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; Index; Bibliography appears only online.

Promotional Information

A study of the natural law ideas of the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution and their impact on the philosophy of law.

About 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).