ABSTRACT
The idea of a “landscape law” is related to a similar demand, made by landscape architects, that “nature must become the law”. The idea that society ought to be governed by the ‘law of landscape’ must be seen in the context of the process by which the idea of landscape merged with that of nature in the course of the Renaissance and Enlightenment. The classical ‘Arcadian’ ideal of landscape as the expression of a natural society influenced the design of the parks surrounding country homes, and these designs, in turn, helped inspire the utopian visions of Enlightenment social and political theorists. The National Socialist idea of landscape was tied to ideas of race and nation in a way that was not the case with the landscape ideals of the Enlightenment, which readily accepted, for example, the use of foreign trees on Rousseau’s sepulchral island.
