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Hugo Grotius
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17th-century philosophy
Hugo Grotius - Portrait by Michiel Jansz van Mierevelt, 1631
Full name Hugo Grotius
Birth 10 April 1583 (Delft, Holland)
Death 28 August 1645 (Rostock, Pomerania)
School/tradition Natural Law, Social contract, Humanism, Scholasticism
Main interests Philosophy of war, International law, Political philosophy, Theology
Notable ideas early theorist of natural rights, sought to ground just war principles in natural law, defended principle of pacta sunt servanda
Hugo Grotius (also known as Huig de Groot or Hugo de Groot; 10 April 1583 – 28 August 1645) worked as a jurist in the Dutch Republic. With Francisco de Vitoria and Alberico Gentili he laid the foundations for international law, based on natural law. He was also a philosopher, Christian apologist, playwright, and poet.
Early life
Born in Delft during the Dutch Revolt, Hugo was the first child of Jan de Groot and Alida van Overschie. His father was a man of learning, once having studied with the eminent Justus Lipsius at Leiden, as well as of political distinction, and he groomed his son from an early age in a traditional humanist and Aristotelian education. A prodigious learner, Hugo entered the University of Leiden when he was just eleven years old. There he studied with some of the most acclaimed intellectuals in northern Europe, including Franciscus Junius, Joseph Justus Scaliger, and Rudolph Snellius.[1]
In Holland, Grotius earned an appointment as advocate to The Hague in 1599 and then as official historiographer for the States of Holland in 1601. His first occasion to write systematically on issues of international justice came in 1604, when he became involved in the legal proceedings following the seizure by Dutch merchants of a Portuguese carrack and its cargo in the Strait of Singapore.
De Indis and Mare Liberum
The Dutch were at war with Spain and Portugal when the loaded merchant ship, Santa Catarina, was captured by captain Jacob van Heemskerk in 1603. Heemskerk was employed with the United Amsterdam Company (part of the Dutch East India Company), and though he did not have authorization from the company or the government to initiate the use of force, many shareholders were eager to accept the riches that he brought back to them. Not only was the legality of keeping the prize questionable under Dutch statute, but a faction of shareholders (mostly Mennonite) in the Company also objected to the forceful seizure on moral grounds, and of course, the Portuguese demanded the return of their cargo. The scandal led to a public judicial hearing and a wider campaign to sway public (and international) opinion. It was in this wider contest that representatives of the Company called upon Grotius to draft a polemical defence of the seizure.[2]
The result of Grotius' efforts in 1604-1605 was a long, theory-laden treatise that he provisionally entitled De Indis (On the Indies). Grotius sought to ground his defense of the seizure in terms of the natural principles of justice. In this, he had cast a net much wider than the case at hand; his interest was in the source and ground of war's lawfulness in general. The treatise was never published in full during Grotius' lifetime, perhaps because the court ruling in favor of the Company preempted the need to garner public support. The manuscript was not made public until it was uncovered from Grotius' estate in 1864 and published under the title, De Jure Praedae (On the Right of Capture). The principles that Grotius developed there, however, laid the basis for his mature work on international justice, De jure belli ac pacis, and in fact one chapter of the earlier work did make it to the press in the form of the influential pamphlet, Mare Liberum.
In The Free Sea (Mare Liberum, published 1609) Grotius formulated the new principle that the sea was international territory and all nations were free to use it for seafaring trade. Grotius, by claiming 'free seas', provided suitable ideological justification for the Dutch breaking up of various trade monopolies through its formidable naval power (and then establishing its own monopoly).
England, competing fiercely with the Dutch for domination of world trade, opposed this idea and claimed That the Dominion of the British Sea, or That Which Incompasseth the Isle of Great Britain, is, and Ever Hath Been, a Part or Appendant of the Empire of that Island.[3] William Welwod, a Scottish jurist who was the first to formulate the laws of the sea in the English language, argued against Grotius' Mare Liberum in An Abridgement of All Sea-Lawes (1613), eliciting a response from Grotius around 1615 under the title Defensio capitis quinti Maris Liberi oppugnati a Gulielmo Welwodo ("Defense of the five free oceans, opposed by William Welwod"). In Mare clausum (1635) John Selden endeavoured to prove that the sea was in practice virtually as capable of appropriation as terrestrial territory.
As conflicting claims grew out of the controversy, maritime states came to moderate their demands and base their maritime claims on the principle that it extended seawards from land. A workable formula was found by Cornelius Bynkershoek in his De dominio maris (1702), restricting maritime dominion to the actual distance within which cannon range could effectively protect it. This became universally adopted and developed into the three-mile limit.
The dispute would eventually have important economic implications. The Dutch Republic supported the idea of free trade (even though it imposed a special trade monopoly on nutmeg and cloves in the Moluccas). England adopted the Act of Navigation (1651), forbidding any goods from entering England except on English ships. The Act subsequently led to the First Anglo-Dutch War (1652 - 1654).
The Arminian controversy, arrest and exile
Part of a series onArminianism
Jacobus Arminius
Background
Protestantism
Reformation
The Five Articles of Remonstrance
Calvinist-Arminian Debate
People
Jacobus Arminius
Simon Episcopius
Hugo Grotius
The Remonstrants
John Wesley
Doctrine
Total depravity
Conditional election
Unlimited atonement
Prevenient grace
Conditional preservation
Aided by his continued association with van Oldenbarnevelt, Grotius made considerable advances in his political career, being retained as Oldenbarnevelt's resident advisor in 1605, Advocate General of the Fisc of Holland, Zeeland and Friesland in 1607, and then as Pensionary of Rotterdam (the equivalent of a mayoral office) in 1613.[4] In 1608 he married Maria van Reigersbergen, with whom he would have eight children (four surviving beyond youth) and who would be invaluable in helping him and the family to weather the storm to come.
In these years a great theological controversy broke out between the followers of Jacobus Arminius, chair of theology at Leiden, and the more confessional Reformed or Calvinist theologian, Franciscus Gomarus. In 1610, several months after the death of their leader, the Arminians issued a 'Remonstrance' declaring their doctrinal differences with the mainstream Reformed doctrines of salvation, most often associated with the Protestant Reformer Calvin, but also held by most Reformed pastors and theologians throughout Europe. They had particular problems with the Belgic Confession, art. 16, on election and reprobation. The Remonstrants did not reject the doctrines of election or predestination, as is often assumed, but rather redefined them so that the decisive factor in a person's salvation is not God's inscrutable decree, but the individual's faith, which God foresees from eternity. According to Arminius and the Remonstrants, God decrees to elect all who meet the condition of faith. Led by Oldenbarnevelt, the States of Holland took an official position of toleration towards the disputants, and Grotius was eventually asked to draft an edict to express this policy.[5] The edict of 1613 put into practice a view that Grotius had been developing in his writings on church and state (see Erastianism): that only the basic tenets necessary for undergirding civil order (e.g., the existence of God and His providence) ought to be enforced while differences on obscure theological doctrines should be left to private conscience.[6]