American Interpretations of Natural Law

1926 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 524-547
Author(s):  
B. F. Wright
Keyword(s):  
Natural Law ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Natural Right ◽  
Law Of Nature ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Higher Law

When James Otis in 1764 declared that government “has an everlasting foundation in the unchangeable will of God, the author of nature, whose laws never vary,” and that “there can be no prescription old enough to supersede the law of nature and the grant of God Almighty, who has given to all men a natural right to be free,” he was at once making use of one of the oldest and most important conceptions in the history of political thought and giving to that concept a distinctly American meaning. His was merely one of the earliest examples in this country of a kind of political theory which was to find reflection in the Declaration of Independence in one generation, in the higher law doctrine in another, and in a famous trilogy of decisions of the Supreme Court in still a third. However, the natural-rights theory is by no means the only usage found for the natural-law concept in the political thought of this country, and it is the purpose of this paper to trace briefly the various interpretations placed upon it and the different forms through which it has passed.It is easy enough to say that natural law has meant just what the individual theorist desired to have it mean; for its content has varied from philosophical anarchy to paternalistic aristocracy, and from the assertion of strongly individualistic democracy to the defence of highly centralized government. But this statement does not dispose of the problem. It is necessary to know why and when these varying interpretations were advanced and what their exponents meant when they spoke so confidently of the laws of nature.

Conclusion—Rousseau’s paradox

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Community ◽  
The Political ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Social Democrat ◽  
The Social ◽  
Adequate Understanding ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter binds the book together, recapitulating its general argument, and offering pointers as to how the study relates to some contemporary questions of political theory. It suggests that a classification that distinguishes between Weber the ‘liberal’, Schmitt the ‘conservative’ and Neumann the ‘social democrat’, cannot provide an adequate understanding of this episode in the history of political thought. Nor indeed can it do so for other periods. In this book, one part of the development of their ideas has focused on the relationship between state and politics. By learning from their examples, people continue their own search for an acceptable balance between the freedom of the individual and the claims of the political community.

scholarly journals DEFOE, DISSENT, AND EARLY WHIG IDEOLOGY

2009 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 595-614
Author(s):  
K. R. P. CLARK
Keyword(s):  
Natural Law ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Ideology ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
Daniel Defoe ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Religious Difference ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Revolution

ABSTRACTThe nature of Whig ideology at its formation in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries continues to attract the attention of historians of political thought. This article contends that prevalent understandings of the taxonomy of the subject nevertheless still often remain secular, and do not fully attend to the religious constituencies of the authors involved. One key author was Daniel Defoe, who was credited with several anonymous pamphlets published after the Revolution of 1688. The effect of these attributions is to reinforce a homogenized picture of early Whig political ideology that fails to identify differences between authors who used similar terms such as ‘contract’, ‘resistance’, and ‘natural law’. This article de-attributes certain of these pamphlets, outlines the consequences for the history of political thought of that de-attribution, re-establishes Defoe's own political identity, and proposes that such a taxonomy should give more attention to religious difference.

Philosophy, Rights and Natural Law

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
German Empire ◽  
Modern Natural ◽  
History Of ◽  
Institutional Contexts

Honouring the work of Knud Haakonssen, this book consists of a series of studies that investigate the place of early modern natural law in the history of political thought. These studies follow Haakonssen’s lead in treating natural law as central to the formulation of doctrines of obligations and rights in accordance with the interests of early modern polities and churches. In doing so, they approach natural law less as a unified doctrine and much more as a field of cross-cutting idioms in which competing political and juridical programs were prosecuted for a variety of purposes. The studies thus investigate how natural law doctrines were formulated, received, and put to work in a wide array of cultural, political and institutional contexts, ranging from the political thought of the Dutch Arminians, Locke’s struggle with the concept of religious toleration, the political-jurisprudential thought of Pufendorf, Thomasius and Wolff in the German Empire, and the jurisprudential thought of Hume and Smith in the context of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Machiavelli’s Commonwealth without Justice

2021 ◽  
pp. 63-88
Author(s):  
Michael C. Hawley
Keyword(s):  
Natural Law ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Niccolo Machiavelli ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Niccolò Machiavelli ◽  
History Of

This chapter illustrates the fundamental divergence between the republican visions of Cicero and those of Niccolò Machiavelli. It demonstrates that Machiavelli does not share Cicero’s vision for a just commonwealth and should not be considered an heir to his strain of republican thought. The chapter also argues that Machiavelli moves further away from what would later become known as liberalism. He rejects the Ciceronian account of natural law, and his regime leaves no room for rights, consent, or the constitutional limitations on power that characterize Cicero’s thought. Machiavelli represents a failed challenge to the Ciceronian tradition. The chapter challenges long-standing accounts of Machiavelli’s place in the history of political thought.

Easily, At a Glance: Aristotle's Political Optics

2010 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 385-408 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Janssens
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Common Good ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
General Design ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
Political Unity ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Way

AbstractIn book VII of the Politics, Aristotle requires that the best regime be eusunoptos, “easily taken in at a glance.” Throughout the history of political thought, the attendant ideal of the polis as a compact and surveyable society was particularly influential. However, closer scrutiny of the way in which Aristotle uses eusunoptos suggests that it designates a problem rather than a solution, to wit, the problems of defining political unity and of attuning the individual and the common good. Exploring the different contexts in which eusunoptos occurs in Aristotle's works, this paper argues that it has political, rhetorical, and poetical meanings that cannot be entirely distinguished from each other. As such, the notion is shown to be germane to the general design of book VII, which constructs the best regime in order to bring to light the limits of politics.

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