Journal of the History of Ideas

The aim of this essay is to examine two very different thinkers writing in a very similar context: Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rather than providing a comprehensive analysis of the relationship between the two, attention is focused on one important respect in which their theories converge: the way that both employed the idea of nature as a normative ideal, and both maintained that what is good and just is so by the very nature of things. The significance and purpose of doing so is threefold. Building on recent research, the opening section of the essay establishes Burlamaqui’s status as more than just a plagiarist of earlier natural law theorists, emphasizing the originality of his thought in this context. The extent to which Rousseau’s approach to natural right followed Burlamaqui’s is explored in the second section. In doing so the problematic relationship between nature as a normative ideal and the role of artifice and denaturing is addressed, a problem that has proved a source of much contention amongst Rousseau scholars. The final section adumbrates the implications for the way that modern natural law was received in Geneva, drawing attention to the infusion of a transcendent standard of justice into the existing discourse, which owed more to Malebranche and Leibniz than to Pufendorf and Barbeyrac. [End Page 209]

While Rousseau is one of the most written about figures in the history of ideas, the place of Burlamaqui, his Genevan contemporary, has received very little attention. When he has been considered it has usually been alongside other natural law theorists in analyzing their influence on the founding fathers and the American Revolution.¹ For a long time the relationship between the two thinkers went unexamined, seemingly bearing testimony to the opinion of Giorgio Del Vecchio that Burlamaqui was an unoriginal theorist who had little influence on Rousseau.² Helena Rosenblatt’s comprehensive study of the Genevan context of Rousseau’s thought suggests otherwise, however, stressing the importance of Burlamaqui in the political controversies that shaped 1750s Geneva, to which Rousseau responded in his main political writings.³ In addition, Petter Korkman’s recent edition of Burlamaqui’s seminal work—in which many of the originally unreferenced sources are identified—not only demonstrates the extent to which Burlamaqui deferred to Jean Barbeyrac’s editions of Grotius and Pufendorf, but also draws attention to where he distinctively broke from them and merits being appreciated as an original thinker in his own right.⁴

Although Burlamaqui is best known as the author of The Principles of Natural and Political Law, the opus consists of two quite distinct volumes: The Principles of Natural Law and The Principles of Political Law.⁵ It is well to focus on the former of these when assessing the extent of Burlamaqui’s originality as he never authorized the latter, which was only published [End Page 210] posthumously based on his lecture notes. Moreover, its content was largely derivative and often deferred to Barbeyrac’s editions of Grotius and Pufendorf verbatim; indeed the most original aspects of The Principles of Political Law were usually little more than summaries of arguments that had been developed in the earlier work. In contrast, Burlamaqui oversaw the publication of The Principles of Natural Law himself in 1747, intending it to serve as an introduction to natural law for his students, and, ironically, to prevent his lectures from being “published against [his] will, in a very imperfect and mangled condition.”⁶ Both volumes, however, must be taken into account when considering the influence on Rousseau, not least because his most famous work, On the Social Contract, or Principles of Political Right, adopted the title of Burlamaqui’s second volume.⁷