Early Modern Sources of the Regular War Tradition

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pablo Kalmanovitz
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Just War ◽  
Armed Force ◽  
Intellectual Tradition ◽  
Christian Wolff ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
Legal Positivist ◽  
Conceptual Articulation

The concept of regular war, like that of just war, belongs to a long-standing intellectual tradition of conceptual articulation, legitimization, and contestation. The defining concern of this tradition has been to institutionalize juridical and conventional means of regulating and limiting the use of armed force. This chapter examines the early modern and Enlightenment accounts of Hugo Grotius, Christian Wolff, and Emer Vattel. In contrast to later legal positivist accounts, these accounts were very keen to provide ethical foundations for their eminently juridical projects. The chapter focusses on the defence of the principle of belligerent equality, which constitutes a central contrast between the regular and just war approaches. Epistemic, prudential, and security-based arguments in defence of the principle are reconstructed and their contemporary relevance assessed.

The Right of Conquest

Victory ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 90-107
Author(s):  
Cian O'Driscoll
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Just War ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
The Right ◽  
Degree Of Overlap

The fifth problem victory raises for just war scholars is that it evokes conquest, which is antithetical to the idea of just war. As such, it raises a set of questions bearing on the legal effects of victory that contemporary just war theorists tend to overlook. Does victory in a just war generate certain entitlements for the victor, and, if so, on what basis? Is just war generative of what we might call a ‘right of conquest’? And does this right extend even to cases where the victor does not have justice on its side? Drawing on the early modern legal writings of Alberico Gentili and Hugo Grotius, this chapter contends that the answers just war thinkers have historically furnished to these questions reveal a degree of overlap with the doctrine of might is right that contemporary just war theorists have been conditioned to ignore and may find disquieting.

Sovereignty, Pluralism, and Regular War: Wolff and Vattel’s Enlightenment Critique of Just War

2017 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 218-241 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pablo Kalmanovitz
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Just War ◽  
Use Of Force ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
Christian Wolff ◽  
Just Cause ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Just War Tradition ◽  
War Discourse

Since its early origins, just war discourse has had two contrasting functions: it has sought to speak law and morals to power, and thus to restrain the use of force, but it has also served to authorize and legitimize the use of force. Critical voices have recently alerted to the increasing use of authorization and legitimization in a broader context of hegemonic and unilateral appropriations of just war discourse. In this article, I show that such critiques of just war have a long history, and reconstruct the powerful challenge that two of the foremost international jurists of the Enlightenment—Christian Wolff and Emer de Vattel—mounted against early modern accounts of just war. Their neglected theory of “regular war” helps us to recover a sense of what a truly pluralist and anti-hegemonic doctrine of ius ad bellum may look like, and reveals a deep tension in the just war tradition between the criteria of political authority and just cause.

Philosophic Pride

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Brooke
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Marcus Aurelius ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
Modern Era

This is the first full-scale look at the essential place of Stoicism in the foundations of modern political thought. Spanning the period from Justus Lipsius's Politics in 1589 to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile in 1762, and concentrating on arguments originating from England, France, and the Netherlands, the book considers how political writers of the period engaged with the ideas of the Roman and Greek Stoics that they found in works by Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. The book examines key texts in their historical context, paying special attention to the history of classical scholarship and the historiography of philosophy. The book delves into the persisting tension between Stoicism and the tradition of Augustinian anti-Stoic criticism, which held Stoicism to be a philosophy for the proud who denied their fallen condition. Concentrating on arguments in moral psychology surrounding the foundations of human sociability and self-love, the book details how the engagement with Roman Stoicism shaped early modern political philosophy and offers significant new interpretations of Lipsius and Rousseau together with fresh perspectives on the political thought of Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes. The book shows how the legacy of the Stoics played a vital role in European intellectual life in the early modern era.

Threats and Coercive Diplomacy: An Ethical Analysis

2018 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-202 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory M. Reichberg ◽  
Henrik Syse
Keyword(s):  
Speech Act ◽  
Just War ◽  
Use Of Force ◽  
Ethical Analysis ◽  
Armed Force ◽  
International Affairs ◽  
Armed Attack ◽  
Coercive Diplomacy ◽  
Actual Use ◽  
Special Category

AbstractThreats of armed force are frequently employed in international affairs, yet they have received little ethical scrutiny in their own right. This article addresses that deficit by examining how threats, taken as a speech act, require a moral assessment that is distinctive vis-à-vis the actual use of armed force. This is done first by classifying threats within the framework of speech act theory. Then, applying standard just war criteria, we analyze conditional threats of harm under Thomas Schelling's twofold distinction of compellence and deterrence. We aim to show how threats of armed attack, while subject to many of the same evaluative principles as the corresponding use of force, nevertheless have distinctive characteristics of their own. These are outlined under the headings of just cause, ad bellum proportionality, legitimate authority, and right intention. The overall aim is to explain how threats in the international sphere represent a special category that warrants a just war analysis.

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.

Calvinists, Arminians, Socinians: Popular Sovereignty and Natural Rights in Early Modern Political Thought

2019 ◽  
pp. 21-35
Author(s):  
James Moore
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
The Political ◽  
Reformed Church ◽  
Hugo Grotius

This chapter focuses upon natural rights in the writings of Hugo Grotius, the Levellers and John Locke and the manner in which their understanding of rights was informed by distinctive Protestant theologies: by Arminianism or the theology of the Remonstrant Church and by Socinianism. The chapter argues that their theological principles and the natural rights theories that followed from those principles were in conflict with the theology of Calvin and the theologians of the Reformed church. The political theory that marks the distinctive contribution of Calvin and the Reformed to political theory was the idea of popular sovereignty, an idea revived in the eighteenth century, in the political writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Circles of Confidence in Correspondence

Nuncius ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles van den Heuvel ◽  
Scott B. Weingart ◽  
Nils Spelt ◽  
Henk Nellen
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Knowledge Exchange ◽  
Technological Knowledge ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Religious Conflicts ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
The Republic

Science in the early modern world depended on openness in scholarly communication. On the other hand, a web of commercial, political, and religious conflicts required broad measures of secrecy and confidentiality; similar measures were integral to scholarly rivalries and plagiarism. This paper analyzes confidentiality and secrecy in intellectual and technological knowledge exchange via letters and drawings. We argue that existing approaches to understanding knowledge exchange in early modern Europe – which focus on the Republic of Letters as a unified entity of corresponding scholars – can be improved upon by analyzing multilayered networks of communication. We describe a data model to analyze circles of confidence and cultures of secrecy in intellectual and technological knowledge exchanges. Finally, we discuss the outcomes of a first experiment focusing on the question of how personal and professional/official relationships interact with confidentiality and secrecy, based on a case study of the correspondence of Hugo Grotius.

Early Modern Sovereignty and Its Limits

2015 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Straumann
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Contract Law ◽  
Property Law ◽  
Private Law ◽  
God's Will ◽  
Legal Obligations ◽  
Perfect Duties ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
Important Idea

AbstractMy Article seeks to explore a few antecedents of the idea that sovereignty may be encumbered with some obligations and duties vis-à-vis non-sovereigns and even strangers. Theories about limitations on sovereignty and obligations on the part of sovereigns often arose out of the fertile conceptual ground of Roman private law, in particular rules of property law governing usufruct and rules of contract law, such as those governing mandate. Early modern thinkers, especially Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), built on these ideas and, in addition, developed an account of moral and legal obligations arising, independently of God’s will, from a universal human nature. Building on Cicero, Grotius was among the first early-modern thinkers to elaborate the distinction between “perfect” duties of justice and “imperfect” duties of beneficence, an important idea that had wide influence through the work of Emer de Vattel (1714-1767). The Article closes by offering a few observations on the trajectories within which Professor Benvenisti’s concept of “sovereigns as trustees of humanity” could be situated.

Justice of War and Justice in War

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Lucas
Keyword(s):  
Just War ◽  
Armed Force ◽  
Political Realism ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Asymmetric Warfare ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Recent Developments

This article deals with what are termed descriptive and normative understandings of war. Descriptive accounts attempt to capture and describe the most salient and essential features of warfare as it is experienced by its participants (and victims). Normative accounts, by contrast, attempt to provide theories about when, if ever, the kind of activities in those descriptive accounts are justified (permissible, excusable, or unavoidable). Normative accounts of warfare also attempt to develop theoretical frameworks within which appropriate and inappropriate means and methods of conducting war can be distinguished. Such justificatory accounts of war and its conduct may be purely political in nature (political “realism”), but are more often framed as moral and ethical arguments about the permissibility of resorting to armed force to resolve conflict and the sorts of methods and tactics which may be permitted when doing so (“just war” theories). This article concludes with recent developments that challenge conventional theories concerning justified war and its proper conduct in the light of new military technologies for waging war, as well as the increased resort to terrorism and forms of “asymmetric” warfare by individuals and organizations not officially representative of existing nation-states.

The Actual and the Possible

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Bertrand Russell ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
Baruch Spinoza ◽  
Christian Wolff ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Range ◽  
Selection Of

This volume offers a selection of essays by leading specialists on modality and the metaphysics of modality in the history of modern philosophy, from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. It revisits key moments in the history of modern modal doctrines, and illuminates lesser-known moments of that history. With this historical approach, the book aims to contextualize and even to offer alternatives to dominant positions within the contemporary philosophy of modality. Hence the volume contains not only new scholarship on the early-modern doctrines of Baruch Spinoza, G. W. Leibniz, Christian Wolff, and Immanuel Kant, but also work relating to less familiar nineteenth-century thinkers such as Alexius Meinong and Jan Łukasiewicz, together with essays on celebrated nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers such as G. W. F. Hegel, Martin Heidegger, and Bertrand Russell, whose modal doctrines have not previously garnered the attention they deserve. The volume thus covers a variety of traditions, and its historical range extends to the end of the twentieth century, since it addresses the legacy of Willard Van Orman Quine’s critique of modality within recent analytic philosophy.

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