A Treatise of the Laws of Nature

Foreword

foreword 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 responsethat 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, 1. For discussion of the “modern” theory of natural law, see Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (1979), and also his “The ‘Modern’ Theory of Natural Law” (1987), 99–122. For more recent discussions of the same tradition, see Haakonssen, Natural Law and Modern Philosophy (1996); and Hochstrasser,Natural Law Theories in the Early Enlightenment (2000). ix x foreword 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 of the most effective critiques of Hobbes’s ideas, but he also used the opportunity to propose a new and distinctivelyscientificapproachtoquestions of moral and political obligation. Cumberland’s achievement was to provide a much-needed defense of the natural jurisprudential project while laying important theoretical foundations fortheworkof suchlater writers as Clarke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson.2 Richard Cumberland (1632–1718)3 Cumberland was born in London, the son of a Salisbury Court tailor. He attended St. Paul’s School, and in June 1649, barely five monthsafter the execution of Charles I, he entered Magdalene College, Cambridge. At Magdalene, Cumberland supplementedhisregularstudieswitharich diet of natural philosophy, developing the scientific knowledge that in2 . For Cumberland’s contribution to the natural law tradition, see Parkin,Science, Religion and Politics in Restoration England: Richard Cumberland’s “De Legibus Naturae ” (1999), especially ch. 7; Kirk, Richard Cumberland and Natural Law (1987); Haakonssen, “The Character and Obligation of Natural Law According to Richard Cumberland” (2001), pp. 29–47; Schneider, Justitia Universalis (1967), pp. 166–75; Darwall, The British Moralists and the Internal “Ought” (1995), pp. 80–108; and Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy (1998), pp. 101–17. For Cumberland’s in- fluence upon Scottish Enlightenment thought, see Forbes, “Natural Law and the Scottish Enlightenment” (1982), pp. 186–204. See also Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics (1975), pp. 18–26; Moore and Silverthorne, “Gerschom Carmichael and the Natural Jurisprudence Tradition in Eighteenth-Century Scotland” (1983),pp.73–88. 3. The main source for Cumberland’s life is a short biography written by his sonin -law Squire Payne: “Brief Account of the Life . . . of the Author,” prefaced to Cumberland’s Sanchoniatho’s Phoenician History (1720).LindaKirkhasproducedthe best modernaccountin“RichardCumberland(1632–1718)andHisPoliticalTheory,” Ph.D. diss., University of London, 1976. Kirk’s discussion forms the basis for ch. 1 of her Richard Cumberland and Natural Law. Some additional information is provided in Parkin, Science, Religion and Politics, Introduction. foreword xi forms almost every page of the De Legibus. Cumberland’s interest in the new science was crucial to his natural law theory; the union of natural philosophy and natural theology created the basis for his science of morality and his logical demonstration of divine obligation. Cumberland left Cambridge after receiving his master of arts in 1656, becoming rector of the small Northamptonshire parish of Brampton Ash in 1658. This rural posting might have marked the...