was nothing but confusion … and impenetrable darkness’. His systematisation of natural law – the science in question – did not consist in deducing moral rules from uncontested definitions and indisputable axioms. His published writings on natural law took no such ‘geometric’ approach. Rather, in a move mirroring Hans Kelsen’s Reine Rechtslehre, Grotius purportedly pioneered a ‘pure’ science of natural law by sharply distinguishing it from divine positive law (i.e. revelation), civil (i.e. Roman) law, and the voluntary law of nations.

In her famous critique of various ‘modern’ presuppositions in moral philosophy, Elizabeth Anscombe suggests that philosophers ought to give up on the idea that there is a sense of ‘ought’ or ‘obligation’ that is specifically moral. This concept, she argues, originally derived its sense from a notion of an authoritative divine law against which human actions could be measured; the presumed existence of such a law made it possible to render absolute verdicts on human acts as licit or illicit. In the absence of recourse to such a law, the terms ‘moral obligation’, ‘moral ought’ and ‘morally wrong’ are empty and best abandoned. It would be better if we look for the ground of normative claims regarding human life and action in our knowledge of our own ‘species’, where this is understood, ‘from the point of view of the activity of thought and choice in regard to the various departments of life’.

Since at least the time of St Clement of Alexandria (150–215), natural law has been a fundamental concept in Catholic accounts of private and public morality. But what is natural about this law (an ontological question) and how we understand it (the epistemological question) has been far from stable. In the twentieth century, a number of competing theories became fashionable, and disagreements among their proponents fuelled an academic growth industry. Underpinning every account of natural law is a presupposition about how faith and reason are related, and a presupposition about how nature and grace are related. Depending on how one construes these primary relationships, one can come up with different accounts of natural law all purporting to be Catholic. There are commonly three different ways of reading the relationship between the couplets ‘nature and grace’ and ‘faith and reason’. These are often described in academic short-hand as Neo-Thomist, Transcendental Thomist and Neo-Augustinian or Augustinian-Thomist.

This chapter will introduce the basic, theoretical architecture of competing Islamic natural law theories from the pre-modern period (ninth to fourteenth centuries). Specifically, it will outline juristic debates in the usul al-fiqh genre on reason as a source of law, where revelation is silent. Thereafter it will reflect on a range of doctrinal debates in which many of those same pre-modern jurists came to a legal determination without reference to scriptural (or any other) texts. Drawing on a curious heuristic they labelled huquq Allah and huquq al-ʿibad (the claims of God and the claims of individuals), I will show that despite not invoking (expressly or otherwise) any natural law account of Islamic law, jurists nonetheless developed law based on a mode of rationality that could be called anything from ‘rational’ to ‘common-sense’ to ‘pragmatic’.

Natural law ethics is a normative theory, which, as its name implies, centres on two key notions: nature and law. It is animated by the idea that nature, and human nature in particular, is the source and ground of the moral laws (or, more widely, moral norms) which govern our nature. Historically, the ‘nature’ component was first theorised in Ancient Greece and Rome, where philosophers argued that human beings are intrinsically directed to and fulfilled by certain ends – the claim of natural teleology. The ‘law’ component found its most pronounced embodiment far earlier, in the scriptures of Ancient Israel, which proclaim a binding set of moral commandments that issue from a transcendent deity. The history of natural law ethics is, put broadly, a mediation between these two cultural inheritances – and is therefore the site of several recurrent controversies. How, exactly, are moral norms embedded in nature?

To examine the prospects for natural law ethics, we need first a working definition of it. But as the previous chapters suggest, any such definition is controversial. Thomas Aquinas defines law as ‘an ordinance of reason directed towards the common good from him who has care of the community and promulgated’. It follows that for a law to be natural, it must be not only grounded in human nature – something Aquinas affirms elsewhere – but also promulgated: the only available promulgator being God. Rosalind Hursthouse, by contrast, takes natural law ethics to be metaphysically less demanding. For her, its theistic underpinning is not salient, and appears even moot. What is salient is the provision of a naturistically grounded criterion of right or good action. Natural law ethics is thus distinct from ethical naturalism in general, which ‘provides a criterion for a particular trait’s being a virtue, not a criterion of right or good action, except indirectly’.