Five-minute digest
The Rights of War and Peace (Book I)
Summary
The Rights of War and Peace (De jure belli ac pacis libri tres) is Hugo Grotius's treatise on the law that binds nations and rulers in war, published in Paris in 1625, seven years into the Thirty Years' War and while its author lived in exile from the Dutch Republic. The complete work has three books: Book I asks what war is, whether war can ever be lawful, and who holds the sovereign power to wage it; Book II examines the just causes of war, chiefly defence, the recovery of property and the punishment of wrongs, and with them property, contracts, treaties, embassies and the right of burial; Book III treats what may be done in war and the moderations (temperamenta) that humanity and good faith impose even on lawful force. The library's text is Book I in A. C. Campbell's English version of 1814, a condensed translation reprinted in 1901 with an introduction by David J. Hill; it contains chapters I to III. Chapter I opens with the claim that war is undertaken for the sake of peace and defines war as the state of contending parties. Grotius then distinguishes right as what is just, right as a moral quality of persons (power, property, credit), and right as a rule. The rule is natural or voluntary. Natural law is the dictate of right reason, so fixed that God himself cannot make the intrinsically evil good, as he cannot make two and two other than four. Natural law is proved from reason and from the agreement of the most civilized peoples, while the law of nations rests on the consent of many nations. Divine voluntary law was given to Adam, to Noah, and through Christ; the Mosaic law bound only Israel. Chapter II asks whether war is lawful. Grotius argues that self-preservation and the use of force against injury agree with nature and with the consent of peoples, that the law given before the Gospel permitted war, and then, at length, that the Gospel does not forbid it to Christians: he weighs the scriptural case against war, John the Baptist's words to soldiers, the centurion Cornelius, Romans 13, and the writings of Tertullian, Origen and other early Christians, whose objections he takes seriously while concluding that they spoke as individuals rather than for the Church. Chapter III divides war into public, private and mixed, and defines sovereign power as the power whose acts no other human will can annul. He rejects the view that sovereignty always remains in the people, and distinguishes the right to sovereignty from the way it is held, ending with the Roman dictator, whose temporary power was nonetheless sovereign.
Top Lessons
Law reaches even into war
Grotius's starting point is that war does not suspend all right: because war is undertaken for peace, it must be governed by rules that make peace possible again. Book I lays the definitions on which that claim rests.
Natural law and the will of God
Natural law, for Grotius, is known by right reason and expresses what God as author of nature commands or forbids; yet it is so fixed that God cannot make what is intrinsically evil good. The point is that moral truth has a necessity like that of arithmetic.
Christian conscience and the sword
Chapter II gives a long and fair hearing to the Christian case against all war before answering it from Scripture and the history of the Church. Grotius treats the question as one of conscience, not only of policy.
Who may make war
Grotius ties lawful public war to sovereign authority and defines sovereignty by the finality of its acts. His argument against the view that sovereignty always remains with the people shows the stakes of the question in the religious and civil wars of his century.
Verified Quotes
Frequently cited
“But because war is undertaken for the sake of peace, and there is no dispute, which may not give rise to war, it will be proper to treat all such quarrels, as commonly happen, between nations, as an article in the rights of war: and then war itself will lead us to peace, as to its proper end.”
“so that war is the state of contending parties, considered as such.”
Frequently cited
“Natural right is the dictate of right reason, shewing the moral turpitude, or moral necessity”
“Thus two and two must make four, nor is it possible to be otherwise; nor, again, can what is really evil not be evil.”
“But the law of nations is a more extensive right, deriving its authority from the consent of all, or at least of many nations.”
“For a law does not bind those, to whom it has not been given.”
“the common subject of sovereign power is the state, which has already been said to be a perfect society of men.”
Medical Lens
Book I is a work of law and moral theology with no medical content beyond passing analogies, such as the man of distempered taste who denies that honey is sweet, used to show that disordered judgment does not overturn natural justice.