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Jean Barbeyrac is a seminal figure in the history of natural law doctrine and one who, as a Huguenot refugee, had much to say on the topic of toleration. For Barbeyrac, natural law offered a secular rationalist principle of morality that could be used in the battle against Catholic persecution. Barbeyrac took from his seventeenth-century predecessors the natural law idea that the state was an essentially secular body and used that idea to license a much more thoroughgoing form of toleration. If the state had no religious competence then even atheism could be permitted, because it did not constitute an injury to the civil peace. This chapter shows that Barbeyrac's radical account of natural law and toleration made substantial modifications to the arguments of his predecessors, and in doing so moved natural law beyond the theological constraints that structured the defining work in the genre.

This chapter examines Grotius’s important influence on Selden as well as their mutual influence on Milton. No history of early modern religious toleration is complete without reference to Grotius’s De Jure Belli ac Pacis and Selden’s De Jure Naturali et Gentium. The implicitly Judaeophilic context of most of their rabbinic references affected not only Milton, but even Grotius’s skeptical editor Jean Barbeyrac as well as the later theorist Samuel Pufendorf. In a tour de force, Selden invents an authentic midrash on Job 31, proving with the help of rabbinic sources, that Job was a righteous Gentile who kept the Noachide laws.

Reading Milton's prose chronologically, there is no way to prepare for the differences between the last antiprelatical tract (April 1642) and the first divorce tract (July 1643) — or, for most readers, between Volume 1 and Volume 2 of the Yale edition of Milton's prose. The earlier, antiprelatical treatises are marked by a Pauline absolutism that will not compound with human weakness as an inevitable condition lying within the bounds of divine forgiveness. But beginning with the first divorce tract and extending through the Areopagitica, Milton confronts with compassion a life of mistake and the inseparability of good and evil in this imperfect world. This transformation can be understood in part by a shift in sources: Whereas the antiprelatical tracts apotheosize the spiritual aristocrats of the Reformation who emphasize difference, the divorce tracts draw on natural law theorists such as Hugo Grotius and John Selden, who emphasize commonality.

This chapter sets out the intellectual context for Rousseau’s engagement with Hobbes by surveying Hobbes’s French reception during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The chapter first examines how Pierre Nicole and Pierre Bayle drew on Hobbes’s political ideas in their own theories, before assessing the metaphysical and theological elements of Nicholas Malebranche’s critique of Hobbes. It then turns to the natural law context and shows how Jean Barbeyrac and Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui helped to establish a somewhat artificial opposition between Hobbesian Epicureanism and Pufendorfian sociability. The final sections consider how Hobbes’s ideas were attacked by Montesquieu, Denis Diderot, and contributors to the Encyclopédie. The chapter reveals that attacks on Hobbes increased as the eighteenth century progressed, even though many of his ideas appear to have diffused into the thought of the time.