Hugo Grotius and the Birth of the Secular
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 May 2022
In On the Rights of War and Peace, Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) pushes natural law thinking into an international law form, shaping not only the origins of international law but a particular vision of the nation-state as the primary political form of modernity. Along the way, he frames the conditions through which just war thinking will move from being a tradition into becoming a theory (with its preoccupying focus on jus ad bellum and jus in bello criteria) and the modern self will become the primary political agent. One implication of his revolutionary thought is that it gives license to colonizing powers to use military force to acquire and defend property, especially the resources of the new world, thereby shaping modern understandings of the natural world as composed of things that can become owned. Another is that it makes refugees all-but-invisible, which will create increasingly acute problems as climate change and violence, together, will dramatically increase the number of displaced persons in the world.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.