scholarly journals Natural Equality and Natural Law in Locke’s Two Treatises

2019 ◽  
pp. 127-146
Author(s):  
Kari Saastamoinen
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Individual Autonomy ◽  
Political Equality ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Successful Attempt ◽  
Democratic Societies

This chapter discusses John Locke’s account of natural equality as presented in his Two Treatises of Government. Together with its sister concept natural liberty, natural equality is often associated with the idea of Locke as an early representative of liberal political thought. Locke’s notions of natural liberty and equality are seen as sings of his commitment to the values of individual autonomy and political equality held central in liberal-democratic societies of today, and his political theory is read as a more or less successful attempt to articulate those values. The chapter argues that such approach to Locke’s remarks on natural equality is historically misleading, and they are best understood when we take seriously the fact that he developed his political theory within the parameters of seventeenth-century natural law.

Epilogue and Conclusion

2021 ◽  
pp. 268-272
Author(s):  
Sarah Mortimer
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
The Church

This chapter draws together the themes of the book and looks forward to the later-seventeenth century. It argues that for much of the sixteenth century politics was subordinate to religion; temporal authorities needed the additional sanctions provided by religious belief if they were to exert any power over the consciences of individuals. The effect was to entangle temporal power in the deepening conflicts over religious truth, and thus to reveal the brittleness of any conception of political authority which relied on the support of the Church. At the same time, older traditions of political thought did not go away and often became stronger. The circulation of classical ideas, the discovery of new peoples, the growing interest in historical change and development all suggested alternative ways of legitimizing political power, often using natural law and avoiding any reliance on specifically Christian commitments. What happened in the early-seventeenth century, and most obviously in the writing of Hugo Grotius, was a move not only to ground political society in a particular conception of human nature (conceived of juridically, as a source of rights and obligations) but also to detach Christianity from that view of human nature. It was this understanding of human beings which enabled the development of a social contract tradition through the seventeenth century and beyond, and became an important source for modern liberalism. The questions it raised would help to shape the thought of the next century.

SACRED HISTORY AND POLITICAL THOUGHT: NEAPOLITAN RESPONSES TO THE PROBLEM OF SOCIABILITY AFTER HOBBES

2013 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOHN ROBERTSON
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Near East ◽  
Family Relations ◽  
Giambattista Vico ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Critical Scholarship ◽  
Sacred History

ABSTRACTFrom the mid-seventeenth century, the problem of human sociability, long a staple of natural jurisprudence, became even more central to political thought. Faced with Hobbes's insistence on man's natural unsociability, Protestant thinkers continued to treat the question from within natural law. For reasons we do not yet understand, however, Catholic thinkers did not. Instead, it is argued here, they turned to sacred history, and in particular to the Old Testament, as the earliest record of the formation of human societies, Hebrew and gentile. The materials for this enquiry were provided by new critical scholarship on the Bible and the peoples of the ancient Near East. Despite the hostility of the authorities in Rome to its findings, this scholarship was widely available in the Catholic world, notably so in contemporary Naples. Two of the most remarkable applications of sacred history to the problem of sociability were by the Neapolitans Pietro Giannone, in his ‘Triregno’ (1731–3), and Giambattista Vico, in the Scienza nuova (1725–44). These works explored the ways in which family relations, religious practices, and war enabled the ancient Hebrews and their gentile neighbours to form and maintain societies, notwithstanding the unsocial tendency of human passions.

scholarly journals ROBERT PERSONS, POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY, AND THE LATE ELIZABETHAN SUCCESSION DEBATE

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. J. M. INNES
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Significant Influence ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Direct Consequence ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Political Resistance

AbstractThis article explores how, and why, Robert Persons's A conference about the next succession to the crowne of Ingland (1594) scandalized late Elizabethan England. By invoking the spectres of popular sovereignty and political resistance, Persons, as is well known, threatened to disrupt the succession of James VI of Scotland to Elizabeth I's throne. In doing so, however, he also undermined the very notion that the English crown passed by succession at all. After discussing Persons's political thought, this article examines the responses to it by such writers as John Hayward, Henry Constable, Peter Wentworth, and James VI himself. Their turn towards natural law as a basis for James's title was, it is argued, a direct consequence of the Conference’s argument. As well as shining long-overdue light on Hayward's political thought, the article thus argues that the reception of Persons's Conference was a significant influence on the development of English political thought in the early seventeenth century.

Multiculturalism and Liberalism

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juliet Hooker
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Minority Group ◽  
The United States ◽  
Individual Autonomy ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Philosophical Debate ◽  
Liberal Neutrality ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Racial Injustice

This chapter examines the debate about multiculturalism in political theory. It traces the emergence of a philosophical literature to justify policies enacted by contemporary liberal democratic states that seek to fairly accommodate cultural diversity and remedy racial injustice. It traces the origins of the contemporary philosophical debate about multiculturalism (particularly in the United States and Canada) to the communitarian critique of theories of liberal neutrality that emphasized individual freedom and autonomy at the expense of collective membership. The liberal–communitarian debate culminated in liberal defenses of minority group rights that emphasize the centrality of culture and group membership to individual autonomy. The essay goes on to consider three remaining sources of tension in liberal multiculturalism: the question of how to reconcile commitments to gender equality and multiculturalism, the issue of how to deal with illiberal minority cultures (particularly religious groups), and the failure to adequately conceive racial justice.

From Hobbes to Shaftesbury

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Brooke
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
The Political

This chapter considers the seventeenth-century reception of Thomas Hobbes, and in particular the question of how he was understood as being both a funny (and dangerous) kind of Stoic and later as a funny (and dangerous) kind of Epicurean. It discusses how Hobbes came to be characterized as an Epicurean and how his critics responded to the political theory he had presented in Leviathan — particularly his arguments on natural law. The chapter focuses in particular on Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, whose philosophical sympathies led him to become an opponent of Hobbes and a supporter of the latitude-men or latitudinarians and their particular engagements with Stoicism.

The Political Thought of Richard Cumberland: Sovereignty and the Escape from the Search for Origins

1977 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 535-548
Author(s):  
Linda Kirk
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
Human Society ◽  
The Past ◽  
Important Stage ◽  
De Legibus

Much of what seventeenth-century writers and preachers had to say about allegiance was framed in terms of deference to the past: subjects owed obedience now because they were heirs to some ancient obedience rightfully exacted. Patriachalists and contractualists alike supposed that questions of legitimacy were best resolved by examining what they took to be the origins of human society. Eventually it became possible to construct a utilitarian political theory which instead judged a given system in terms of the needs it met; Richard Cumberland's De Legibus Naturae (1672) marks an important stage in this process. His cosmology is Christian and his political theory shares many trappings with those of his contemporaries, but from an examination of human interdependence he succeeds in establishing an unequivocally utilitarian account of sovereignty.

FRENCH LIBERALISM’S “INDIAN DETOUR”: LOUIS DUMONT, THE INDIVIDUAL, AND LIBERAL POLITICAL THOUGHT IN POST-1968 FRANCE

2014 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 685-710
Author(s):  
JACOB COLLINS
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Intellectual Tradition ◽  
Economic Issues ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Revolution

Liberalism in France has typically been concerned with political, rather than economic, issues. Its classic texts—those of Constant, Guizot, and Tocqueville—were written in the aftermath of the Revolution, and reflected on the historical and political problems that grew out of it: the nature of the modern state, the rights and duties of the individual, and the nexus of institutions that mediated their relationship. These writings defined the contours of modern French liberalism, and became a key resource for thinkers in the late 1970s, notably Pierre Rosanvallon and Marcel Gauchet, who were looking for ways to revitalize the liberal-democratic project. In his 1985 study of Guizot, Rosanvallon could regret that “the question of liberalism in French political culture of the nineteenth century is ‘missing’ in contemporary thought.”1 If the task of political theory was to recover this intellectual tradition, what were the terms of the recovery? Which ideas were missing from the conceptual landscape of the 1970s to inspire it?

Hellenistic Political Theory

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phillip Mitsis
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Hellenistic Period ◽  
Political Views ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Conditions

There is an almost schizophrenic quality to much of the surviving evidence for political thought in the Hellenistic period. The philosophers usually taken to be most characteristic of the Hellenistic period and whose views were to prove by far the most influential for subsequent political thinkers—the Epicureans, Stoics, and sometimes, honorifically, because of their influence on the Stoics, the Cynics—all emphatically insist that individuals can achieve perfect happiness completely on their own and under any kinds of inhospitable political conditions. This article considers a range of recent major reconstructions of Hellenistic political views by scholars who claim that the period did indeed engage in genuine political philosophy. It agrees with Isaiah Berlin's claim that the radically depoliticized outlook of Hellenistic philosophers signaled one of the most revolutionary and crucial breaks in the history of Western political thought. Moreover, two of their central tenets—Stoic natural law and the Epicurean social contract—were to prove unexpectedly fruitful for later political thinkers.

Testing pragmatic genealogy in political theory: The curious case of John Rawls

2020 ◽  
pp. 147488512090977
Author(s):  
Francesco Testini
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
John Rawls ◽  
Alternative Strategy ◽  
The Political ◽  
Bernard Williams ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Democratic Societies ◽  
Basic Ideas ◽  
Miranda Fricker

Starting from the ‘Dewey Lectures’, Rawls presents his conception of justice within a contextualist framework, as an elaboration of the basic ideas embedded in the political culture of liberal-democratic societies. But how are these basic ideas to be justified? In this article, I reconstruct and criticize Rawls’s strategy to answer this question. I explore an alternative strategy, consisting of a genealogical argument of a pragmatic kind – the kind of argument provided by authors like Bernard Williams, Edward Craig and Miranda Fricker. I outline this genealogical argument drawing on Rawls’s reconstruction of the origins of liberalism. Then, I clarify the conditions under which this kind of argument maintains vindicatory power. I claim that the argument satisfies these conditions and that pragmatic genealogy can thus partially vindicate the basic ideas of liberal-democratic societies.

scholarly journals The obesity problem as a challenge to liberal political theory

2011 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 99-115
Author(s):  
Misa Djurkovic
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
The State ◽  
Individual Autonomy ◽  
Classical Liberal ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Democratic State ◽  
Liberal Approach ◽  
Contemporary Liberalism ◽  
Liberal Political Theory ◽  
Do So

Spread of obesity and diseases that it causes brought to justified warnings of an epidemic. Author starts from classical liberal differentiation between self regarding and others regarding acts, and then raises the issue of the possible liberal approach to obesity problem. He presents real causes of the obesity, and proceeds with two different visions of contemporary liberalism: one, abstract, which doesn?t pay attention to context in which we have to draw the line between self and others regarding acts, and second, advanced, responsible liberalism of contemporary liberal democratic state which cares a lot about the context, including international one. From the first perspective state would be obliged not to interfere in overweight problems of its citizens. From the second it would be forced to do so for many substantial reasons. Although author justifies right and even duty of the state to deal with obesity problem, he insists that for the time being it is mostly reacting in wrong way: since idea of individual autonomy is not perceived in adequate way, state reacts to the consequences and not to the causes of the problem.

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