Francisco Suárez: Law, Consent and the Community

The Jesuit theologian Francisco Suárez (1548–1617) brought the School of Salamanca's thinking to a peak in his treatise On Laws and God the Lawgiver, published in 1612. Suárez blended Aquinas's emphasis on reason with the voluntarist insistence on will: natural law shows what is good, but it binds as law because God commands it. He also argued that political power comes from God not directly to kings but to the community as a whole, which then transfers it to a ruler.

This meant the people were the original holders of political authority, an idea with radical potential. Suárez used this view to reject the theory of the divine right of kings defended by James I of England. He also distinguished natural law from the law of nations, which he saw as customs common to almost all peoples. His work was widely studied in Catholic and Protestant universities, linking medieval scholasticism to early modern political theory.