Chapter 10 analyses Locke’s early writings on money within the wider context of his corpuscularism and explores what I have termed his ‘doctrine of necessities’. The chapter argues that his theory concerning the ‘necessaries’ and ‘necessities’, rather than ‘rights’, gives systematic coherence not only to his political and economics writings but to his entire philosophical theory. In Locke’s early writings on money, the key issue concerns economic phenomena that belong to an interdependent scientific system. The chapter discusses in detail the literature dealing with moneylending that existed before Locke and demonstrates in this manner his originality.

Chapter 3 subjects the theory’s macro-level hypotheses to statistical tests based on a comprehensive new dataset: the Performance of International Institutions Project (PIIP). It begins by describing the PIIP’s scope, contents, and sources. The empirical analysis is divided into four sections. The first examines the relationship between performance and policy autonomy. I find a positive association when policy autonomy is measured using a survey of international bureaucrats, a proxy for de facto policy autonomy, but no relationship when it is measured using formal rules, a proxy for de jure policy autonomy. The second section turns to the determinants of de facto policy autonomy, showing that the survey-based measure is positively predicted both by the quantity, depth, and breadth of operational alliances and by the exercise of governance tasks with high monitoring costs for states. In the third section, I employ a simultaneous equations strategy to isolate the effect of performance and de facto policy autonomy on one another. The fourth section summarizes a battery of robustness checks.

Chapter 4 discusses the circle that formed around the intelligencer Samuel Hartlib (1600–1662). Its overarching argument is that utilitarian science offered guidance in finding the simplicity of the unum necessarium (Luke 10:42), a common theme exalted by contemporary Millenarianism of the Protestant cause. In practical terms, knowledge about necessities became the means to achieving that goal of faith. The scepticism of the period and its obvious corrupting effects on morality and devotion led to inventiveness in pursuit of substitutes for the classical moral principle of the light of reason. The Reformers worked towards a political and theological project of a utilitarian science as a means by which to reach God and reproduce Paradise on earth. Scientific knowledge about trade became central and was expressed, significantly, in the momentous Navigation Acts of 1651.

This chapter considers the theory’s implications for the significant issue of accountability in global governance. My reasoning may appear to suggest a fundamental tension between performance and accountability: If avoiding the thorniest obstacle to performance requires curtailing state influence in the policy process, international institutions presumably cannot be both effective and accountable. I argue, however, that if we embrace a more expansive understanding of how accountability may be institutionalized, no such tradeoff arises. This is because the same factors that nurture policy autonomy make institutions more likely to adopt a variety of modern accountability structures – what I call second-wave accountability (SWA) mechanisms – that primarily benefit and empower non-state actors. Once in place, moreover, SWA mechanisms can themselves deliver performance gains by revealing operational problems, improving the quality of decision-making, and boosting policy compliance. I provide two forms of empirical support for these claims: (1) statistical evidence based on novel data on the spread and strength of SWA mechanisms; and (2) a qualitative plausibility probe focusing on institutions in the issue area of economic development, where many SWA mechanisms were pioneered.

Chapter 2 analyses Hobbes’s ‘doctrine of necessity’, which was famously so termed by Hobbes himself in his debate with Bishop Bramhall. It argues that by means of this doctrine’s basis in the natural sciences Hobbes transformed natural law from an idealist to a pragmatic enterprise, from one based on natural rights to one characterized by the pragmatic employment of principles of necessity. The chapter discusses Avicenna’s metaphysics of existence, through which he described ‘nature’, which gives precedent to what exists in the material world and depends on the necessitarian principle that ‘whatever exists is necessitated by another’. Similarities between Avicenna’s metaphysics and Hobbes’s are analysed, and in respect of the former the capacity of the doctrine of necessity to sustain a metaphysical framework for philosophy and politics is identified.

In the Introduction the three interwoven theses of the book are presented. The first of these concerns the Anthropocene era and contends that a more accurate understanding of the history of natural law and its impact on the development of modern Europe, which, significantly, focuses and draws on previous transformations of the concept of nature, will facilitate the addressing of key current issues in respect of that era. The second concerns the metaphysics of human nature and nature more broadly and contends that the sceptical denial of the light of moral nature and of its epistemological freedom is related to the disappearance of nature as a sacred space. The third thesis concerns the modification of natural law in England during the seventeenth century and contends that the most important seventeenth-century scientists/natural lawyers buttressed their liberal politics by means of philosophical and ethical necessitarianism.

Locke’s knowledge of medicine, and of the main Galenist principles, indicates the type of ideas he was familiar with at an early age. Scholars have analysed the reception in the European political tradition of the Pseudo-Aristotle’s Oeconomia up to Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha, where the household unites economy and politics as a kingdom. The chapter evaluates in a novel manner, in the context of the seventeenth-century liberalism, the tradition of texts that deal with the materialist anthropology of needs, including the Pseudo-Galen’s Yconomia, in which household and humanity originate in the existence of needs. In these texts the state is the sum of individuals united through the materialist principle of human needs with an arbiter entrusted to resolve disputes about reciprocal transactions.

The scepticism of the period from roughly 1645 to 1680 prompted philosophers’ attempts to rethink theology and moral and civil philosophy in their search for ideas concerning the common and the public good. Ralph Cudworth’s effort to overcome the challenges posed by fragmentation in religion and politics and to develop a philosophy helpful in uniting society, but not at the expense of liberty, demonstrate that Neoplatonism was an important force during that period. In a sceptical era, John Selden contributed to particularism in natural law. A discussion of Sir Robert Filmer’s life and key political ideas together with the principles of political economy he espoused follows. Given the disintegration of moral theology in that period, the commercialization of societal ties seems to have been unstoppable. Against the Macphersonian critique of possessive individualism, the chapter puts forward the opening argument that both Hobbes and Locke sought to tame the harsh society characterized by the use of credit they saw before them and that they chose to do so by means of political philosophy and natural law.

Chapter 5 presents the book’s second comparative case study, which examines four major global health agencies: the World Health Organization (WHO); the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS); Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance; and the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria (GFATM). The structure of the examination is analogous to Chapter 4’s. After enumerating the characteristics on which the four institutions are matched, I chronicle how differences in their de facto policy autonomy have given rise to disparate performance outcomes: The WHO and UNAIDS have been characterized by relentlessly declining autonomy and performance over their life cycles, Gavi and GFATM by the opposite trends. I then delve into the operational origins of these differences, which, once again, defy a purely design-based explanation. Like Chapter 4, the case study draws on extensive interviews and archival material.

The transformation of the politics of government towards material necessities has deep roots in Locke’s work. Public order may guide human reason, he argued in the controversy over ‘matters indifferent’, while the classic understanding of conscience, with its troublesome perplexities, appears to be demoted to the private sphere in his unpublished Two Tracts of Government. In his Essays on the Law of Nature the innate principles are denied. Instead, Locke affirms the centrality of human necessities since they compel human beings to band together.