SOURCE: "Natural Law and Revolutionary 'Natural Rights'," in Edmund Burke and the Natural Law, The University of Michigan Press, 1958, pp. 14-28.

In the excerpt that follows, Stanlis demonstrates the pervasiveness of the notion of Natural Law for all modern political philosophy, from the relatively conservative to the most radical. To explain his thesis, heanalyzes the works of Hobbes, Bentham, and Locke.

The bulk of contemporary jurists (particularly those of the positivist school) … are really attacking a false idea of natural law, and in exterminating it, exterminate only a man of straw, drawn from the pages of cheap-jack textbooks…. The idea of natural law … does not go back to the philosophy of the eighteenth century, which more or less deformed it.

Maritain, The Rights of Man and Natural Law, p. 59.

In 1789 Jeremy Bentham published his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, in which he made a...