John Selden, the Law of Nature, and the Origins of Government

Abstract

Selden has long been regarded as one of the foremost scholars in seventeenthcentury England. Milton described him as 'tthe chief of learned men reputed in this Land',1 while David Ogg claimed, with little exaggeration, that Selden sought 'not fame but truth in an erudition more vast than was ever garnered by any other human mind'.2 His phenomenal learning extended over the whole range of civil and ecclesiastical history and law. Until recently, however, his work as a political theorist suffered from a sad neglect. But in I979 this state of affairs was amply remedied with the publication of Richard Tuck's .,atural rights theories: their orizgin and development. Dr Tuck argues that Selden played a crucial role in the development of modern natural-rights theories, decisively influencing the royalist writers of the Tew Circle, and paving the way for the work of Thomas Hobbes.3 In a brilliantly argued account of Selden's theory, Dr Tuck portrays him as a thinker of startling originality. While previous political theorists had accepted that the natural law defining the obligations and rights which all men have in common was intuitively obvious, it was Selden's view, according to Dr Tuck, that it had been revealed by 'God's pronouncements to the Noachidae '4 (that is to say, Noah and his sons), and he 'assumed that somehow societies had passed that information on to posterity; God had given it to man at a point in historical time, and it was the historical continuity of human societies that kept it alive. The attack on the theory that the natural law consisted of innate rational principles thrcw into prominence its historical dimension, and made Selden's life-work a consistent whole.'5 Selden, Dr Tuck continues, argued that the obligation which men possessed to obey the command of a superior (that is to say, the civil magistrate in the case of human law and God in the case of natural law) was 'constituted by fear of a prospective punishment administered by such a superior'.6 In adopting this position Selden 'had moved to a completely individualistic and hedonist view of moral obligation, the development of which in later English moral philosophy was to be of central importance '. His 'extreme scepticism about the possibility of' moral