Hugo Grotius 1583 – 1645

Hugo Grotius was a Dutch jurist and philosopher who is widely regarded as the founder of modern international law. Against the religious and dynastic justifications for war that dominated his age, he argued for a body of natural law binding on sovereigns and grounded in human reason and sociability. His De Iure Belli ac Pacis distinguished just from unjust war, articulated the rights and duties of states in their relations with one another, and opened the path to later thinking about international order. His Mare Liberum defended the freedom of the seas against Iberian claims to monopoly.

Hugo Grotius — Huig de Groot — was born at Delft in April 1583, the son of a regent and curator of the new University of Leiden. A celebrated child prodigy, he matriculated at Leiden at eleven and took his doctorate in law at Orléans in 1598 at fifteen. He served as advocate-general of the fisc, Pensionary of Rotterdam, and curator of Leiden, and stood with Johan van Oldenbarnevelt for the Remonstrant cause in the Dutch religious crisis of the 1610s. After the orthodox Calvinist victory of the Synod of Dort he was condemned to perpetual imprisonment in the castle of Loevestein in 1619; in 1621 his wife Maria smuggled him out hidden in a book chest, and he passed the rest of his life in exile, serving from 1635 as Swedish ambassador to the French court.

His major works are Mare Liberum (1609), the early De iure praedae (composed around 1605, published only in 1868), De iure belli ac pacis (On the Law of War and Peace, 1625), De veritate religionis christianae (1627), and a long series of biblical, classical, and historical Annotationes.

Grotius gave international law its modern foundation, deriving the rules of war and peace, of the freedom of the seas, and of trade and treaty from a natural law rooted in human sociability that, in a celebrated phrase, would still hold even on the supposition that there were no God. He stands at the head of the modern natural-law tradition that runs through Pufendorf and Locke into Enlightenment political philosophy. He died at Rostock in August 1645, on his way home from Stockholm.