1 - Barbeyrac’s Intervention

Summary

This chapter concentrates on the pivotal figure of Jean Barbeyrac, translator extraordinaire of Hugo Grotius, Samuel von Pufendorf, Richard Cumberland, and others. A French Huguenot refugee, Barbeyrac introduced the great Protestant natural law treatises to a French (and ultimately English) audience. But Barbeyrac was much more than a translator. He recast earlier natural law theories around individual conscience and made subjective right the foundation for society and politics. Where Grotius and Pufendorf had conceived of permission or “natural liberty” as the freedom to do whatever the law did not forbid (and thus, not really a right), Barbeyrac insisted a contrario that both natural and civil law tacitly determined – and thus legalized – what was permissible for subjects to do. For Barbeyrac, rights thus took precedence over duties, though only because every action had been made permissible by God. He extended this argument to property, which originated from a God-given natural right to first possession.