Hugo Grotius

Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) enters this wiki through The Rights of War and Peace, the work that secularized the natural-law tradition and is conventionally credited with founding international law.

Place in This Wiki

Grotius was a Dutch jurist, theologian, and statesman of the Dutch Golden Age — a child prodigy, later imprisoned and famously escaping in a book chest. The wiki uses him for the pivotal move in his 1625 masterwork: grounding the content of natural law in the rational and social nature of man rather than in revelation — how far that leaves the obligation referred to God as the author of nature is disputed, and Grotius’s own definition does not settle it — so that it would retain its force etiamsi daremus non esse Deum — even if we were to grant, as the Preliminary Discourse puts it at §XI, “what without the greatest Wickedness cannot be granted, that there is no God, or that he takes no Care of human Affairs”. The qualification matters: the godless premise is one Grotius names as impious and entertains only counterfactually, not a secular starting point he adopts. This made natural rights a common standard across confessional lines and built the law of nations on it.

He stands in the lineage between Aquinas and Locke: he inherits the Scholastic apparatus, loosens its dependence on revelation, and hands a rights-and-contract natural law to the moderns. Grotius is a theorist of obligation, property, and just war, not a libertarian.

Sources

Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace (1738 Morrice/Barbeyrac Translation, Full Text) - the Preliminary Discourse, source of the etiamsi daremus passage quoted here
Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace (Full Text) - the basis for this profile; Campbell translation, abridged

Galtland Index

Explorer

Hugo Grotius

Hugo Grotius

Place in This Wiki

See Also

Sources

Graph View

Table of Contents

Backlinks