文档介绍：56 Ancient Origins
It is noteworthy that the rule of reason was affirmed also by Liebniz's philo•
sophical adversary, John Locke (1632-1704), who declared that "the State of
Nature has a Law of Nature to govern it" and that "Reason ... is that Law,"
and who called reason man's "only star pass" (Second Treatise of Gov•
ernment IT. Ch. 2, sec. 6; First Treatise, ch. 6, sec. 58). Along with Locke, a series {2}
of influential political and legal thinkers, including Hugo Grotius (1583-1645),
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), and Samuel Pufendorf (1632-1694), invoked the
ideas of reason and natural law. By "reason," however, these early modern the• Stoic Eudaimonism and the Natural
orists had in mind nothing on the order of Plato's idea of an intelligence guided
by eternal moral verities, because they accepted an empiricist epistemology, or Law Tradition!
a voluntarist theory of moral obligation, or both. In its new incarnation, the Jacob Klein
rule of reason continued to have traction during the Enlightenment under the
influence of theorists like Montesquieu (1689-1755). It is, for example, a major
theme in the American Federalist, which states that "it is the reason of the
public alone that ought to control and regulate the government. The passions
ought to be controlled and regulated by the govermnent" (No. 49 by Madison)."
Though detached from its roots in Platonic metaphysics and epistemology, the Introduction
rule of reason continued to be a potent force in modern political thought. 55
The identification monly accepted morality with nature is contrary to
some of the earliest currents of Greek thought. The sophist Antiphon force•
fully describes the conventions of law as bonds placed upon the natural order;
the Athenians invoke a necessary law of nature to sanction the massacre at
Melos; and Plato's Callicles offers, in the service of his immoralism, the image
of a lion dominant and noble by nature, tamed and shackled by c