A Treatise of the Laws of Nature - Richard Cumberland Natural Law and Enlightenment Classics

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the idea that individuals are bound, both by their limitations and their potentiality, to a common social good. Given that the pursuit of the common good results in a greater fulfillment of human nature than the narrow pursuit of individual self-interest, the pursuit of the common good presents itself as the logical priority for individuals, given that their own interests will be best served as a result. Such a proposition offered the prospect of a handy summary of the law of nature in one universal formula: Man’s proper action should be an endeavor to promote the common good of the whole system of rational agents.

      Although Cumberland had derived this practical proposition from a scientific examination of the nature of things, he still needed to demonstrate that such a proposition could be considered the will of God. His solution to this problem, discussed at length in chapter 5 of De Legibus, is Cumberland’s most distinctive theoretical move. Cumberland argued that it was possible to identify the sanctions attached to the law of nature, namely the structures of reward and punishment that God had ordained for the observance and dereliction of the law of nature. Punishments take various forms, ranging from the traditional scourges of conscience through to the state of war, a natural punishment for unreasonable, Hobbesian behavior. Rewards include simple happiness through to the benefits of peace, prosperity, and security. Cumberland stressed that such sanctions are not in themselves the causes of moral obligation. They are merely clues indicating that the practical proposition concerning the common good is indeed the basic principle of God’s justice. The knowledge that such a proposition is God’s will gives the proposition the force of law. Cumberland’s theory of obligation risked the suggestion that God himself is bound by the laws of nature, but Cumberland avoided the implication by arguing that an essentially free God binds himself to the observance of the regularities in his creation. Although not an unproblematic solution, Cumberland’s scheme allowed a reconciliation between natural law and the requirements of Protestant theology, one of the many reasons for Cumberland’s profound in fluence upon later writers in the tradition.

      The practical implications of Cumberland’s solution are scattered throughout the book but particularly in chapter 9, where the political implications of his argument are made clear. Having clarified the differences between Hobbes’s natural law theory and his own, Cumberland attempted to show that his position sustains a more durable account of sovereignty justified by the common good. The magistrate’s competence extends “universally to things divine and human, of foreigners and fellow-subjects, of peace and war.”13 Cumberland’s sovereign possesses extensive civil and ecclesiastical jurisdiction, all warranted by divinely ordained natural law. Paradoxically, one of Cumberland’s majorachievements was to demonstrate that an almost Hobbesian sovereignty could be part of an orthodox natural law theory.14

       Reception

      The reception of De Legibus gives some indication of its impact upon the natural law tradition. Cumberland’s thesis was particularly important for Samuel Pufendorf, whose De Jure Naturae et Gentium was published in the same year. Pufendorf was accused of Hobbism and in response deployed Cumberland’s arguments in his own defense. The second edition of De Jure Naturae (1684) included no fewer than forty references to De Legibus, reinforcing Pufendorf’s anti-Hobbesian credentials but also adding weight to his theory of obligation.15 In England it is perhaps no surprise to find Samuel Parker freely adapting the central argument of De Legibus in his Demonstration of the Divine Authority of the Law of Nature (1681). James Tyrrell, who had urged John Locke to publish something similar, produced an English abridgement of the work (with Cumberland’s approval) under the title A Brief Disquisition of the Law of Nature (1692). Cumberland’s combination of positive theory and anti-Hobbesian critique ensured that the work would continue to find an audience until the early eighteenth century. After that time, Cumberland’s ideas were developed by writers like Samuel Clarke; Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury; and Francis Hutcheson; but the waning of the Hobbesian threat and Cumberland’s outmoded science made the book itself less urgent and rather dated to an audience that had become used to more sophisticated treatments of natural law.16

       Editions

      The original Latin edition was published by the Little Britain bookseller Nathaneal Hooke and seen through the press by Hezekiah Burton; but as Burton admitted in his address to the reader, the job was not well done.17 The text is littered with transcription errors allegedly perpetrated by an unnamed youth who did the typesetting. The first edition was licensed by Samuel Parker on July 25, 1671, and the work was advertised in the term catalogues in February 1671/72. As Linda Kirk has established, there are two variants of this edition, with slightly different definitions of the law of nature at the beginning of chapter 5.18 The possible significance of these differences is discussed in this edition in the notes to that chapter. A second edition of the Latin text was published in Lϋbeck and Frankfurt a.d.O. by Samuel Otto and Johann Wiedermeyer in 1683, followed by a third in the same places in 1694. A fourth edition of the Latin text, based upon the 1672 edition, was published in 1720 by James Carson in Dublin.

      In terms of translations, Cumberland’s text was, as we have seen, adapted by Samuel Parker and James Tyrrell, whose Brief Disquisition went into a second edition in 1701. Cumberland’s work would have to wait until 1727 for a full translation into English, by John Maxwell, the text used in this edition. Maxwell was prebendary of Connor and chaplain to Lord Carteret, then lord lieutenant of Ireland. Maxwell’s preface makes it clear that his intention was to produce a full translation for the first time, given that Cumberland’s original Latin text was both difficult to acquire and complicated to read. Cumberland’s anti-Hobbism may have appealed at a time when Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (1714, 1723) appeared to revive central Hobbesian arguments. Maxwell’s project was probably also occasioned by discussions of natural law inspired by Francis Hutcheson’s work. Hutcheson headed a private academy in Dublin during the early 1720s and developed his own natural law position in his Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), a work critical of some aspects of Cumberland’s project but with clear debts to the argument of De Legibus. Maxwell was familiar with Hutcheson’s work and saw the latter’s project as a supplement to Cumberland’s own.19

      Whatever the gains Maxwell hoped for, his Treatise of the Laws of Nature also registers considerable anxieties about the text. The translation comes with two introductory essays and lengthy appendixes by Maxwell, all of which are designed to head off wayward readings of Cumberland’s work.20 The opening essays, in particular, qualify Cumberland’s use of pagan philosophy, both by rejecting deist assumptions that might flow from such sources but also by asserting the importance of revelation in guiding the use of natural reason. The appendices carry out the same task with lengthy extracts from Samuel Clarke’s defenses of the immateriality of a thinking substance and Maxwell’s own essay on obligation, which reinforces the orthodox character of Cumberland’s theory of obligation. Cumberland’s work, so advanced for its own time, contained rather too many hostages to fortune to be published on its own in the very different world of the 1720s.

      The next major translation of Cumberland’s work produced what is undoubtedly the best edition of De Legibus, Jean Barbeyrac’s Traité Philosophique des Loix Naturelles, published in Amsterdam in 1744. Barbeyrac was able to obtain a transcript of Cumberland’s manuscript alterations, together with Richard Bentley’s corrections,21 and these were incorporated into extensive notes, together with commentaries on the text and even on Maxwell’s English translation. As a critical edition, Barbeyrac’s work is an astonishing feat of scholarship, an essential starting point for a modern editor.

      The last edition of Cumberland’s work was produced in Dublin in 1750 by John Towers. Towers produced a new but rather wayward translation and annotation inferior to Maxwell’s earlier attempt. Towers also included considerable ancillary material, including translations of prefatory addresses that Maxwell had left out. These pieces have been included in appendixes 1 and 2 of this edition.

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