The Necessity of Nature

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).

• 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.

'This book contributes innovatively and originally to clarifying the complexity of the debates on natural law in the 17th century, showing how we might stand to benefit from them in the present day.' Gustavo Gozzi, Journal of the History of International Law