Is Modern Liberty Ancient? Roman Remedies and Natural Rights in Hugo Grotius's Early Works on Natural Law

2009 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Straumann
Keyword(s):  
Natural Law ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Law And Ethics ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
Scholarly Attention

The Dutch humanist Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) is widely acknowledged to have made important contributions to an influential doctrine of individual natural rights. In this article I argue that Grotius developed his rights doctrine primarily out of normative Roman sources, that is to say Roman law and ethics. If this Roman tradition has been as central to Grotius's influential writing on natural rights as I claim, why has it not received more scholarly attention? The reasons lie in the view that while rights are constitutive of modern liberty, they were unknown in classical antiquity.

Natural Law in Early Modern Legal Thought

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Ibbetson
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Human Reason ◽  
God's Will ◽  
Law Of Nature ◽  
Legal Thought ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Hugo Grotius

Natural law thinking in the early modern world had two principal roots: Greco-Roman moral philosophy and Roman law. These two strands came together in sixteenth-century Spain, from where they influenced the Dutchman Hugo Grotius. Grotius can be seen as the channel through which this thinking reached a pan-European audience. His works, and the works of his followers, came to have an enormous influence on the development of legal thought and practice after the seventeenth century. Ideas of natural law were no longer regarded as dependent on God’s will. A rational structure could be derived from self-evident premises in the law of nature and identification of concrete rules of natural law was regarded as the work of human reason. These features, coupled with its seeming moral objectivity, allowed natural law to provide a template for positive legal systems, and fuelled the move towards codification of law in eighteenth-century Europe.

Natural Law and Natural Rights in Early Enlightenment Copenhagen

2019 ◽  
pp. 94-124
Author(s):  
Mads Langballe Jensen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Academic Teaching ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
The Common ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

This chapter discusses the earliest teaching of post-grotian natural law by Henrik Weghorst and Christian Reitzer in Copenhagen in the decades around 1700. This teaching has often been presented as merely derivative of the ideas of Hugo Grotius or Samuel Pufendorf. In contrast, this chapter argues that Weghorst and Reitzer developed two very different, and antagonistic, forms of natural law, reflecting academic teaching in Kiel and in Halle. However, it also shows how Weghorst and Reitzer illustrate the common ground of much Lutheran natural law theorising in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Thus, for all their differences, both gave primacy to natural law and focused on duties, rather than rights, as constitutive of social and political life.

Grotius, Stoicism, and Oikeiosis

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Brooke
Keyword(s):  
Natural Law ◽  
General Structure ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Practical Deliberation ◽  
Modern Natural ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
Natural Law Theory ◽  
Close Fit

This chapter turns to Hugo Grotius and to the origins of the modern natural rights tradition in a reworking of Ciceronian Stoicism. It first argues that there is a close fit between the general structure of a Ciceronian Stoic natural law theory and the argument that Grotius builds in his Prolegomena to De Jure Belli ac Pacis (1631). Next, the chapter notes that the Stoic concern with autonomy combined with regulating practical deliberation is what gives us this distinctive argument, in which strong claims about the natural sociability of human beings end up issuing in a theory characterised above all by rights that separate people and their property off from one another. Finally, although Grotius calls oikeiosis (a desire for society) the appetitus societatis, he in fact works far more closely with Stoic sources on the side of personal oikeiosis rather than on the side of social oikeiosis.

Hugo Grotius in Context: Van Heemskerck's Capture of the Santa Catarina and its Justification in De Jure Praedae (1604-1606)

2003 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 511-548 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martine Julia Van Ittersum
Keyword(s):  
Natural Law ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Original Text ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Santa Catarina ◽  
East Indies ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
Rights Theories

This article reconstructs Jacob van Heemskerck's second voyage to the East Indies and his capture of the Portuguese merchantman Santa Catarina on 25 February 1603. It incorporates important new archival evidence like Van Heemskerck's letter to the directors of the Dutch East India Company of 27 August 1603, and the original text of the verdict of the Amsterdam Admiralty Court, which confiscated the Santa Catarina on 4 September 1604. It has long been known that the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) wrote De Jure Praedae in defense of the ship's seizure and at the explicit request of the directors of the Dutch East India Company. Historians have failed to recognise, however, that Grotius' conceptualisation of natural rights and natural law in De Jure Praedae is based to a large extent on Van Heemskerck's own justification of privateering. A key notion of Grotius' rights theories - the individual's right to punish transgressors of the natural law in the absence of an independent and effective judge - follows logically from Van Heemskerck's reasoned decision to assault the Santa Catarina in revenge for Portuguese mistreatment of Dutch merchants in the East Indies. As shown by recent work in international relations theory - notably Edward Keene's Beyond the Anarchical Society: Grotius, Colonialism and Order in World Politics (Keene, 2002) - the natural law and natural rights theories that Grotius formulated in De Jure Praedae cannot be divorced from Dutch imperialism and colonialism in the early modern period.

What we own Before Property: Hugo Grotius and the Suum

Grotiana ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-77 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alejandra Mancilla
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Property Rights ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
The State ◽  
Current Discussion ◽  
State Of Nature ◽  
Modern Natural ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
Scholarly Attention

At the basis of modern natural law theories, the concept of the suum, i.e. what belongs to the person (in Latin, his, her, its, their own), has received little scholarly attention despite its importance both in explaining and justifying not only the genealogy of property, but also that of morality and war. In this essay I focus on Grotius’s account of the suum and examine what it is, what things it includes, what rights it gives rise to, and how it is extended in the transition from the state of nature to civil society. I then briefly suggest that reviving this concept could help to illuminate the current discussion on the foundations of basic human rights, and to re-evaluate cases where these seem to clash with property rights.

11. Hugo Grotius

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Camilla Boisen
Keyword(s):  
Natural Law ◽  
Just War Theory ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Social Contracts ◽  
External Relations ◽  
Literary Sources ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
Short Biography

This chapter examines Hugo Grotius' key political ideas. Grotius, one of the most prolific and erudite writers of the seventeenth century, sought to formulate a set of universal rights and duties that would secure peace by constraining states in their internal and external relations. Drawing on a wide range of philosophical and literary sources, including Roman law, ancient classics, theology, and poetry, Grotius rehabilitated the natural law in an attempt to achieve harmony in an increasingly splintered political environment. After providing a short biography of Grotius, the chapter analyses his views on natural law, natural rights, property rights, sociability, self-preservation, and social contracts. It also discusses Grotius' arguments regarding international order in the context of just war theory and punishment and concludes with an assessment of Grotius' legacy in the area of political thought.

Religion und Recht in der Frühen Neuzeit

2016 ◽  
Vol 102 (1) ◽  
pp. 283-316
Author(s):  
Christoph Strohm
Keyword(s):  
Natural Law ◽  
Canon Law ◽  
Spanish Empire ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Early Modern History ◽  
Religion And Law ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
Law Of Nations ◽  
Judicial Discourse

Abstract Religion and Law in the Early Modern history. The devaluation of the canon law by Protestant Reformers promoted the system-oriented presentations of law based on Roman law. Also in ius publicum there is a significant majority of Protestant authors. The situation differs from natural law and law of nations where the discourse of the 16th century was broadly determined by Catholic authors, specifically by the so called Spanish late scholasticism. In the Spanish empire fundamental works on natural law and law of nations were created. This came to an end in consequence of a „re-theologisation“ of the judicial discourse in the Jesuit led Tridentine Counter- Reformation. During the 17th century - starting with Hugo Grotius (1625) - we see primarily Protestant authors in the field.

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