La noción de ley en Suárez y Locke

Abstract

It can be affirmed that the voluntarist sense of Locke's notion of law is typically modern. The use of a lexicon emphasizing the volitional element as the essence of law has its origin in anthropological, juridical and theological theories of the Late Middle Ages, of which Suárez is the principal vehicle of transmission to modernity. Whether directly or indirectly, the influence of Suárez's concept of law on Locke is indisputable. The last part of this article investigates the historical sequence Suárez-Grotius-Lock searching for a common, developmental thread in the voluntarism of said authors, and proposes a way to understand Grotius's expression regarding the validity of natural law, "etiamsi daremus non esse Deum", diverse from how it is habitually understood, whose real meaning is to indicate the relative autonomy of natural law with respect to the divine will.