Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui

Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui was a Genevan legal and political theorist, born in 1694 into a Calvinist family in Geneva and died in 1748. He became an honorary professor of ethics and natural law at the University of Geneva at the age of twenty-five, and his treatises Principes du droit naturel of 1747 and Principes du droit politique of 1751 were translated into several languages across some sixty editions. His synthesis of natural law theory, including his argument that happiness is a natural right, influenced the American founding generation, including Thomas Jefferson's language in the Declaration of Independence.