The Necessity of Nature: God, Science and Money in 17th Century English Law of Nature

My intuition in writing this book was that acquiring a better understanding of the history of natural law might facilitate addressing key current issues relating to the Anthropocene era and offer an insight into the development of the power of money.
The book relates how knowledge and nature were rearranged anew in the theories of natural law developed in seventeenth-century England. It locates that novelty of English natural law in its context and explains why it remains relevant today. In so doing it broadens the classical language of governance to encompass notions drawn from natural and social sciences, the theory of knowledge and natural philosophy. These notions concern health, human necessities, the light of nature, innate principles, abundance, scarcity, utility, oeconomy, money and, indeed, the human body, all of which have consistently been neglected in legalistic accounts of the history of international law and studies of natural law, or only with theology as a secondary element. My argument is that the Scientific Revolution was as important as the Reformation in the process that transformed natural law from a theological staple into a new philosophy for the development of Europe. I argue that the sacred idea of nature was one of the casualties of the Scientific Revolution, and the innate principles of practical reason were another. They had to give way so that natural scientists could obtain dominion over science and the humanities.