Hugo Grotius

Works

• 1609The Free Sea

  Published anonymously at the request of the Dutch East India Company, originally a chapter of a larger manuscript on prize law: the sea cannot be owned, and navigation and trade are open to all peoples, against Portuguese claims to a monopoly of the route to the East Indies.

• 1625On the Law of War and Peace

  Three books on the law between peoples: natural law, grounded in human sociability, would hold even if there were no God; war may be waged only for a just cause, and even then must observe limits of law and moderation.

Position

Grotius is on the map as a founder of modern natural law and of the law of nations. In “On the Law of War and Peace” he grounded law in human nature, above all in the desire for an ordered social life (appetitus societatis): what reason recognises as compatible with this sociability is natural law, and it would hold “even if we were to concede that there is no God” – a sentence that became a symbol of the separation of law from theology, although Grotius added that this could not be conceded without the utmost wickedness. On this basis he set out the causes that justify war (defence, recovery of property, punishment), the rules that bind belligerents and the duty of moderation even in a just war, drawing on Roman law, the Spanish scholastics and the ancient authors. His theory of rights as a moral quality of persons influenced Hobbes, Pufendorf and Locke, and Adam Smith credited him with the first attempt at a system of natural jurisprudence. “Mare liberum” argued that the sea cannot be owned and is open to the trade of all nations. Grotius also wrote theology, notably “De veritate religionis Christianae” (1627), and history. Recent research has shown how closely his legal arguments were tied to the interests of the Dutch East India Company and how he treated slavery and colonial expansion; this is set out under “Context & critique”.

Life & context

Hugo Grotius (Huig de Groot) was born on 10 April 1583 in Delft. A child prodigy, he entered the University of Leiden at eleven and in 1598 accompanied the statesman Johan van Oldenbarnevelt on an embassy to France. He practised as a lawyer in The Hague, became historiographer of Holland and in 1607 advocate-fiscal; in 1613 he became pensionary of Rotterdam. From 1604 he wrote for the Dutch East India Company a legal defence of its seizure of the Portuguese ship Santa Catarina, of which only “Mare liberum” (1609) was published in his lifetime. In the conflict between Remonstrants and Counter-Remonstrants he sided with Oldenbarnevelt; in 1619 he was sentenced to life imprisonment in Loevestein castle, from which he escaped in 1621, hidden in a book chest. In exile in Paris he wrote “De iure belli ac pacis” (1625); from 1634 he served as Swedish ambassador to France. He died in Rostock on 28 August 1645, after a shipwreck.

Further main works

• De iure praedae commentarius (written 1604–06, published 1868)
• Mare liberum (1609)
• De antiquitate reipublicae Batavicae (1610)
• De iure belli ac pacis libri tres (1625)
• De veritate religionis Christianae (1627)

Appears in

• Debate ‘War and Peace: When Is Armed Force Justified?’