Genoese to the Ligurian Sea.

Turn, he told his readers, to John

Selden's Mare clausum, where you will find arguments which will do
quite as well for Spanish claims to rights in the lands of America, as
they do for the English king's claims to the North Sea and the North
Atlantic. 59 Selden, of course, was writing in the terms of the language
of 'modem' iusnaturalism (described here by Richard Tuck), a
language in which objective conditions play a far larger role than
they did for the Spanish Thomists. But the terms of that discourse
were already beginning to look by the 1630s distincly unwieldy and
outmoded. As Solrzano concluded, the whole issue to which
Vitoria and his pupils had addressed themselves was now only of
'antiquarian interest' and was raised, when at all, only by 'certain
heretics out of envy of ou r nation'. 60
'

60

Poltica indiana, p. 114. On Selden's More clauJUm, see Richard Tuck, Natural Rights
Theories, pp. 86-7.
Poltica indiana, pp. 112-1 3.

An earlier version of this essay was read as a pape r at a conference on the Roman
Law held at the Warburg lnstitute and at the Social and Politica! Theory Seminar at
Cambridge. Iam grateful to those present, and in particular to John Dunn, Quentin
Skinner, Geoffrey Hawthorn and Istvan Hont, for their comments and
suggestions.

5
====================================== ~

The 'modern' theory of naturallaw

RICHARD TUCK

It is a familiar observation that the late eighteenth century in Europe

witnessed one of the greatest revolutions which has ever occurred in
the writing of philosophy. The novelty of the views of Kant and his
followers was obvious to contemporaries, and has been a truism in
the historiography of philosophy to this day. What is not so familiar
is that the writing of the history of philosophy was transformed at the
sarne time, and that it has remained in its new form ever since. ln
order to vindicate his own philosophy, Kant was located by both
himself and his successors in a new version of the history of
philosophy, sweeping away what had been commonplaces for more
than a century. The transformation was most complete in the area of
modern moral philosophy, for there not only did an old interpretation vanish, but so did a complete cast of characters. Given Kant's
own views, this was understandable, but the survival of the postKantian history into our own time has proved a great barrier to a
genuine understanding of the pre-Kantian writers. What I want to
do in this essay is outline the history of recent moral philosophy
which Kant rejected and seek to understand why it seems to the men
of the Enlightenment to be such a powerful and obvious account of
their origins.
The character of the revolution is best appreciated by contrasting
two works written within fifty years of each other, the second edition
ofJohannJakob Brucker's Historia critica philosophiae (1766; the first
edition was 1742-4) andJohann Gottlieb Buhle's Geschicte der neuern
Philosophie (1802). Both were vast compendiums written by
professors at Ge,r man universities to help their students find their
way through the philosophy courses; both were also seized on by the
wider European audience of their time as the best syntheses available of the history of philosophy. But both their overall structure
and their specific content are startlingly different.

99

-o

ro

Cf)

Brucker's main conviction was that 'eclectic' philosophy was

characteristic of the modem world. Although the dogmatic schools
of antiquity dd have modem representatves, the purest strain of
philosophical thinkng since the Renaissance was represented by the
man who respects no ancient authorities but 'diligently investigates
the nature and properties of the objects which come under his observation, that he may from these deduce clear principies, and arrive at
certain knowledge'. 1 This stress on certainty was, as we shall see, an
important element in this history. Bacon, according to Brucker, was
the first philosopher fully to exhibit this eclectic character, for he
was the first (apparently) who knowingly repudiated all the
philosophical schools of antiquity. Because eclectic philosophy does
not admit of division into schools, Brucker argued, the history of
post-Baconian philosophy should be written in terms of the areas of
inquiry rather than the substantive positions taken up, and he
therefore tried to write the history of modem 'moral and politicai
philosophy' as a whole.
ln this history, the first modem writer is Montaigne, closely
followed by Pierre Charron, for they were undogmatic investigators,
though they lacked the ability to put together a new and persuasive
system. That honour fell to Hugo Grotius, who was the main hera of
Brucker's account- a hero both because in his De iure bel/i ac pacis
(1625) he produced a genuinely new system of ethics which was not
simply a defence of one of the ethical theories of antiquity, and
because ofhis open eclecticism. 'His eclectic spirit clearly appears, in
the general maxim which he lays down conceming antient systems;
that, "as there never was any sect so enlightened, as to be entirely
destitute of truth." ' 2 Grotius was followed closely by John Selden,
Thomas Hobbes and above all Samuel Pufendorf, with whose De iure
naturae et gentium (1672) Brucker ends his story, disclaiming any
intention of carrying it down to his own time.
If we then move on to Buhle's Geschicteder neuern Philosophie, we find
a wholly different account. Gone, first of all, is the attempt to write
the history of modem moral philosophy as a whole; instead, modem
philosophy is characterised in every area by the opposition of two
schools described, in a terminology unknown to Brucker, as
1

Jacob Brucker, Historiacriticaphilosophiae, IV.2 (Leipzig, 1766), p. 4. The translation

is from William Enfield, The History of Philosophy . .. drawn up from Brucker's Historia
Critica Philosophiae II (London, 1819), p. 469, which in this passage is a literal rendering of Brucker. The standard account of this Enlightenment historiography is
Giovanni Santinello, Storia deli storie generali della filoJofia (Brescia, 1980- ).
Brucker, Historia, p. 00; Enfield, History, p . 543.

'realists' and 'idealists', that is of course 'empiricists' and

'rationalists', the labels which have bedevilled the history of
philosophy ever since. Grotius, the lynch-pin of Brucker's account
of the modem history of ethics, is treated with dramatic contempt:
his De iure bel/i ac pacis is 'ordinarily regarded as a system of natural
law, which it is not, nor could it be, according to the object which the
author set himself'- which was simply to write an analysis of internationallaw. 3 To doso, Grotius had to outline the fundamental principies of naturallaw, but 'the principies which serve him as a point of
departure are for the most part vague, inexact and without precision; for he presents the rights of men and of peoples against one
another, now as general maxims of reason, now as features of social
necessity, and sometimes as the customs of civil societies, to such an
extent that the science of naturallaw has neither firm foundations
nor any systematic unity in his work.' 4 Not only was his philosophy
unsatisfactory: Buhle even argued that Grotius was temperamentally and intellectually ill-equipped to act as ambassador for the
Queen of Sweden, the post Grotius held for more than a decade
at Paris. 5
It is Buhle's account which we find, in effect, in all subsequent
general works on the history of philosophy: Grotius and Pufendorf
have never re-emerged to take up places of honour in the history of
modem moral philosophy. If they are mentioned, it is as late
examples of scholasticism, and their modernity, which so impressed
Brucker, is not taken at all seriously. (One example: Alasdair
Maclntyre in A Short History of Ethics mentions Grotius's 'later
development of Aquinas' view of natural law into a law for the
nations' .) 6 The way in which intemationallawyers at the end of the
nineteenth century rediscovered the scholastic writers on the laws of
war, and placed both Grotius and Pufendorf in that tradition, helped
to underwrite this view of them.
And yet, Brucker's history was far more than a piece of his own
idiosyncracy. He was merely stating in very conventional terms a
history of modem ethics which was a commonplace in his time,
though he integrated it into a defence of 'electicism' which was,

' Johann Gottlieb Buhle, Geschicte der neuern Philosophie, III (Gttingen, 1802), p. 329;
Histoire de la philoJophie moderne, trans. A.]. L. Jourdan, III (Paris, 1816), p. 283.
4
Buhle, Geschicte, p. 332, Htoire, p. 285.
5
Buhle, GeJchicte, p. 328n, Htoire, p. 282n.
6
Alasdair Maclntyre, A Short HiJtory of EthicJ (London, 1967), p. 120. That is the sum
total of his discussion of Grotius; Pufendorf is not mentioned at all.

1/Je moaern meory OJ nalurat taw

perhaps, more unusual. 7 The origins of this history lie in the late
seventeenth century, and it received a comprehensive exposition at
the very beginning of the eighteenth century. The first sketch of it is
to be found in the preface to the first edition of Pufendorf' s De iure
naturae et gentium itself, in 1672: in the preface, he described Grotius
as 'the first person to make our age value the study of naturallaw',
and observed that his successors were Hobbes (in whose work, despite many errors, there is 'much of infinite value') and Selden. 8
This sketch, like the rest of the work, carne under fierce attack in
the next six years, and in 1678 Pufendorf answered his critics and
provided a justification and expansion of this history, in a volume
entitled Specimen contoversiarum circa ius natura/e ipsi nuper motarum. Most
of the attacks on the De iure naturae et gentium had come from the pens
of German Protestants; foremost among them were two colleagues
of Pufendorf at Lund University in Sweden, Nikolaus Beckmann,
professor of Roman Law (who later converted to Catholicism) and
Josua Schwartz, professor of Theology. They were joined by
Friedrich Gesen, the Lutheran minister of Gardelegen near
Magdeburg, Valentin Velthem, professor ofTheology atJena, and
Valentin Alberti, professor of Theology at Leipzig. 9
Although these Lutheran worthies had a variety of elabora te arguments to make against Pufendorf, their central claim was that he was
in effect a Hobbesian, and that he had therefore departed from the
metaphysical and theological orthodoxy of the Protestant church.
To establish this, they seized on two distinctive features of
Pufendorf's theory. One was Pufendorf's argument that no human
action is in itself either good or bad: actions do not exhibit inherent
moral properties comparable to their physical properties, but
instead have their moral qualities 'inputed' to them by the application to them of a rule devised by some agent or group of agents.
His critics took this strong ethical anti-realism to be comparable to
Hobbes's anti-realism, and to be in direct conflict with the truths of
Aristotelianism(as indeed itwas). The second feature ofPufendorf's
ideas which disturbed the Lutherans was his claim that the principies
A good example of the commonplace character of this history in the eighteenth
century is provided by its incorporation in a characteristic work of the salons,
Alexandre Savrien's Htoire des phi/osophes modernes (3rd edn, Paris, 1773, II, PP
79ff. for Grotius).
Samuel Pufendorf, De iure naturae et gentium (Lund, 1672), sig. b4v ff.
A full discussion of this controversy is to be found in Fiammetta Palladini,
Discussioni seicentesche su Samuel Pufendorf(Bologna, 1978). Iam indebted to Istvan
Hont for my introduction to this invaluable work.

lU:)

of the law of nature can all be interpreted as means towards the end
of the preservation of 'society', as this too seemed to them to be
comparable to Hobbes's account of the laws of nature. Although
they recognised that this latter claim was one which had also been
made by Grotius, the Lutherans tended to argue that Grotius was
fundamentally orthodox by virtue ofhis denial of the former claim;
and both Velthem and Alberti in fact produced their own commentaries on Grotius to make this point.
The history which was implicit in these Lutheran critiques of
Pufendorf was in some ways closer to the post-Kantian one.
Velthem praised the 'prince of moralists' Aquinas and the 'father of
metaphysics' Surez, and saw Grotius as in some sense their
successor; Hobbes was outside this realist tradition, and there was a
fundamental break between his work and Grotius's. 10 To answer
these critiques, Pufendorf once again stressed his rival history,
which cut Grotius off from his predecessors and linked him both to
Hobbes and to Pufendorf himself. ln some ways this looks like a
scramble for the authority of Grotius, but there was no particular
reason why Pufendorf should have felt obliged to wrest it from his
opponents - he had after all been quite criticai of Grotius (and,
indeed, of Hobbes) in De iure naturae et gentium. Pufendorf's account
is more plausibly read as a genuine attempt to place himself in what
he took to be his theoretical context, and to cast doubt on his
opponents' understanding of recent intellectual history.
The first chapter of the Specimen is entitled 'The origin and
development of the study of natural law', and it starts from the
assertion that 'in fact, there was no one before Hugo Grotius who
accurately distinguished the laws of nature from positive law, and
put them in proper order'. 11 The New Testament contained the
foundations of the law of nature, but it could not be used as the
fundamental text in the study of the law, for it also contained much
that non-Christians would not accept- and the essence of the laws of
nature was that all men actually recognised their force. The classical
writers were also deficient; it is true that 'among the various sects of
ancient philosophy, the Stoics made some claims which, somewhat
emended, would apparently have been easily developed into a body
of natural jurisprudence; but they were neglected, and only the
10

Samuel Pufendorf, Specimen controversiarum circa jus natura/e tPsi nuper motarum
(Uppsala, 1678), p. 26. For the problem of which work ofVelthem's is quoted here,
se e Palladini, Dcussioni., p. 200, n. 3. 11 Pufendorf, Specimen, p. 1.

dogmas of Aristotle admitted to the schools'. 12 His objection to

Aristotle's moral theory was its localism: 'his Ethics, which deals with
the principies ofhuman action, apparently contains scarcely anything
other than the duties of a citizen in some Greek polis. ]ust as in his
Politics, he seems mainly to have had in view the practices ofhis own
Greek states, and to have puta special value on their liberty; which is
a grave defect in a study intended to serve the interests of the whole
human race.' 13
Not until Grotius did anyone produce a work uncontaminated by
the theories of earlier writers. 14 Pufendorf even conjectured that it
had been inspired 'by what the most perceptive Bacon, once
Chancellor of England, declared about the advancement of learning', 15 an association with Bacon which h e was the first to make. His
remarks represent a very early use of Bacon as a symbol of antischolastic enlightenment, at least outside the peculiar circles of the
mid-seventeenth-century enthusiastics for a technological utopia
who have been studied by Charles Webster; like Pufendorf's whole
interpretation, this use of Bacon became a standard feature of
histories of philosophy before Buhle, as we saw in the case of
Brucker. Grotius was the model for all students of the laws of nature;
though, in a sideswipe at Velthem and Alberti, Pufendorf warned
against treating De iure bel/i ac pacis as a text in need of scholastic
commentaries - in the end Grotius would become like Aristotle,
buried beneath pedantry and casuistry. 16
Although Grotius made the breakthrough into a modern science
of naturallaw, Pufendorf was fairly criticai of some of his views, and
in particular ofhis claim that the laws of nature are equivalent to laws
of logic, comparable to the proposition that twice two is four.
Pufendorf of course denied just this in his De iure naturae et gentium,
and he repeated his denial in the Specimen. But he also acknowledged
that 'it can happen, that someone who goes wrong on some general
issue, can get particular matters absolutely right. Though it should
not make his definition any the less faulty, there are a vast number of
questions which Grotius answers correctly.' 17 ln other words,
Pufendorf believed that while the superstructure of Grotius's theory
was correct, its foundations were in need of modification. ln the
Specimen he failed to give a clear explanation of why he approved of
the superstructure, other than some references to Grotius's use of
12
14

15

lbid., p. 8. 13 Ibid., p. 9.
' Accinx it porro sese GrotiuJ ad moliendum opus, in quo nulla priorum vestigia
ipsum regebant.' Jbid., p. 10 ~
17
lbtd., p. 9 . 16 Ibtd., p. 11; cf. also pp. 86-9 .
Ibrd., p. 169.

the principie of'sociability'. But it is fairly clear from his argument

in the D e iure naturae et gentium that he took the common ground
between Grotius and himself to be, as his Lutheran opponents
perceived, the idea that the laws of nature consisted of rules
concerning the preservation of indivtduals.
The crucial passage in the D e iure naturae et gentium is Book II,
chapter 3.11:
1t is an easy Matter to discover the Foundation of Natural Law. Man is an
Animal extremely desirous of his own Preservation, of himself expos'd to
many W ants, unable to secure his own Safety and Maintenance, withou t the
Assistance of his Fellows, and capable of returning the Kindness by the
Furtherance of mutual Good: But then heis often malicious, insolent, and
easily provok' d, and as powerful in effecting Mischief, as h e is ready in
designing it. Now that such a Creature may be preserv'd and supported, and
may enjoy the good Things attending his Condition of Life, it is necessary
that h e be social; that is, that h e uni te himself to those ofhis own Species, and
in such a Manner regula te his Behaviour towards them, as they may have no
fair Reason to do him Harm, but rather incline to pro mote his Interests, and
to secure his Rights and Concerns. This then will appear a [recte the?)
fundamental Law of Nature, Every Man ought, as far as in him lies, to pro mote and
preserve a peaceful Sociableness with others. 18

This, as we shall see la ter, is more or less identical to Grotius's theory

about the content of the laws of nature. Both Pufendorf and Grotius
believed that what was right (honestum), was so because it was
fundamentally profitable (utile) to an individual in need of protection
from his fellow men, and both quoted with approval those passages
of Cicero where he associated the right and the profitable (though
Ccero did not believe that utilttas was logically prior to honestas). lt
was because Pufendorf believed this, that he could also speak of
Hobbes with such approval, and bracket his name with Grotius's.
His disagreement with Grotius carne ove r the question of whether
a belief that some course of action was profitable (in this general
sense) was in itself sufficient to induce a belief in an agent that the
course of action was morally obligatory. Grotius apparently
believed that it was, and that an accurate assessment of social
realities was enough to give rise to knowledge of an obligatory moral
law. Pufendorf, on the other hand, observed that men can often act
quite knowingly against their own interests, and that therefore
knowledge of what is in ou r interests cannot be sufficient to make us
believe we are under an obligation to perform the actions.
18

Samuel Pufend o rf, The Law of N ature and NationJ, ed. Jean Barbeyrac, trans. Basil
Kenn et (London, 1 749) p . 134.

To make these Dictates ofReason obtain the Power and Dignity ofLaws, it
is necessary to cal! in a much higher Principie to our Assistance. For altho'
the Usefulness and Expediency of them be clearly apparent, yet this bare
Consideration could never bring so strong a Tie on Mens Minds, but that
they would recede from these Rules, whenever a Man was pleas'd either to
neglect his own Advantage, or to pursue it by some different Means, which
he judg'd more proper, and more likely to succeed. Neither can the will of
any Person be so strongly bound by his own bare Resolution, as to hinder
him from acting quite contrary, whenever the Humour takes him.

This 'higher principie' upon which Pufendorf called was the will of
God; it was only because all men believed in a God who had power
over them, that they felt obliged to do something which they might
not otherwise choose to do. His criticism ofGrotius (and Hobbes) in
this areais forceful and perceptive. But the crucial point to stress at
the moment is that the criticism did not take him as far away from
Grotius and Hobbes as one might have expected, if one considered
only these foundational matters. Pufendorfbelieved that we determine what it is that God wills us to do, by considering what is in our
best, long-term interests: we know that God wishes us to be preserved,
and therefore we know that we are obliged to do whatever is
necessary for ou r preservation. W e need no beliefs which a rational
and self-controlled atheist could not also possess, in order to determine the content of the laws of nature; and Pufendorf always
emphasised that the content of the laws was the important issue, and
that there was no point to the kind of trivial propositions which his
Lutheran opponents believed to be foundational to a moral theory,
such as 'what is morally right is to be performed'. 20 As Pufendorf
said, the problem was to determine what was morally right; and his
answer to this question suggests that the Lutherans who accused
Pufendorf of a kind of Hobbism had seen a genuine and important
feature of his theory.
Having argued that Grotius represented a fundamental break with
all previous theories of naturallaw, Pufendorf went on to outline the
developments in the subject after 1625. The principal followers of
Grotius, Pufendorf argued, wereJohn Selden and Thomas Hobbes.
Both shared Grotius's basic approach, and in particular his hostility
to scholasticism; but both had grave deficiencies. Selden 'did not
deduce the law of nature from some principie whose force all nations
would recognise', but from a specifically jewish source, albeit one
supposedly promulgated to all mankind, namely the Praecepta
19

lbid., p. 141.

20

See his remarks in the Specimen, p. 123.

noachidarum. 21 Hobbes tried to construct a mathematical model of

the laws of nature, but what he developed was in fact the old
Epicurean hypothesis (possibly, Pufendorf conjecture~, becau~e h~~
great friend Gassendi had tried to do the sarne m phys1cs) ..
Nevertheless, he was a man of great intellect, and he had forced h1s
opponents to think very carefully about fu~damental fe~tur~s of ~he
law of nature. The last person to figure m Pufendorf s h1stoncal
ketch was another Englishman, Richard Cumberland, who had
~ublished his De legibus naturae in the sarne ~ear a~ Pufend?rf'.s De iure
naturae et gentium. Pufendorf recorded h1s dehght at fmdmg that
someone else had independently discovered many of the sarne
points (particularly in opposition to Hobbes) which he himself ~ad
thought of, and in the second edition of the De iure naturae et genttum
23
h e incorporated extensive references to Cumberland.
ln its broad outlines, Pufendorf's sketch was togo through almost
unaltered into the eighteenth-century textbooks. Only one thing
needed to be added to this account of modem moral philosophy in
order to tum it into precisely the history which Brucker put forward.
As we saw, alongside Bacon and Grotius, Brucker put Montaigne
and Charron: the modern moral science, in his eyes, began as a
response to ethicalsceptirm. Although in some ways this was indeed
assumed by Pufendorf, it is not at all explicit in his work; the writer
who put it at the centre of the history of morality was the French
Protestant philosopher Jean Barbeyrac. At the beginning of the
eighteenth century he undertook to place the ideas of the modem
natural-law school before as wide a public as possible. His great
editions of Grotius and Pufendorf, and their translations into
French and English, flooded both Europe and the New World, and
represented in themselves virtually an encyclopaedia of modem
politicai thought. To the 1709 edition ofhis Pufendorfhe appended
a history of ethics, which was translated into English as An Historical
and Critica! Account ofthe Science ofMorality, and which sets out more o r
less completely the history which was to be repeated by Brucker.
According to Barbeyrac, the writers of antiquity and the Middle Ages
all failed to produce an adequate scientific ethics; the Stoics and
Ccero (whom Barbeyrac took to be a 'moderate Academic', i. e.,
sceptic) carne nearest, but even they were deficient in a number of
crucial respects. Not until Grotius 'broke the ice' after the long
24
domination of Aristotle did a new and truly scientific ethics appear.
" Ibid., p . 3.
23
Ibid., p. 13.

Ibid. , p. 12.
" Pufendorf, The Law of Nature and N ations, pp. 63, 67.

22

1/Je moaern tbeory oj natural taw

But in addition to recapitulating Pufendorf's views about the unity

and identity of the new school (Grotius's followers, Barbeyrac said,
being Selden, Hobbes, Cumberland, Pufendorf and now Locke),
Barbeyrac explained just what Grotius had clone that was so
significant.
Barbeyrac's Account begins with some sections of general
philosophical reflection, in which he sought to establish that there
could be a demonstrable moral science. H e was very clear where the
chief objection to this programme lay, and what was wrong with
the objection.
Some have, for a long Time, believ'd, and, even at this Day, many do maintain, that Morality is a science very uncertain, and wherein scarce any Thing,
beyond Probabilities, is to be found: But it is solely for want of due Examination into the Nature of Things, that this false Notion has prevail'd. 25
As examples of the objection, he singled out particularly the works
of Montaigne and Charron, though he also referred to the views of
the sceptics of antiquity (notably Cameades), and to the writings of
his own contemporary Pierre Bayle. 26 It was the distinctiveness of its
answer to this scepticism which in Barbeyrac's eyes made the De iure
belli ac pacis the foundational text of the modem natural-law
school.
What led Barbeyrac to stress the importance of scepticism as a
background for the Grotian moral science was clearly the activity of
Bayle, who during the 1680s and 1690s published a wide variety of
essays defending Pyrrhonian scepticism. This activity culminated in
his famous Dictionnaire historique et critique of 1697, in which the
articles on the sceptics of antiquity (notably, again, Cameades) are
miniature treatises on the desirability of their ideas. Bayle even
sought to some extent to appropriate the leaders of the modem
natural-law school for his own enterprise - the articles on both
Grotius and Hobbes ( especially the latter) are full of praise for their
subjects, particularly on account of their religious beliefs. 27 By 1709
it seemed to Barbeyrac that scepticism was as flourishing as it had
been in the time of Montaigne, and h e emphasised accordingly that
Grotius and his followers had been explicit and well-judged opponents
of scepticism.
" Ihrd., p. 5.
,. Ibrd., pp. 5-8 (Montaigne and Charron), p. 9 (Bayle) and p. 56 (Bayle compared
to Carneades).
27
Pierre Bayle, The Dictionary Htorical and Critica!, ed. P. Des Maiseaux (London,
1734-8), II, pp. 325 ff. (Carneades), III, pp. 24Iff. (Grotius) and 467ff.
(Hobbes).

109

The obvious question to ask about Barbeyrac's belief that the

modem natural-law school developed as a reply to scepticism is, how
far was that belief shared by Grotius and Pufendo~f t~en:selves? .ln
fac,t Grotius in the Prolegomena to De iure bel/i ac pacrs hd1d s1gnal. qu1te
H
clearly that his main intention was to answer t e scept1c.
e
remarked,
since it would be a vain Undertaking to treat of Right, if there is really no
such thing; it will be necessary, in order to shew the Usefu~ness of the Work,
d t establish it on solid Foundations, to confute here 10 a few Words so
~:ng~rous an Error. And that we may not engage with a Multitude at once,
let us assign them an Advocate. And who more proper for t~is purp?se than
J
Carneaues
. . ..1 This Man having undertaken to dispute aga10st]ust1ce,
d
A that
kind of it, especially, which is the Subject of this Treatise, foun no rgument stronger than this. Laws (says he) were instituted by Men ~or t~e sake
of Interest; and hence it is that they are different, not only 10 d1f~erent
Countries according to the Diversity of their Manners; but often 10 the
sarne Cou~try, according to the Times. As to that which is called NATURAL
RIGHT, it is a mere Chimera. 28
The use of Carneades as the principal spokesman for the position
which Grotius was about to attack was, I think, unprecedented in
any work on the laws of nature. The medieval and sixteenth-centu~y
scholastics had never put their theories in this kind of context: theu
intention had always ostensibly been to interpret the ethical
theories either of Aristotle or Aquinas, neither of whom saw the
refutation of scepticism as their prime task. After Grotius, however,
the fragments of Cameades's discussion of justice (which had be~n
embedded in a lost work by Cicero, and had been preserved only m
extracts from that work in the Christian father Lactantius)2 9 became
part of the standard repertoire of modem discussions of naturallaw.
It is fairly clear that the fragments had become far mor~ than
curiosities of the history of ancient philosophy through theu new
association with the sophisticated and comprehensive scepticism of
the late-sixteenth-century writers, and that for 'Cameades' one
should in effect read 'Montaigne' or 'Charron'.
Grotius' s reply to the sceptic was, as Pufendorf perceived, ~o
stress the importance of selfinterest. To understand the force of th1s,
we have to consider the character of contemporary scepticism. The
first point to stress is that for Montaigne and Ch.arron, as for the
ancient sceptics, the force of their scepticism in eth1cal mat~e~s ca~e
simply from their apprehension of the truth of moral relat1v1sm- m
28

Hugo Grotius, The RightsofWarand Peace, ed.JeanBarbeyrac, trans. anon. (London,

29
1738), pp. xiv-xv.
Lactantius, The Drvme Instrtutes.

.L'\..L"-'I.L.I..L.L'\..LJ

..l U'-.;1'\.

.1/Jt:

the most famous passage in Montaigne, 'what truth is that, which

these mountains bound, and is a lie in the world beyond?' 30 lt thus
had a different basis from their scepticism in general epistemological
matters, for that rested primarily upon the illusory character of
sense experience. lt is true that in each case no criterion was available
with which to distinguish true from false belief, and the sceptic thus
had to suspend judgement; but if a criterion had become available in
the physical sciences, this would have been no remedy for the moral
sciences, as no true account of the material world will necessarily
resolve fundamental moral disagreement. There was thus an empirica/
basis to the sceptical doubt in the area of morality: it arose from an
observation about the beliefs and practices to be found in different
human societies, and not from any general considerations about the
nature of ethical thinking.
The second point which must be made is that the sceptic did not
merely register his disbelief in ali scientific propositions. Scepticism
(again both in antiquity and sixteenth-century France) underpinned
a way of life: the sceptic still had some principies to live by. H is main
goal was a life of ataraxia o r apatheia, free from the disturbance caused
by emotions based on beliefs, including beliefs about the virtues and
vices. The one thing which he did not exclude from this life was,
however, the simple desire for self-preservation, for it was precisely
to preserve oneself that the sceptical sage recommended ataraxia.
The flight from the world which the sceptic advocated had as its
objective the preservation of the individual from the emotional and
- often - the physical harm consequent upon an engagement in
public life. At this point in the writings of the post-Renaissance sceptics (and maybe also in those of Carneades himself), scepticism
reached out to hold hands with Stoicism, for the Stoics too had
argued that man' s primary desire was to preserve himself. They had
also argued that principies of justice would be compatible with this,
something which Carneades ridiculed in the passage which Grotius
quoted, and it is noteworthy that although both Montaigne and
Charron exhibited a great respect for and interest in the Stoic arguments, they were unwilling to pick up the Stoic defence of
justice. 31
Grotius's great idea seems to have been that the sceptic could be
30

31

Michel de Montaigne, Essayes, trans. ]. Florio, ed. ]. I. M. Stewart (London,

n.d.), p. 524.
Se e Myles Burnyeat, 'Can the scepticlive his scepticism', inDoubtand Dogmatism, ed
Malcolm Schofield, Myles Burnyeat and Jonathan Barnes (Oxford, 1980),
pp. 20- 53.

lltUUt;fN

H.ICUIY UJ

IIU/.-1-+tu" "'-+""

ered once the full implications of his acceptance of the principie

answ
.. f
f
elf-preservation
had been thought out. The argument 1s m act
0
(which. he
sets ou t most clearly in his early work, D e iure praedae
.
osed in 1604/5, and which remained largely m manuscnpt),
~~:~h it is presented in a much more detailed form in De iure bel/i ac
pactf. ln De iure praedae he argued that
.
God fashioned creation and willed its existence, every individual part
smce
.
.
h
h
thereof has received from Him certam natural propertles w ereby t at
stence may be preserved and each part guided for its own good, in con;;:mity, one might say, with the fundamental law inherent in its origin.
From this fact the old poets and philosophers have rightly deduced that
love, whose primary force and action are directed to self-interest, is the first
rinciple of the whole natural order. Consequently, Horace should not be
~ensured for saying, in imitation of the Academics [i. e., the Academic sceptics, headed in the second century B.C. by Carneades], that expediency
might perhaps be called the mother of justice and equity. 32

Thus the two primary laws of nature, he asserted, were 'It sha/1 be
permissib/e to defend one's own /ife and to shun that which threatens to prove
injurious' and 'It sha/1 be permissib/e to acquire for onese/f and to retain those
things which are usefu/for life.' 'On this point the Stoics, Epicureans and
Peripatetics are in complete agreement, and apparently even the
Academics have entertained no doubt.' 33
As the last remark shows, Grotius presented these laws in what
would la ter be regarded as an 'eclectic' manner, as principies which ali
men would accept, and which all societies would acknowledge. ln
part, this involved a simple observation of human societies:
Grotius's contention was that no society had been or could be found
in which this moral principie was denied, though many other moral
principies, e.g., of the Aristotelian kind, were frequently disregarded.
The moral relativist had therefore jumped to too pessimistic a conclusion. Grotius argued the sarne about the next two laws of nature,
which he presented as secondary to the principie of selfpreservation, but equaliy universal- 'Let no one inflict injury upon bis
fe/low' and 'Let no one seize possession of that which has been taken into the
Possession of another.' 34 These bans on wanton injury of another human
being were also principies which no man or group of men would
deny, though they would at the sarne time concede that injury to
another in the cause of self-preservation might be justified (this is
the door which led fairly directly to Hobbes). Grotius's explanation
of why ali these laws were universal was essentially that they were

"

Hugo Grotius, De iure praedae commentarius, I, trans. G. L. Williams (Oxford, 1950),

33 Jbrd. , pp. 10-11.
34 Ibrd., p. 13.
p. 9.

functionally necessary for social existence: no society could be

imagined in which they were systematically flouted. But the persuasiveness ofhis case carne as much from his deployment of empirical evidence about social practices as from this functionalist
explanation.
ln the De fure praedae, this account of the content of the laws of
nature in terms of self-preservation is associated with what might be
calied a 'voluntarist' theory of their form. Grotius argued that 'What
God has shown to be H is Will, that is law ... The act of commanding
is a function of power, and primary power over ali things pertains to
God, in the sense that power over his own handiwork pertains to the
artificer and power ove r inferiors, to their superiors.' H e even asserted,
in dramatic contrast to what he was to say in De fure belli ac pacis, that
'a given thing is just because God wills it, rather than that God wills
the thing because it is just'. 35 But, like Pufendorf la ter, he believed
that we can determine what it is that God wills for mankind, not by
consulting Scripture or what seems intuitively obvious, but by considering what must be clone if a man, made as God has made him, is
to be preserved from his feliow men. The De iure praedae would in fact
have met many of the objections which Pufendorf and Barbeyrac
levelled at the De iure bel/i acpacis; ironically, it remained locked away
in the house of the De Groot family, and was not made public
until1864.
However, during the twenty years after he wrote De iure praedae
Grotius abandoned this theory about the form of the laws of nature,
and in De iure bel/i ac pacis produced instead the notorious claim that
the laws would bind mankind, 'though we should even grant, what
without the greatest Wickedness cannot be granted, that there is no
God, o r that he takes no Care ofhuman Affairs'. The laws of nature,
Grotius now argued, could only be ascribed to God in the sense that
'it was his Pleasure that these Principies should be in us'. 36 Despite
this, Grotius's account of the content of the laws in 1625 was very
dose to what it had been twenty years earlier. ln Book I he argued
that 'the first impression of nature' is 'that Instinct whereby every
Animal seeks its own Preservation, and loves its Condition, and
whatever tends to maintain it'. 37 This instinct may be governed by
rational reflection on the needs of society, but sociallife itself is to a
great extent the product of man's necessity: 'Right Reason, and the
Nature of Society, ... does not prohibit ali Manner ofViolence, but
only that which is repugnant to Society, that is, which invades
l5

lbid., p. 8 .

another's Right: For the Design of Society is, that every one should
quietly enjoy his own, with the Help, and by the united Force of the
whole Community. ' 38 These are the two principies of De iure praedae,
self-preservation and the ban on wanton injury.
In the Prolegomena to De iure bel/i ac pacis, it should be said, Grotius
did emphasise more than he had clone in De iure praedae the positive
advantages of society and the universal human desire to live with his
feliows, and this led him to reverse his judgement on the quotation
from Horace he had endorsed in 1604/5; but he did so in a somewhat
qualified way. His new position is summed up in the foliowing
passage:
the Saying, not ofCarneades only, but of others, Interest, that Springofjustand
Right [Horace], if we speak accurately, is not true; for the Mother ofNatural
Law is human Nature itself, which, though even the Necessity of our
Circumstances should not require it, would of itself create in us a mutual
Desire of Society: . . . But to the Law of Nature Profit is annexed: For the
Author ofNature was pleased, that every Man in particular should be weak
ofhimself, and in Want of many Things necessary for living Commodiously,
to the End we might more eagerly affect Society. 39
The substantial continuity of Grotius's most powerful and
original idea (particularly in the body of his text), despi te a radical
change in his view of the laws' foundations, is a striking illustration
of the fact that foundational issues are not the most important ones
in this history. What is important is the continued attempt to
integrate the laws of nature into a system based on the principie of
self-preservation; beyond that, there was scope for a great deal of
disagreement (even, as we have just seen, within one person's own
inteliectual career) about how to interpret the system as a whole, and
how to explain the obligatory character of the laws. W e could draw a
rather strict analogy with contemporary natural science: Galilean
physics provided a new and integrated system, but left a substantial
opening for philosophical discussion about its metaphysical basis.
If a concern with Carneades, anda commitment to refute what he
had said by using the principie of self-preservation, are the leitmotivs
of the modem natural-law school, then both Pufendorf and Hobbes
do indeed amply qualify for membership. Pufendorf devoted two
sections of the chapter in which h e discussed the general character of
the law of nature to a discussion of Carneades's argument that
'there's no such Thing as natural Law, but that ali Law first arose
from the Convenience and the Profit of particular States', and he
38

36

Grotius, The R1ghts of War and Peace, p. xix.

J1

lbJd., p. 24.

Ib!d., pp. 25-6 .

39

Ibid., p.

XX.

.L /J f..<

refuted it (as we have seen) by deductions from the principie of self40

prese~vation. Hobbes, of course, thought more deeply about just
these tssues than any other seventeenth-century philosopher; but he
too seems to have had contemporary scepticism largely in mind. A
~articularly striking example is the well- known passage of L eviathan
m which he remarked,
~he Foole ha~h sayd in his heart, there is no such thing asJustice; and somehm_es also wtth his tangue; seriously alleaging, that every mans conservatwn, and contentment, being committed to his own care, there could be
no reason, why every man might not do what he thought conduced
thereunto: and therefo:e also to make, or not make; keep, or not keep
Covenants, was not agamst Reason, when it conduced to ones benefit.

This looks very much as ifHobbes had in mind the sarne observation
of Carneades which Grotius also attacked, that ' either there is no
justice; o r, if there is such a thing, it is the greatest foolishness since
one will harm oneself while consulting the interests of other p~ople'

(au~ nu/Iam esse iustitiam; aut, si sit aliqua, summam esse stultitiam, quoniam
stbt noceret alienis commodis consulens). 4 2 Mersenne in fact recommended
Hobbes's. D e cive to Sorbiere as the ideal refutation of scepticism. 43

The particular character of the refutation of scepticism in both

Pufendorf and Hobbes (and, indeed, in Grotius himself) Ieft them,
however, open to the charge that they were sceptics of a kind them~elves: for they refuted the sceptic by employing one of his own
tdeas, that the fundamental principie of human conduct was the
desire for self-preservation. Hobbes was continually attacked for
endorsing this sceptical proposition, and when Pufendorf' s
opponents accused him of Hobbism, they often joined this to an
accusation of moral scepticism - Friedrich Gesen, for example,
alleged that Pufendorf was in fact a new Carneades. 44 Although
Barbeyrac may have overstressed the singlemindedness with which
his her?es co~batted contemporary scepticism, it is clear enough
that thts was mdeed a crucially important element in their enterprise, and that many of their differences from earlier natural-law
theories can best be understood in this context. It is also clear that
post-Kantian writers have misrepresented their strategy because
they have forgotten the original point of their ideas. Grotius and his
successors were responding to a straightforward pre-Humean moral
40
41

43

Pufendorf, The L aw of N ature and N ations, p. 125.

Th o mas ~,obbes, L e_viathan, ed. C. B. Macphe rson (Harmondswo rth, 1968),
P 20 3.
Lac tantt~s, Opera omma, I, ed. S. Brandt (Vienna, 1890), p . 449.
Tho mas H44o bbes, D e Cwe: Tbe Latm Vem on, ed. H oward Warrender(O xfo rd 1983)
P 86.
Palladini, D IScumoni, p. 177.
'
'

111-VU I.; I 11-

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VJ

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scepticism, which simply pointed to the multiplicity of beliefs and

practices around the world, and concluded that there were no
common moral beliefs and hence nothing stable upon which to build
a universal ethics. Part of their response consisted equally simply in
demonstrating that there were actually at least two universal moral
beliefs (the right of self-preservation and the ban on wanton injury),
and that this minimalist ethics could be used as the basis for a universal
moral science. There was therefore a substantial element of descriptive ethical sociology in their works, since that was the battleground
chosen by their opponents. When Hume (and also, it should be said,
Rousseau , though in a much more allusive fashion) pointed out that
no information of that kind could possibly be relevant to the construction of a moral theory, theirs was a new kind of scepticism, which
no earlier writer had had to deal with.
I hope to deal in another context with the eighteenth-century
criticisms of the modern moral science; here, my purpose is simply
to consider its general character, and its relationship to its
predecessors and competitors. ln particular, recognising the
centrality of the arguments against scepticism for the modern
naturallawyers helps us to understand Pufendorf's and Barbeyrac's
sense that there was a fundamental division between the ancient or
medieval natural-law writers and the modern ones, and it also helps
us see the humanist roots of the latter. When the particular antisceptical point of the modern school was forgotten, it was easy to see
it as merely an extension of the long medieval tradition of naturallaw theory, and wholly distinct from the humanist mode of politicai
theorising (in which, it was always clear, the notion of 'naturallaw'
played a very small part}. But as we have seen, Pufendorf and his
followers believed strongly in an absolute break between the
medieval moral philosophy willprove unsatisfactory: no major work
of ethics devoted explicitly to refuting the sceptic survives from
utterly different in their eyes from the genuinely 'modern'
writers.
The explanation of this is that if one is principally alert to the
problem of moral scepticism, then it is true that both ancient and
medieval moral philosophy will prove unsatisfactory: no major work
of ethics devoted explicitly to refuting the sceptic survives from
antiquity (though it is clear that there were some), and medieval
natural-law thinking is conspicuous by its lack of awareness that fullblooded moral scepticism was an intellectual possibility. The
Ockhamists, who of course exhibited a scepticism about the realist
basis for a demonstrative moral science, never denied that such a

s~ience

was ro:sible. The simple deduction which Montaigne and

Charron made from the observed fact of radical moral disagreement,
tha_t :crh~lp~ ther c could be no universal stand a rd of right and wrong,
was somcthmg to wh1ch men at the beginning of the seventeenth
century had to think up their own response.
The men who were most likely to think up such a response were
men tra1ned tn a humanist manner. Elements of scepticism had been
present from the early Renaissance, in the work of people such as
Valia, and w_e have already seen the importance of a detailed
k_nowledge ?f the ~ncient sceptical texts for sixteenth-century sceptlcs. Monta1gne s1mply saw very clearly the implications of ma
ny
t h"111gs w h"1c h ear 11er humanists had argued. A sensitivity to the force

of these ideas, and therefore a desire to confront them in a

sympathetic manner, was going to be found at the end of the sixteenth century among humanists themselves rather than among
c~ntemp~rar y natural lawyers trained in a scholastic style. The
bwgraph1es of Grotius or Hobbes are indeed strikingly different
from t~at of Surez: both the former were brought up largely 011 the
humamst texts, and both displayed all the interests and abilities of
~he h~manist. They each wrote poetry, both in their vernaculars and
111 ~at111; throughout their lives they also wrote history, and retained
an 111_terest in literary and textual criticism as well as philosophy.
Grotms was of course intemationally famous for his precocious
humams_t tale~ts. While not ignorant of medieval and contemporary
scholastlc wnters, the context in which they employed that
knowledge was always shaped largely by their humanist concems.
This obvious fact about their biographies has not carried much
:veight wit~ many re~~nt writers (including, I should confess, myself
111 an earher work.) This is largely because the modem moral
scientists used extensively the terminology of naturallaw, and it is
almost a defining characteristic of the humanist politicai theorist
that he did not. It is true that Grotius and his followers broke
decisively with the humanist view of politics and ethics as practkal
~ubjects ,On the Aristotelian sense, i.e. , not deductive systems,
SClences o r eptstemes); their refu tation of scepticism allowed them to
reinstate the ide a that the study of men' s actions could be 'scientific'
and to this extent they did resemble conte mporary scholastics. Bu~
the scholastic writer in both the Middle Ages and the sixteenth
century believed that it was possible to put Aristotle's ethics ora
similar account of the classical virtues, on a theoretical and scie~tific
,,

foundation, while the modern natural lawyers saw clearly that this
was impossible: in their eyes, the sceptical critique of such ethical
theories was overwhelming.
The sympathy which these writers retained for many features of
humanist and even sceptical moral theories comes out in many
important aspects of their work. lt is a familiar fact, for example,
that the seventeenth-century natural-law writers stressed the
distinction between a state of nature and civil society to a degree far
bevond any medieval author. This was because they shared the sceptic~' sense that most familiar moral beliefs and practices were the
product of specific circumstances and histories, and differed from
place to place; their history was the history of civil societies. But the
minimalist core of universal moral principies was not part of that
story, and could be used to describe (speculatively) what life would
be like without the superadditions of civility. 1t could also be used
for the sarne reason to describe relations between different civil
societies, the first use to which it was in fact put, in the writings
of Grotius.
But perhaps the most important way in which the modem moral
science preserved something of the outlook of the late-sixteenthcentury sceptical humanist is in the deep pluralism inherent in it. The
function of the new moral science was not crudely to rebut scepticism but to transcend it: to use what the sceptic himself believed as
the basis for an anti-sceptical science. Thus the multiplicity of possible beliefs and customs to which the relativist pointed was not to be
denied, or treated as evidence for human irrationality, but (in
general) to be endorsed and absorbed into the new theory. As
Grotius said plainly, 'there are severa! Ways of Living, some better
than others, and every one may chuse what he pleases of ali those
Sorts'. 46 All the writers in this tradition, including even Hobbes, saw
it as part of their duty to defenda relatively pluralist intellectual and
aesthetic culture against its enemies - notably the Calvinist and
Catholic churches. This aspect of Pufendorf's work was another
reason for the hostility levelled at him by the Lutheran clergy.
lt would, I think, be impossible to overestimate the importance to
these writers of their sense that large areas of life needed defending
from fanatics, that is, from people who believed in more extensive
universal moral obligations than those contained in the minimalist
core. ln a way, they all wished to se e the world made safe for the sceptic; the irony was that scepticism itself could not show how the world
Grotius,

Richa rd Tu ck. i\'atmal H ;;~/Jtr 'f'!worii'J (Ca m b ri dge, 1979) , p. 176.

7'/J<'

Ht;;f,IJ

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l'um, p. 64.

was to be made safe, for it could not in principle show why the fanatic
was wrong in holding his moral beliefs and acting upon them,
however violently. W e can see the character of this ambition clearly
if we contrast the fortunes ofboth scepticism and what we might call
'post-scepticism' in the United Provinces and in France. The fact
that the wars of religion had been fought to a stalemate across
Europe, and that henceforward politicians in most major European
countries were going to have to live with fundamental and irreconcilable ideological divisions within their states, undoubtedly
fostered a kind of disengaged and sceptical attitude in the leaders of
many states by the beginning of the seventeenth century. 'To know
nothing is the surest faith' remarked Jan van Oldenbamevelt,
Advocate-General of the United Provinces and the patron of the
young Grotius; 'in matters of state the weakest are always wrong'
observed Cardinal Richelieu ofFrance, ironically enough to Grotius
propos of the fall and execution of Oldenbamevelt. 47 Richelieu
helped the so-called li bertins rudits and contributed to the sceptical
culture which was so prominent in seventeenth-century France;
there, the power of the state protected such ideas and to some extent
even based itself upon them. ln the United Provinces, on the other
hand, the execution of Oldenbamevelt and the exile of Grotius were
dramatic illustrations of the fact that disengaged and pluralist politicians were themselves vulnerable to the attacks of fanatics. It is no
accident that in France (as Professor Keohane has shown) the kind
of post-sceptical moral science I have been discussing hardly
developed; 48 it was Holland and England above all where it was
invented, two countries where in the first half of the seventeenth
century the power of the state was threatened o r broken by religious
dogmatists. Nor is it an accident that so many of these modem
natural-law writers tumed to a powerful and- in our terms- illiberal
state to protect intellectual freedoms from mistaken or dogmatic
philosophers arrayed in churches. Pufendorf too fits into this
picture, for one ofhis principal concems apart from his natural jurisprudence was an analysis of the German constitution in the wake of
the destructive religious wars of the mid-century, in which he
pleaded for strong and effective states in Germany to prevent such a
catastrophe being repeated.
This deeper understanding of the humanist roots of the modem
41
48

Jan den Tex, Oldenbamevelt, I (Cambridge, 1973), p. 7; G ro tius, BriefwiJJeling, II, ed.
P.C. Mo lhuysen (The Hague, 19 36), p. 448.
Nannerl Keoha ne, Philosophy and the State in France (Princ e ton, 1980), p. 122.

oral science is merely one example of the kind of insight which is

:Vailable to us once the post-Kantian history of morality is replaced
with the pre-Kantian one. The moral theories of the lateseventeenth- and eighteenth-century naturallawyers constituted in
many ways the most important language of ~olitics. and et.h ics in
Europe, influential over a huge area and m a w1de .vanety of
disciplines. Their essential unity has been fractured and theu character
misunderstood for the last two centuries; but if we allow ourselves to
be guided by the 'history of morality' which they themselves
spired , we can recover a truer sense of what they represented.. Not
ln
the least important consequence of this is then that we can put mto a
roper perspective the invention at the end of the eighteenth
~entury of the politicai and ethical theories by which in one way or
another we all stilllive.