Influence
According to the Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing, he "played a role of fundamental importance in the transition of English historical writing from a medieval antiquarianism to a more modern understanding of the scope and function of history than had ever before been expressed in Renaissance England". His reputation lasted well, with Mark Pattison calling him "the most learned man, not only of his party, but of Englishmen".
By about 1640, Selden's views (with those of Grotius) had a large impact on the Great Tew circle around Lucius Cary, 2nd Viscount Falkland: William Chillingworth, Dudley Digges, Henry Hammond. It was in this milieu that Selden met and befriended Thomas Hobbes. They had much in common, in political thought, but the precise connections have not been clarified.
Richard Cumberland followed Selden over both Grotius and Hobbes on natural law. Selden contested the scholastic position, after Cicero, that "right reason" could by its dictates alone generate obligation, by claiming that a formal obligation required a superior in authority. In his De legibus Cumberland rejects Selden's solution by means of the Noahide laws, in De jure naturali, in favour of Selden's less developed alternate solution. The latter is more orthodox for a Thomist, an intellectus agens as a natural faculty in the rational soul, by the mediation of which divine intellect can intervene directly with individuals. Matthew Hale tried to merge the theory of Grotius on property with Selden's view on obligation. Cumberland and Hale both belonged to a larger group, followers in a broad sense of Selden, with backgrounds mostly of Cambridge and the law, comprising also Orlando Bridgeman, Hezekiah Burton, John Hollings, Richard Kidder, Edward Stillingfleet, John Tillotson, and John Wilkins.
Giambattista Vico called Grotius, Selden and Samuel Pufendorf the "three princes" of the "natural right of the gentes". He went on to criticise their approach foundationally. In his Autobiography he specifies that they had conflated the natural law of the "nations", based on custom, with that of the philosophers, based on human abstractions. Isaiah Berlin comments on Vico's admiration for Grotius and Selden.
Read more about this topic: John Selden
Famous quotes containing the word influence:
“Imagination is always the fabric of social life and the dynamic of history. The influence of real needs and compulsions, of real interests and materials, is indirect because the crowd is never conscious of it.”
—Simone Weil (1909–1943)
“We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it; and did not spend our time in atoning for the neglect of past opportunities, which we call doing our duty.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Just what is the civil law? What neither influence can affect, nor power break, nor money corrupt: were it to be suppressed or even merely ignored or inadequately observed, no one would feel safe about anything, whether his own possessions, the inheritance he expects from his father, or the bequests he makes to his children.”
—Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 B.C.)