John Locke's account of natural law, which forms the very basis of his political philosophy, has troubled many critics over time. The two works that shed light on Locke's theory are the early Essays on the Law of Nature and the Second Treatise of Government, published over 20 years later. Many critics have assumed that the early work presents a voluntarist approach to natural law and the second a rationalist approach, but the present analysis in this book shows that Locke's theory is consistent. Both works present a concept of the law of nature that must be placed between voluntarism and rationalism. (Series: Polyptoton. Munster Collection, Academic Writings / Polyptoton. Munsteraner Sammlung Akademischer Schriften - Vol. 3)

This study provides a comprehensive reinterpretation of the meaning of Locke's political thought. John Dunn restores Locke's ideas to their exact context, and so stresses the historical question of what Locke in the Two Treatises of Government was intending to claim. By adopting this approach, he reveals the predominantly theological character of all Locke's thinking about politics and provides a convincing analysis of the development of Locke's thought. In a polemical concluding section, John Dunn argues that liberal and Marxist interpretations of Locke's politics have failed to grasp his meaning. Locke emerges as not merely a contributor to the development of English constitutional thought, or as a reflector of socio-economic change in seventeenth-century England, but as essentially a Calvinist natural theologian.

Crown under Law is an account of how and why the constitutional idea arose in early modern England. The book focuses on two figures_Richard Hooker and John Locke. Rosenthal represents Hooker as a transitional figure who follows in the medieval natural law tradition even while laying the groundwork for Locke's political thought. The book challenges the influential interpretation of Locke by Leo Strauss (who saw Locke as a radical modernist) by illustrating the lines of continuity between Locke's argument in the Two Treatises of Government and the earlier political tradition represented by Hooker. By illustrating the often distinctive manner in which Hooker addressed the great questions, and how he powerfully affected later developments such as Locke's conception of the state, Rosenthal's Crown under Law establishes the important place of Richard Hooker in the history of political thought.

Written before his better-known philosophical works, these essays fully explain how natural law is known and to what extent it is binding.