The Principles of Natural and Politic Law. Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui
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more fully worked out.
It is not difficult to imagine how lecture notes might differ from a finalized publication. Burlamaqui’s systematic lectures drew on and provided a summary of the most up-to-date political science available in his day. Apparently Burlamaqui felt that his students did not need to know which claims were directly from Grotius, Pufendorf, or Barbeyrac and which claims were his own. In a published book, by contrast, the reader would have expected the sources to be indicated.4 However, as Bernard Gagnebin notes in what is thus far the best monograph on Burlamaqui, “the editors of the Principes du droit politique published all these quotations, without indicating the sources.”5
Burlamaqui had entrusted the manuscript containing his reworked chapters on civil government to his sister and daughter, expressly demanding that it not be published. When the Principes du droit politique was announced, Burlamaqui’s sister and daughter protested. They pointed out that the original manuscript with Burlamaqui’s emendations had never left their hands, and they refused to recognize the publication as being by their father and brother. After an official investigation, it was decided that the Principes du droit politique could not be sold with a title indicating that it was written by Burlamaqui. Officially, then, only half of the present work is by Burlamaqui. Few contemporaries outside Geneva would have realized this, however. The publishers complied with the demands and published the Principes du droit politique anonymously. This simply made the book look all the more like a second volume of the large natural law treatise that Burlamaqui had been planning. There is little doubt that it was the unpolished Principes du droit politique that earned Burlamaqui the reputation of being unoriginal. Large portions provide pedagogical summaries of contemporary political science (natural law) without either references or the kind of independent reflection one would expect in a published work. Burlamaqui’s efforts to hinder his work from being published “in a very imperfect and mangled condition” had failed.
At the time of Burlamaqui’s death, the first reviews of the Principes du droit naturel had just been published. Rumors that there would be an English translation had also reached Geneva. That translation, by Thomas Nugent, was published in London in 1748. Nugent’s fame was to be based on travel books, such as The Grand Tour; or, A Journey through the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, and France (1749), and on translations of thinkers better remembered than he, such as Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Condillac. He also translated the Principes du droit politique as Principles of Politic Law, adding “being a sequel to the Principles of natural law.” This was published in 1752, one year after the original French text was published in Geneva. The same London publisher, J. Nourse, also produced the first combined two-volume Principles of Natural and Politic Law in 1763; a comparable French edition appeared in 1764. The English 1763 edition was essentially nothing more than the Principles of Natural Law and the Principles of Politic Law sold with one title. Some minor changes were introduced at the beginning of the second volume (the Principles of Politic Law), apparently with a view to merging the two books into a seamless whole. Nugent, who died in 1772, was probably involved in making those changes; they are noted in the present edition.
The Burlamaqui that reached British and American universities and was read for generations was Principles of Natural and Politic Law. Much of Burlamaqui’s audience took the latter half of this work to be just as much his as the former, reading his painstaking extracts from Pufendorf, Grotius, and Barbeyrac as the original insights of the Genevan natural law professor. Others who had read their Pufendorf with care may have recognized many borrowed passages but would have had a hard time identifying exactly the places where Burlamaqui parts company from his predecessors. The present edition helps the reader by identifying the sources from which Burlamaqui borrowed his observations. This is, however, a complicated task, and no doubt there remain paragraphs built on passages in the above works or elsewhere that have not been identified.
Even after the publication of the Principes du droit politique, many of Burlamaqui’s lecture notes remained in circulation. Some were published in 1766–68 by Fortuné-Barthélemy de Félice, an Italian professor of philosophy and mathematics who moved to Yverdon, converted to Protestantism, and became director of a printing press. Having secured a set of Burlamaqui’s own lecture notes, de Félice reworked the material, adding new chapters to the published books, fusing some chapters, deleting passages and inserting new ones as he saw fit, and adding a commentary of his own. Finally, in 1775, Burlamaqui’s lecture notes were published in Lausanne by the publisher Grasset as Éléments du droit naturel. These editions provide information on themes that Burlamaqui discussed in his lectures but that fall outside the scope of the present book. De Félice’s edition contains eight volumes: the first two constitute the Principes du droit naturel, the last three the Principes du droit politique. Between these de Félice inserted three volumes of material from Burlamaqui’s lecture notes on man’s primitive state, on his duties to God and to himself, and on the main laws of sociability. Under duties to God, Burlamaqui discusses natural religion in more detail and makes more use of Barbeyrac’s defense of religious toleration and freedom of conscience than he does in the present work.
Burlamaqui’s lectures took the usual form of a commentary on Pufendorf ’s DHC, interspersed with more elaborate discussions from DNG and Grotius’s DGP, all in Barbeyrac’s French translations.6 The first half of the present work often presents Burlamaqui’s understanding of Pufendorf, Grotius, and Barbeyrac, usually with some indication of his sources, followed by Burlamaqui taking sides on controversial points or arguing that all three are in need of rectification. Despite the standard view of Burlamaqui, his standpoints are not unoriginal. On controversial issues he is often far from the standard positions; I discuss a few cases below. The second half of the present work is less original since, as explained, it was not prepared for publication by Burlamaqui, excepting a few long chapters. It clearly and systematically presents the main issues of contemporary natural law theory, but it was not common practice for a lecturer in all cases to point out his modern sources.
Yet even in the latter half of the work, Burlamaqui is often at variance with his predecessors. One clue for understanding these differences is Burlamaqui’s status as a member of the upper strata of the Genevan aristocracy. His long discussion of the best form of government—one of the few chapters that had clearly been prepared for publication—engages in Genevan politics. As a council member and as an expert on natural law, Burlamaqui participated in formulating the ruling elite’s intellectual response to the bourgeoisie’s claim that the small council was usurping power that constitutionally and traditionally belonged to the general council.7 Burlamaqui’s chapter on forms of government is very critical of democratic regimes and argues (against Pufendorf ) for the advantages of a “mixed” government like the Genevan “aristo-democracy,” to use an expression from the Genevan elite’s reply to the bourgeoisie’s demands.8 The best political regime, Burlamaqui argues, is the one that most safely helps men achieve the happiness they naturally aspire to, and such a regime is government by the ablest, the elite. Burlamaqui’s defense of aristo-democracy supports the authority of Geneva’s small council, which explains why Rousseau, who defended the rights of the general council and upheld the political rights of the bourgeoisie, adopted such a hostile attitude to Burlamaqui’s writings and even to natural law theory in general.9
Burlamaqui’s natural law theory also differs from Pufendorf ’s in its foundational principles. The context was the more optimistic trends in Genevan Calvinism at this time. For Burlamaqui, man is first and foremost a being that strives for happiness or felicity; this is the primum mobile behind all human action. When Burlamaqui insists that self-love is not “the fruit of human depravation” (I.1.5 §7), he is quite in line with the happy egoism of many theologians of his day.10 His views are very different from those defended by Pufendorf, who stressed men’s inclinations to evil and who saw natural laws not as rules to make men happy but as rules needed for them to survive each other’s company. Burlamaqui by contrast claims that the natural laws do not exist merely to hinder men from harming each other but to guide their natural striving for happiness, a concept that Burlamaqui offers in the first paragraph of his book. The same approach is applied by Burlamaqui to civil laws. The most central task of the civil state is to help men become happier than they