BOOK: Mónica GARCÍA-SALMONES ROVIRA, The Necessity of Nature. God, Science and Money in 17th Century English Law of Nature [Cambridge Studies in International and Comparative Law, ed. Larissa VAN DEN HERIK & Jean d'ASPREMONT; 179] (Cambridge: CUP, 2023); ISBN 9781009332149, 120 GBP

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Book description:

To understand our current world crises, it is essential to study the origins of the systems and institutions we now take for granted. This book takes a novel approach to charting intellectual, scientific and philosophical histories alongside the development of the international legal order by studying the philosophy and theology of the Scientific Revolution and its impact on European natural law, political liberalism and political economy. Starting from analysis of the work of Thomas Hobbes, Robert Boyle and John Locke on natural law, the author incorporates a holistic approach that encompasses global legal matters beyond the foundational matters of treaties and diplomacy. The monograph promotes a sustainable transformation of international law in the context of related philosophy, history and theology. Tackling issues such as nature, money, necessities, human nature, secularism and epistemology, which underlie natural lawyers' thinking, Associate Professor García-Salmones explains their enduring relevance for international legal studies today.

On the author:

Mónica García-Salmones Rovira is Global Law Fellow in the Alvaro d'Ors Global Law Chair, ICS, at the University of Navarre, and a Senior Fellow at the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law, University of Helsinki. She is the author of The Project of Positivism in International Law (2013) and co-editor of Cosmopolitanisms in Enlightenment Europe and Beyond (2013) and International Law and Religion (2017). 

Table of contents:

Table of Contents:

Introduction

I Altering the Perception of Nature

II Nature and The Light of Nature

III Needs, Politics and Money

IV Necessity and Liberalism

IV Outline of Chapters

• 1. A Christian Science: Searching for the Common Good and the Public Good

1.1 Deism, Neoplatonism and the Light of Reason

1.2 Scepticism and Moral Righteousness

1.3 Hobbes and Locke versus Filmer on Political Economy

1.4 The New Oeconomies: Household – State – Nature

• 2. Hobbes's Doctrine of Necessity

2.1 Hobbes's Doctrine of Necessity and Existence

2.2 Necessitarian Metaphysics and (Human) Body in Avicenna and Hobbes

• 3. Necessities, Natural Rights and Sovereignty in Leviathan

3.1 Hobbes's Necessity, Theology and Natural Laws

3.2 The Doctrine of Necessity in Leviathan

• 4. Reformers on the Necessary Knowledge

4.1 Useful Knowledge as the Only Necessary Knowledge: Benjamin Worsley in Context

4.2 All-Encompassing Human Necessities

• 5. Necessity, Free Will and Conscience: Robert Sanderson

5.1 Logician and Theologian

5.2 The Mechanical Conscience

• 6. The Grand Business of Nature

6.1 The Oeconomy of Nature

6.2 The Fact of Man

6.3 The Grand Business of Nature

• 7. Robert Boyle, the Empire over Nature

7.1 Nothing Is Necessary: Benjamin Worsley Revisited

7.2 The Transmutator of Nature

7.3 Undoing Nature

• 8. Locke's Early Writings

8.1 Independent Judgment of Conscience, Public Order and Public Interest

8.2 Undoing Conscience

• 9. Medicine, Oeconomy and Needs

9.1 The Oeconomy of Needs

9.2 Physicians and Oeconomia

• 10. Money and the Doctrine of Necessities

10.1 Locke's Doctrine of Necessities

10.2 Usury, Interest and Science

• 11. The Scientification of Money

11.1 The Science of Interest

11.2 The Morality of Capital

• 12. The Doctrine of Necessities and the (Public) Good

12.1 Necessity and Necessities in Knowledge and Morality: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

12.2 Necessities, Dominion and Money in the Two Treatises of Government

• Conclusions 

(source: ESIL IGHIL)

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