Locke’s Ciceronian Liberalism

2021 ◽  
pp. 137-186
Author(s):  
Michael C. Hawley
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Original Formulation ◽  
Law Of Nature

This chapter considers how John Locke reunites the two strands of Ciceronian thought from the seventeenth century. Locke returns to Cicero’s original formulation of natural law republicanism and innovates on it. He derives from Cicero’s natural law a set of natural rights, corresponding to the duties Cicero claimed were imposed by natural law. Locke’s law of nature is a barely modified version of Ciceronian natural law, but his conception of natural rights allows him to solve a number of theoretical problems posed by Cicero’s construal of the issue. Locke also offers a solution to the puzzle of how a doctrine of natural law could meet the standard of skeptical epistemology.

Power and Authority in Seventeenth Century England

1974 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Tuck
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Law Of Nature ◽  
The People ◽  
The Law ◽  
Power And Authority

Many English political theorists of the mid-seventeenth century reveal in their writings an awareness that new political terminologies were needed to cope with the apparent breakdown of traditional ideologies. Such an insight is of course famously displayed by Thomas Hobbes and the early Hobbists such as Dudley Digges, in their treatment of orthodox Natural Law doctrines - ‘if we looke backe to the Law of Nature, we shall finde that the people would have had a clearer and more distinct notion of it, if common use of calling it Law had not helped to confound their understanding, when it ought to have been named the Right of nature’ wrote Digges in 1643.

Adams, Wilson, and the American Res Publica

2021 ◽  
pp. 187-220
Author(s):  
Michael C. Hawley
Keyword(s):  
Natural Law ◽  
Final Stage ◽  
John Locke ◽  
The Self ◽  
Original Formulation ◽  
American Founding ◽  
John Adams ◽  
American Experiment ◽  
Res Publica

This chapter considers the final stage of the Ciceronian tradition: the American founding. Insofar as the American founding is influenced by John Locke, it is indirectly indebted to Cicero. However, John Adams and James Wilson recognize the profoundly Ciceronian character of American liberal republicanism. Both argue that the prevailing understandings of natural law, justice, liberty, and what it means to be a republic derive from Cicero’s formulation. Moreover, Adams and Wilson see the American experiment as proving Cicero right, that a republic tethered to natural law could be realized. They also see the American Founding as contributing its own innovation to this tradition: written constitutionalism. The self-conscious writing of a regime’s constitution enables the principles of a natural law republic to be fixed and formalized in a way that Cicero’s original formulation did not provide for.

Fundamental Human Rights and the Military Regime in Nigeria: What did the Courts Say?

1971 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. O. Aihe
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Law Of Nature ◽  
Positive Law ◽  
Moral Force ◽  
Traditional Natural ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Military

The rights of the individual in the society have been conceived as natural rights—which in the modern state have no more than a moral force. In the context of a modern state which asserts absolute powers within its borders, it appears idle to suggest as in the traditional natural law theories that there is anything like a law of nature existing independently of and overriding positive law.

scholarly journals From Progressive Radicalism to Democratic Degeneration: The Trajectory of John Locke's Political Theory

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-29
Author(s):  
Sirvan Karimi
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
John Locke ◽  
The State ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
Fundamental Function ◽  
Law Of Nature ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Organic Intellectual

As an organic intellectual of the emerging propertied class in 17th century England, John Locke has made an enduring contribution to the prevailing ideas shaping the socio-political order in Western societies and beyond. Through invoking the law of nature and natural rights which were nothing more than what he had abstracted from the socio-economic conditions of the seventeenth century and had projected back into the state of nature, Locke assiduously embarked on justifying the separation of civil society from the state, naturalizing  class inequalities identifying the preservation of property as the fundamental function of the state, and rationalizing the subordination of  propertyless classes to the emerging  liberal democratic political order geared to preserve the interests of economically hegemonic classes.

John Locke: Natural Law and Innate Ideas

Dialogue ◽  
1980 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 531-545 ◽  
Author(s):  
S.B. Drury
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Natural Laws ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
Innate Ideas ◽  
Essay Concerning Human Understanding

In the seventeenth century, the concept of natural law was linked with that of “innate ideas”. Natural laws were said to be ideas imprinted by nature or by God on men's minds and were the very foundation of religion and morality. Locke's attack on innate ideas in the first book of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding is therefore considered to be an assault on natural law. Modern critics like Peter Laslett, W. von Leyden and Philip Abrams are of the opinion that Locke's critique of innate ideas in the Essay cannot be reconciled with the concept of natural law in the Two Treatises of Government.

scholarly journals Trzy „odczarowania” nowożytnej koncepcji prawa naturalnego

2020 ◽  
Vol 6(161) ◽  
pp. 169-187
Author(s):  
Michał Wendland
Keyword(s):  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Modern Concept ◽  
The Third ◽  
Law Of Nature ◽  
Theological Foundations ◽  
History Of

he article addresses, in the perspective of the history of modern philosophy, the issue of the transformation to which the concept of natural law was subject in the 17th and 18th centuries. The author shares the views of, among others, Habermas and Bobbio, according to which the modern concept of natural law has been made “more positive” or “disenchanted” (after Weber), and thus the traditionally understood law of nature was transformed into the concept of natural rights. The article distinguishes three forms of this process: the first one, i.e., the so-called bourgeois school of natural law (Grotius, Thomasius, Pufendorf); the second one, developed by representatives of the early (moderate) Enlightenment (Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu); the third one, the most radical one, represented by the thinkers the late Enlightenment, mainly French encyclopaedists and materialists (La Mettrie, Holbach, Condorcet, Paine). Their common feature was the gradual abandonment of the metaphysical or theological foundations of natural law in favour of a naturalised ethic.

scholarly journals Thinking with John Locke about the nature of human rights: vietnamese and global perspectives

XLinguae ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 3-18
Author(s):  
Hoa Thi Kim Do ◽  
Michal Valco
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Final Section ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Critical Assessment ◽  
The State ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Global Perspectives ◽  
Law Of Nature ◽  
The Subject

Our paper explores important topics related to John Locke’s thoughts on human rights and their viability for our contemporary discourse on the subject. We begin by exploring Locke’s education and epistemological reflections as factors that influenced his political philosophy. Next, we examine Locke’s views on the ‘state of nature,’ ‘law of nature,’ and ‘natural rights’ and show how his ideas have recently been appropriated (or contested) by Vietnamese and Western scholars. In the final section, we offer a critical assessment of the viability for the contemporary discourse of Locke’s metaphysical presuppositions from which he derives his notions of ‘natural rights.’

John Locke and Natural Law

Philosophy ◽  
1956 ◽  
Vol 31 (116) ◽  
pp. 23-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. von Leyden
Keyword(s):  
Natural Law ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Theory Of Knowledge ◽  
The Political ◽  
Law Of Nature ◽  
Empiricist Theory ◽  
The One ◽  
Medicine Education ◽  
Civil Government

It has been said, and few would deny, that John Locke is as important as the founder of philosophical liberalism as he is as the founder of the empiricist theory of knowledge. Though he was a most versatile thinker, writing on philosophy, politics, medicine, education, religion, and economics, and on all these with the knowledge of an expert and the influence of an authority, his fame no doubt derives on the one hand from his treatises on Toleration and Civil Government, and from his Essay on Human Understanding on the other. Whenever these are expounded by scholars, the political writings are discussed independently of the Essay and the Essay independently of the political writings. The reason for this is obviously that scholars have seen very little connexion between Locke's principal works. This has been changed with the appearance of a manuscript in which are preserved eight essays on the law of nature written by Locke in Latin shortly after the Restoration of 1660 and thirty years before the appearance in print of his major works. This manuscript has been published by me, and it is now possible to recognize that Locke's two main bodies of doctrine, namely his political theory and his theory of knowledge, have a common ground and that this lies in his early doctrine of natural law. Admittedly, the notion of a natural law can be seen to be of central importance in his treatise on Civil Government and it also plays its part in the Essay.

A Demonstrative Theory of Natural Law: Johannes Althusius and the Rise of Calvinist Jurisprudence

2009 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 248-265 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Witte
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
The Political ◽  
Legal Norms ◽  
Complex Theory ◽  
Religious Wars ◽  
Law And Politics ◽  
Procedural Rights

Early modern Calvinists produced a rich tradition of natural law and natural rights thought that shaped the law and politics of protestant lands. The German-born Calvinist jurist Johannes Althusius produced one of the most original Calvinist natural law theories at the turn of the seventeenth century. Althusius argued for the natural qualities of a number of basic legal norms and practices by demonstrating their near universal embrace by classical and biblical, catholic and protestant, theological and legal communities alike. On this foundation, he developed a complex theory of public, private, penal and procedural rights and duties for his day, to be embraced by everyone, particularly by those who were slaughtering each other in religious wars, persecutions and inquisitions. Althusius' theory of natural law and natural rights was Calvinist in inspiration but universal in aspiration, and it anticipated the political formulations of a number of later Western writers, including Locke, Rousseau and Madison.1

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