ABSTRACT
It has been indicated that the unquestioning devotion to the concept of natural law which seems to have characterized virtually all of the political theory of the latter part of the eighteenth century did not continue into the nineteenth. A number of writers in the first half of that century either explicitly or implicitly abandoned the concept, or, as in the case of John C. Calhoun, George Fitzhugh, Orestes A. Brownson, and others, repudiated the principle of rights derived from nature while continuing to believe in the principle of restraining and guiding laws of nature. In these writings, then, one does not find a real criticism of the concept under discussion. The honor of being the first writer in America to set forth such a criticism seems to belong to that extraordinarily versatile gentleman, Thomas Cooper. It seems clear, then, that Cooper is writing in the tradition of Hobbes, as well as in the spirit of Bentham and Austin.
