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 founded 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 natural law in the rational and social nature of man rather than in revealed theology, so that it would retain its force etiamsi daremus non esse Deum — even if we were to grant that there is no God. 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, strips its theological dependence, and hands a rights-and-contract natural law to the moderns. Grotius is a theorist of obligation, property, and just war, not a libertarian.

See Also

• The Rights of War and Peace - the work present in this wiki
• Natural Law and Natural Order - the tradition Grotius secularizes and carries to the moderns
• Thomas Aquinas - the Scholastic predecessor whose apparatus Grotius inherits and strips of theology
• John Locke - the heir who receives the Grotian rights-and-contract natural law
• Natural Law - The wiki’s natural-law hub: the classical lineage of reason-knowable justice above positive law, from Aristotle and Cicero through Aquinas, Grotius, Locke

Sources

• Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace (Full Text) - the basis for this profile