A TREATISE OF THE LAWS OF NATURE
NATURAL LAW AND
ENLIGHTENMENT CLASSICS
Knud Haakonssen
General Editor
This book is published by Liberty Fund, Inc., a foundation established to encourage study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.
The cuneiform inscription that serves as our logo and as a design element in Liberty Fund books is the earliest-known written appearance of the word “freedom” (amagi), or “liberty.” It is taken from a clay document written about 2300 B.C. in the Sumerian city-state of Lagash.
Foreword, annotations, index © 2005 by Liberty Fund, Inc.
Margin notes have been moved from the margin of the paragraph in the print edition to precede the paragraph in this eBook, in a smaller font.
Cover art: Portrait of Richard Cumberland used by permission of the Master and Fellows of Magdalene College, Cambridge.
This eBook edition published in 2013.
eBook ISBNs:
978-1-61487-037-1
978-1-61487-185-9
CONTENTS
A TREATISE OF THE LAWS OF NATURE
A PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY INTO THE LAWS OF NATURE
CHAPTER I. Of the Nature of Things
CHAPTER II. Of Human Nature, and Right Reason
CHAPTER IV. Of the Practical Dictates of Reason
CHAPTER V. Of the Law of Nature, and Its Obligation
CHAPTER VI. Of Those Things Which Are Contain’d in the General Law of Nature
CHAPTER VII. Of the Original of Dominion, and the Moral Virtues
CHAPTER VIII. Of the Moral Virtues in Particular
APPENDIX II. A Treatise Concerning the Obligation, Promulgation, and Observance of the Law of Nature
APPENDIX 1. Richard Cumberland’s Original Dedication to De Legibus Naturae
APPENDIX 2. Hezekiah Burton’s “Address to the Reader”
The seventeenth century witnessed what has been called the “heroic” period in the development of modern natural law theory.1 Beginning with Hugo Grotius, Protestant thinkers began to experiment with scholastic natural law ideas to produce a distinctive and highly successful tradition of natural jurisprudence that would come to dominate European political thought. Viewed from the eighteenth century, the success of the tradition could be, and often was, taken for granted, but such retrospective views could often conceal the extent to which the early pioneers faced real challenges in their attempts to reconcile natural law ideas with the rigors of Protestant theology. In this context, Richard Cumberland is perhaps one of the great unsung heroes of the natural law tradition. Cumberland’s De Legibus Naturae constituted a critical intervention in the early debate over the role of natural jurisprudence at a moment when the natural law project was widely suspected of heterodoxy and incoherence.
Hugo Grotius’s work undoubtedly generated a great deal of interest among Protestant thinkers, but it also occasioned a critical response that threatened to undermine the whole project. The most dangerous writer in this respect was Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes simultaneously adapted and subverted the new jurisprudence, producing a theory that would become notorious for its apparent atheism and absolutism. As a result, early natural law writers were dogged by accusations of Hobbism, the charge that behind their attempts to forge a new tradition lay the reduction of moral and political obligation to self-interest alone. Cumberland’s De Legibus Naturae, with its sustained assault on Hobbes’s ideas, constituted one of the most important and influential responses to this damaging accusation. Cumberland not only produced one