Abstract
The development of natural law theory in late seventeenth-century Europe owed a great deal to the distinctive political situations left in the wake of religious and political conflict during that period. Fragile political stability often coexisted with problems of religious pluralism. In these contexts natural law theory offered a useful means of sidestepping intractable religious conflict while at the same time offering new resources for the legitimacy of the early modern state.
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Notes
This chapter draws upon and develops some of the themes in J. Parkin, Science, Religion and Politics in Restoration England: Richard Cumberland’s De legibus naturae (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 1999).
For contrasting recent treatments of Cumberland’s position, see particularly, L. Kirk, Richard Cumberland and Natural Law (Cambridge: James Clark, 1987);
S. Darwall, The British Moralists and the Internal ‘Ought’ 1640–1740 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 80–108;
J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 101–17;
K. Haakonssen, ‘The Character and Obligation of Natural Law According to Richard Cumberland’, in M. A. Stewart (ed.), English Philosophy in the Age of Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Narrative detail is taken from a variety of sources: N. Sykes, From Sheldon to Secker: Aspects of English Church History 1660–1768 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959);
A. H. Wood, Church Unity without Uniformity: A Study of Seventeenth Century Church Movements and of Richard Baxter’s Proposals for a Comprehensive Church (London: Epworth, 1963);
D. R. Lacey, Dissent and Parliamentary Politics 1661–1689 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1969);
J. Spurr, The Restoration Church of England 1646–89 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991).
For Parker, see R. Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s ‘Two Treatises of Government’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 41–54;
G. Schochet, ‘Between Lambeth and Leviathan: Samuel Parker on the Church of England and Political Order’, in N. Phillipson and Q. Skinner (eds), Political Discourse in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 189–208; Parkin, Science, Religion and Politics, pp. 37–48.
Including Locke. See J. Parkin, ‘Hobbism in the later 1660s: Daniel Scargill and Samuel Parker’, Historical Journal 42 1 (1999), 85–108.
T. Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. R. Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 111.
Ibid.; T. Hobbes, On the Citizen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 56–65.
R. Westfall, Science and Religion in Seventeenth Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958);
H. G. Van Leeuwen, The Problem of Certainty in English Thought 1630–90 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963);
B. Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).
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© 2002 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Parkin, J. (2002). Probability, Punishments and Property: Richard Cumberland’s Sceptical Science of Sovereignty. In: Hunter, I., Saunders, D. (eds) Natural Law and Civil Sovereignty. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403919533_6
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