Burlamaqui was born on July 13, 1694 in Geneva as son of Jean-Louis, who was a member of the legislative authority of the city, the council of two hundred, and of Suzanne Favre de la Croix. His ancestors, the Burlamacchi, had emigrated from the Italian city of Lucca after the Reformation. Jean-Jacques studied philosophy and jurisprudence at the Academy of Geneva from 1709 to 1716, when he obtained his official law exam. On April 26, 1717, he got married to Renée, the daughter of Jacob de Chapeaurouge (1669-1744), who was a member of the small council and syndic. Having already taught private lessons on natural law to sons of patrician Genevan families and to foreigners, he was awarded the title of honorary professor by the city council in 1720. The same year, he travelled to England and joined his friend, the theologian Ami Lullin (1695-1756), for a short study stay at Oxford University. In 1721 the two friends travelled back to Geneva via the Netherlands, where Burlamaqui visited Jean Barbeyrac at the University of Groningen.

In 1722, the small council decided to create two professorships in law in order to assure that natural law would henceforth be taught at the Academy. Shortly after Jean Cramer (1701-1773), Burlamaqui was appointed professor of natural and civil law on 29 March, 1723, and he taught mainly natural law on the basis of Barbeyrac's richly commented French translation of Samuel Pufendorf's De officio hominis et civis. Besides the regular students, some of the numerous young nobles from England and Germany visiting the city also attended his classes.

While he was in England, Burlamaqui had been elected to the council of two hundred, and he was appointed to the council of sixty in 1730. He thus participated in the political affairs of the city and got involved in the turmoil of 1734. Together with three other commissioners he was in charge of writing a report on behalf of the government aimed at rejecting the demands of the bourgeoisie. During the political unrests, he left the city because he was accompanying his pupil Frederick II, Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, to his court. The prince had come to study in Geneva in 1732 and returned after the turmoil, remaining there until 1737. During these years, Burlamaqui was in charge of teaching the prince the law of nature and nations. When the two were not together, the teaching continued via correspondence (Broussois, 2019). Burlamaqui stopped teaching in 1739 because of ill health, and his former substitute Pierre Lullin officially replaced him in 1740. Despite his unwillingness, Burlamaqui was elected to the small council in 1742 to which he belonged until his death on April 3, 1748.

Burlamaqui was, above all, a dedicated teacher of natural law. He used Barbeyrac’s French translation of Pufendorf’s manual, Les devoirs de l’homme et du citoyen (1708), as textbook for his courses, and he borrowed extensively from Pufendorf’s and Grotius’ main works, also in Barbeyrac’s translations, respectively Le droit de la nature et des gens (1707) and Le droit de la guerre et de la paix (1724). In 1747 he published the Principes du droit naturel. He then worked on a study of civil government but was unable to finish it before he died. A friend of his, the theologian Jacob Vernet (1698-1789), completed the manuscript based on the lecture notes of Burlamaqui’s courses, and published the work in 1751 as Principes du droit politique. At the instigation of Burlamaqui’s sister and his daughter Sara (d. 1782), the government ordered the publisher Barillot to remove the names of the author and printer as well as the place of publication from the copies already printed and from any future publication. Henceforth, the Principes du droit politique were considered as the second part of Burlamaqui’s system, and the two parts were later reprinted as Principes ou Eléments du droit naturel.

The lecture notes were later used for two new editions. The first one is Fortuné-Barthélemy de Félice’s annotated edition in eight volumes of 1766-1768, entitled Principes du droit de la nature et des gens. Avec la suite du droit de la nature qui n’avoit point encore paru. As de Félice explains in the letter to J. H. S. Formey serving as introduction to the first volume, Burlamaqui’s published work only presented the general principles of natural law and did not show how the latter applied to man’s duties against God, against himself and against others. Having discovered lecture notes on this matter, he decided to include them in the present edition, but as they were very brief, he added his own extended commentary. This is the content of vols. 3-5, which the editor inserted between the Principes du droit naturel (vols. 1-2) and the Principes du droit politique (vols. 6-8). De Félice openly admits in his letter to Formey and in the introduction to the third volume that he decided to abridge the original text and to displace a chapter in order to make a coherent whole of the compilation of Burlamaqui’s published work and the text of the lecture notes. Consequently, his edition, which received highly critical comments in his own time (Viani, 2012, p. 133-135), has to be considered in the light of the editorial strategy of de Felice himself and not as the expression of Burlamaqui’s own thought (Silvestrini, 2016).

The other new edition was Elémens du droit naturel (1775, 1783) and Principes ou Elémens du droit politique (1784), printed in Lausanne by F. Grasset. The first of these volumes comprises a lengthy introduction, composed of a preface and two unsigned letters, the first on the study of civil law, the second on the shortest and easiest method to gain knowledge of the elements of law. The author of this introduction was Jean-Marc-Louis Favre (1733-1793), who held a doctoral degree in law from the University of Tübingen and owned a rich library in the Rolle castle. The letters are excerpts from the missives he had sent to several students from the Pays de Vaud, among them Frédéric-César de la Harpe (1754-1838), the future personal teacher of Alexander I of Russia and leading politician in the formation of the Helvetic Republic, who studied law at the University of Tübingen in the early 1770s. Favre’s editions are the only ones that are exclusively based on the texts Burlamaqui had dictated to his students (Viani, 2012). It has to be noted, however, that the title of the second volume, Principes ou Elémens du droit politique, does not appear in any of the lecture notes of Burlamaqui’s courses known today.

Burlamaqui’s published works, or parts thereof, have been translated into English, Dutch, Italian, German, and Danish, and were republished in more than sixty different editions by the second half of the nineteenth century. The first editions of the Principes du droit naturel and of the Principes du droit politique were immediately translated into English by Thomas Nugent, the former in 1748, the latter in 1752. A revised edition was published in 1763 as The Principles of Natural and Politic Law. This was the edition that reached the British and American universities and colleges and was studied there for generations.

Burlamaqui has sometimes been taken for an unoriginal compilator. This is because part of his published work, and notably the Principes du droit politique, reproduced the text of his lectures, which borrow extensively from Pufendorf’s and Grotius’ treatises on natural law as well as from Barbeyrac’s commentaries on these works without explicit reference. Yet in the Principes du droit naturel, which he elaborated for publication, he develops an original theory of moral obligation and provides an account of the law of nature which differs remarkably from that of Pufendorf. Regarding moral obligation, Burlamaqui steers a middle course between a rationalist and a voluntarist account of the nature and foundation of obligation. Depending on the contexts, he ascribes the former either to Samuel Clarke (I, 6, §11) or to Grotius (II,7,§15), who held that reason can discover the moral quality of actions independently of any law. The opposite position is the one defended by Pufendorf and by Barbeyrac, who established as principle of obligation the will of a superior and thus argued that obligation follows the law (I, 6, §12). Burlamaqui was obviously well acquainted with Barbeyrac’s reply to the Jugement d’un Anonyme [Leibniz], published in the 1718 edition of Les devoirs de l’homme et du citoyen.

He aims at showing that the rationalist and the voluntarist conception of obligation are insufficient and that their respective virtues need to be evaluated in the context of a more complex theory of obligation that combines ‘internal’ with ‘external’ obligation (Zurbuchen, 2004). Regarding the former, he argues that it is possible to impose obligation on oneself by reason. This is so because rational insight furnishes the reason to act in a certain way and at the same time the motive to do so. He defines obligation as “a restriction of natural liberty, produced by reason; inasmuch as the counsels which reason gives us, are so many motives, that determine man to act after a certain manner preferable to another” (The Principles of Natural and Politic Law, I,6,§9). For understanding how the counsels provided by reason become the motives to act in a certain way, one needs to presuppose, argues Burlamaqui, that the counsels indicate the means for attaining a good that the will strives for, or for avoiding an evil. One thus needs to refer to man’s interest in attaining the good or avoiding the evil, and the latter is founded in man’s desire of happiness (I,5,§6). Internal obligation is ultimately anchored in self-love – a principle that is not bad, as is commonly held, but good in itself since it was given to man by God, a supremely perfect being (I,5,§7). Insofar as reason indicates the means to an end (happiness), it has to be considered as the “true” or “primitive rule” of human actions (I,5,§9). Internal obligation will then be reinforced by external obligation, which originates in the will of a superior, who commands or prohibits certain things under threat of punishment. However, in order to distinguish external obligation from constraint, Burlamaqui argues, reason must approve the authority of the superior. Otherwise, the command of the superior would not have the power of penetrating the will (I,6,§12-13).

Burlamaqui further explains that the general idea of right (ius) consists in the primitive rule of human actions thus understood. The notion of right may however also be taken as “a power of acting or faculty” (I,7,§2), which is not a physical but a moral quality. As such, it includes “a relation of agreeableness to a rule which modifies the physical power, and directs its operations in a manner proper to conduct man to a certain end” (I,7,§3). Right as a moral quality thus depends on the prior approval by reason that the use of our faculties corresponds to the primitive rule of human action. Burlamaqui’s subjective concept of right as a moral power is very similar to the one defended by Grotius. Neither of them conceived ius as something an individual has command of in the service of his self-preservation. It rather designates the moral power to judge what an individual rightfully should have. Like Grotius, Burlamaqui defended a “conservative theory” of natural rights (Haakonssen, 2002).

Burlamaqui’s foundation of the law of nature is a major deviation from Pufendorf’s theory. While Pufendorf insisted on the distinction between natural law and moral theology (De officio hominis, preface), Burlamaqui considers natural theology as “the first and true foundation” of the law of nature. This discipline would demonstrate that God exists and has the right of prescribing laws to man, and that he actually did impose laws. To explain how man discerns what is dictated by natural law, he refers to the role he attributed to reason in the context of his theory of moral obligation, and he also introduces the idea of a “moral instinct”, which would be the same as Hutcheson’s “moral sense”, that is, “a faculty of the mind, which instantly discerns, in certain cases, moral good and evil, by a kind of sensation and taste, independent of reason and reflexion” (II,3,§1). This basic sense or taste of virtue and justice, which could be found in nearly all men, is supplemented by reason, a faculty that enables men to better discern the true rules of conduct. Moral instinct and reason are thus considered as two distinct means for discerning moral good and evil, but they are not on a par. Burlamaqui affirms that reason has three advantages over instinct: it contributes to prove the truth and exactness of the moral instinct, it considers the ideas in all their relations and consequences, and it has a more extensive sphere concerning the application of principles (II,3,§§9-11). This ordering of the moral faculties made his theory of moral obligation especially interesting for some of the American founding fathers such as James Wilson and Thomas Jefferson (White, 1978, pp. 97-141).

Yet another revision of Pufendorf’s theory of natural law – which was already suggested by Barbeyrac in his commentaries to the Les devoirs de l’homme – can be found in the way in which Burlamaqui founds the various duties imposed on man by natural law. While in the De iure Pufendorf limited himself to dealing with the duties to others and – in the second edition of his main work – with the duties to oneself, he also considered the duties to God in the De officio. Burlamaqui criticizes Pufendorf for establishing sociability alone as the foundation of all natural laws, for it would be impossible to derive all our duties from this principle. He proposes instead to derive man’s duties from three principles: duties to God from religion, duties to oneself from self-love, and duties to others from sociability (II,4,§§18-19).

In the lectures that were published as Principles of Politic Law Burlamaqui deals with the origin and nature of civil society, with internal and external sovereignty as well as with different forms of government. This part of his theory is especially important in regard to the republican theory of the social contract that Rousseau would later develop. Unlike Pufendorf, who criticized mixed forms of government as being ‘irregular’, Burlamaqui developed a concept of sovereignty which allowed him to provide a positive account of mixed forms of government such as the English monarchy or the Genevan aristo-democracy. He argues that sovereignty comprises different powers, or parts, which may be divided and entrusted different hands. While he does not deny that in his native republic the sovereign power originally belongs to the people, he also argues that sovereignty can be exercised jointly by the different orders of the government, that is, by the general council, the council of two hundred, and the small council. As attested by the report against the demands of the bourgeoisie that he helped write at the request of the Genevan government, Burlamaqui developed a political theory suited to serve the interests of the ruling elite. His theory of sovereignty was thoroughly criticized by Rousseau, who argued in the Social Contract that sovereignty exclusively consists in the legislative power, and that the latter has to be exercised by the people assembled in the general council (Silvestrini, 2007, 2010).

Although Burlamaqui’s natural law theory has been read by generations of students in various European countries and in America, a thoroughgoing study of his impact on later thinkers remains a desideratum.