Hugo Grotius and the Doctrine of Natural Law

When Hugo Grotius (1583—1645) appeared on the European scene in the early seventeenth century, the confines of the known world had broadened enormously and international trade was weaving dense and profitable exchange networks between the Atlantic coasts of Eu­rope (Portugal, Spain, France, Holland, and England) and West Af­rica and the Americas.

Triangular trade routes among these three geographical areas brought immense riches. Merchandise of Iitde intrinsic worth left from European ports to be exchanged in Africa for merchandise of much higher value; in that “black continent” young men and women were hunted down pitilessly, thrown into chains, put onto ships, and sent to the Americas. There they fetched high prices as manpower for immense and rapidly multiplying plantations (of sugar cane, for the most part), and the space they had occupied in the ships was then filled with American agricultural products that were carried back to Europe. Thus with one round-trip voyage a ship could turn a high commercial profit three times.

The capture of African and American men, navigation over nearly uncharted seas, landings in regions inhabited by “savage Indians” and pagans all left their mark on the cultural level when it came to pursu­ing in greater depth legal problems that already figured prominently in the thought of the “Secunda Scholastica.”

We have seen the Salamanca jurists’ intense intellectual curiosity and their efforts to deal with questions of war, peace, plunder, and the extermination of entire non-Christian populations. Although Hugo Grotius is usually credited with being the founder of interna­tional law, in reality the prevalent historiographic perspective often (but not always) oversimplifies the complex vicissitudes of European thought and the European scene between the sixteenth and seven­teenth centuries.

Hugo Grotius lived in the years of the rise of a number of extremely powerful mercantile “companies”: the East India Companies of En­gland (1600) and Holland (1602), and the Dutch West India Com­pany (1621). It was this economic reality that gave urgency to Groti- us’s consideration of the legal problems of navigation and the spoils that could be won in the course of long and adventurous sea voyages.

Grotius’s first work, published anonymously in 1609, bore the sig­nificant title of Mare liberum and was conceived as an autonomous chapter of a much larger treatise, De Iurepreiedae. As is known, how­ever, Grotius⁵S fame rests on the vast fresco of his De iure belli acpacιs_y published in Paris in 1625 after a period when he was pursued by per­sonal troubles that included being sentenced to prison for life in Hol­land and fleeing, under perilous circumstances, to freedom in Paris.

De iure belli ac pacis was in large part written during Grotius⁵S prison years, and it draws largely on the Spanish legal literature of the sixteenth century, which Grotius had been able to study in depth even though he was incarcerated. Although he amply and ably exploited the possibilities that the new methodology had opened up and bor­rowed relevant reflections from the “Secunda Scholastica,” he reinter­preted them with originality and set them within his own compre­hensive, synthetic, and systematic vision of the law.

The matrix of Spanish ideas and methodology is particularly evi­dent in the way in which all Hugo Grotius⁵S institutional thought is anchored in the concept of nature. From this basic point of departure and this pivotal idea, Grotius derived a carefully articulated vision of the legal “institutions,” following an organization that radically and definitively rejected the sequence of books and titles in Justinian’s Di­gest and even the three-part linear division of the Roman institutional scheme of the Institutes.

In Grotius⁵S thought, however, the aims of religious expression shifted. A man who reflected on nature was also a man who reflected on his own nature, on his own instincts, and on the need to control those instincts and subject them to discipline. He was admittedly a man who entrusts himself to the nature willed by God, but for pre­cisely that reason he first must trust himself, his own individual na­ture, and his own capacity for seeing and comprehending. In this fashion, nature took on the colors of “human reason” and was itself fundamentally the reason of the man who investigates and who knows. The age of Descartes was drawing near: that famous French philosopher’s Discourse on Method was published in 1637.

It is often said that European natural law doctrine was born with Grotius. In any case, Grotius had many and famous successors and followers, among whom Samuel Pufendorf (1632-94) was one of the most important.

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