The Political Thought of Richard Cumberland: Sovereignty and the Escape from the Search for Origins
| Published date | 01 December 1977 |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9248.1977.tb00464.x |
| Date | 01 December 1977 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
THE POLITICAL THOUGHT
OF
RICHARD CUMBERLAND:
SOVEREIGNTY AND THE ESCAPE FROM
THE SEARCH FOR ORIGINS
LINDA
KIRK
Universiry of Shefield
Absrracr.
Much of what seventeenth-century writers and preachers had to say about
allegiance was framed in terms of deference to the past: subjects owed obedience now
because they were heirs to some ancient obedience rightfully exacted. Patriachalists and
contractualists alike supposed that questions of legitimacy were best resolved by examining
what they took to be the origins of human society. Eventually
it
became possible to
construct a utilitarian political theory which instead judged a given system in terms of the
needs it met; Richard Cumberland’s
De Legibus Narurae
(1672)
marks an important stage
in this process. His cosmology is Christian and his political theory shares many trappings
with those
of
his contemporaries, but from an examination of human interdependence he
succeeds in establishing an unequivocally utilitarian account of sovereignty.
I
MUCH
of what seventeenth century writers and preachers had to say about
allegiance was framed in terms
of
deference to the past: subjects owed obedience
now because they were heirs to some ancient obedience rightfully exacted.
Patriarchalists drew great authority from Genesis and its clear evidence that the
world’s
first
father was
its
first ruler; contractualists
(on
even flimsier grounds)
presupposed that governments derived their authority from what men
or
God
had once surrendered
or
entrusted to them.
As
Hume was to point out, an
institution’s present legitimacy cannot be established by examining its origins,’
but for a long time political writers kept the habit of basing their doctrine on
their particular account of the beginnings of social and political life. The
Restoration natural lawyer, Richard Cumberland (taken seriously in his lifetime
but not
a
great deal since), was not free from this failing, but the political theory
embedded in his magisterial reply to Hobbes succeeds in resolving the quest for
legitimacy into a question of In a sense, of course, any examination
of
a
1
D. Hume,
A
Treatise of
Human
Nature
(London, ed.
L.
A.
Selby-Bigge, 1967), Book 111.
Part
11,
Section 7, especially pp.
541-2.
2
Richard Cumberland’s
De Legibus Narurae
(London, 1672), has never been satisfactorily
translated into English. James Tyrrell’s abridgment of the book--A
Brief Disquisition of the
Law
of Nature
(London, 1692)-amended the original even more than it abridged it.
Of
the
two
eighteenth century attempts at translation, Maxwell’s
(1727)
is sounder than Towers’ (Dublin,
1750) and when
De Legibus Naturae
is quoted in the text of this article
it
is normally Maxwell’s
version which is used-with its spelling, capitalization and punctuation modernized. The
translator’s occasional errors have been corrected wherever they materially affect the argument;
any word
or
phrase supplied appears in square brackets. Page references to Cumberland,
De Legibus Nafurac,
signify Maxwell’s text, not the original Latin.
Political
Studies,
Vol.
XXV,
No.
4
(535-548).
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