Hugo Grotius

Grotius, Hugo (1583–1645)

Scholar, lawyer and statesman, Grotius contributed to a number of different disciplines. His reputation as the founder both of a new international order and of a new moral science rests largely on his De iure belli ac pacis (The Law of War and Peace) (1625). Though the tendency today is to regard Grotius as one figure among others in the development of the concept of international law, he is increasingly regarded as one of the most original moral philosophers of the seventeenth century, in particular as having laid the foundations for the post-sceptical doctrine of natural law that flourished during the Enlightenment.

Of several striking epithets applied to Grotius, the earliest was that of Henry IV, who called him ‘the miracle of Holland’. When only 15 years old Grotius had been taken on a diplomatic mission from the United Provinces to France, where he astonished the King with his prodigious learning. As a classicist, poet, historian, theologian and jurist he continued to impress his contemporaries throughout his life. He also continued to participate in international diplomacy during a period of almost constant conflict. For some twenty years he served the United Provinces until, on the fall of his patron Jan van Oldenbarnevelt in 1619, he was imprisoned for life. After a dramatic escape two years later he once again left The Netherlands for France, this time permanently. From 1634 until his death he acted as ambassador to France for Queen Christina of Sweden.

His interest in international relations earned Grotius another remarkable epithet, ‘the father of international law’. As early as 1605 he wrote a treatise in defence of Dutch incursions in the East Indies, of which one chapter was published as Mare liberum (The Freedom of the Seas) in 1609. The treatise as a whole did not appear in print until 1864 as De iure praedae (The Law of Plunder), but in 1625 Grotius provided a fuller and somewhat revised statement of his ideas in the work on which his reputation chiefly rests, De iure belli ac pacis. In the first of its three books Grotius examined the notion of a just war, before moving on in the second to review the causes of just wars and in the third to consider how wars were justly waged.

The De iure belli did much to promote the idea of a society of states bound together by the common recognition of a set of rules governing relations between them. None the less, Grotius’ reputation as the founder of an international legal order has not survived intact, partly because he wrote on only some aspects of international law, partly because his views were largely derivative. By contrast, his reputation as the founder of a new moral science has been rehabilitated. Although he wrote in the apparently familiar language of the natural law tradition, Grotius is believed to have established a new basis for ethical inquiry by tracing everything back to the one tenet of natural law that even sceptics would not deny, the idea that men were entitled to preserve themselves. From this foundation he – and to a greater degree his successors – reconstructed an elaborate body of natural law doctrine on a mathematical model (see Natural law §§4–5).