ABSTRACT
It is commonly held that the history of natural law theory should be divided into two periods. The first includes classical and medieval natural law theory; the second, the modern version. But it seems to me that in recent years there has been a shift in the evaluation of when this change occurred, even if supporters of the two natural law theories have not been fully aware of it. Until a few years ago the prevailing doctrine, already firmly in place at the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth through the work of Pufendorf, Thomasius, and Barbeyrac, was that Grotius was the initiator of the modern theory of natural law. The perspective has now changed. The conviction is spreading that modern natural law theory begins with Hobbes rather than Grotius. Two things have happened. On the one hand, Grotius’s philosophical originality has been called into question, and scholars have studied more carefully and confirmed his links with the premodern tradition, in particular with the philosophy of late scholasticism. On the other hand, Hobbes’s legal thought has come out of quarantine and is being studied with curiosity and with the growing conviction that it constitutes an illuminating anticipation of theories which are, rightly or wrongly, considered innovative.
