Hugo Grotius

And as a matter of fact, you might say that one of the defining features of the early modern period in the history of political thought, the history of English political thought in particular, is that it was a period that rejected the kinds of natural inequality associated with Aristotle's theory of slavery.

Okay, so if we look at people like Gentile, Grotius, Hobbes, Locke, Pufendorf, they all had different conceptions of slavery and different ideas of how slavery originated and how it functioned.

But for you, they all belong to the same Roman law tradition.

And I'm very glad that you put it that way because this is the aim of the first couple chapters of the book.

I don't think any of my advisors would have imagined when I started graduate school that I would spend years of my life digging into the legends of Prester John.

I don't think that was on anybody's agenda.

after I started to write about theories of slavery in Hobbes and Grotius, but it emerged in part because the figure of Prester John has to be understood if we are to understand early modern English perceptions, indeed European perceptions, of Africa.

It emerged out of a probably falsified letter that started to circulate in Europe, I believe in the 13th century, attesting to the existence of a vast Christian empire below or south of the Holy Land, below Egypt, in an inland region of Ethiopia, where to that point, very few European travelers had ever visited.

He said that Lutherans and Mennonites could be grudgingly tolerated if they kept quiet, but that Jews were beyond the pale and should be excluded entirely.

Even Hugo Grotius, who, as we'll be seeing, was the most important thinker of the Dutch Republic, apart from Spinoza, said that there should be firm restrictions on worship amongst Jews.

In light of such unfriendly attitudes, Jonathan Israel has suggested that Spinoza must have meant it ironically when he wrote of the rare happiness of living in the Netherlands, where everyone's judgment is free and unshackled, where each may worship God as his conscience dictates, and where freedom is esteemed above all things dear and precious.

A man like Spinoza would have criticized religious freedom in the Netherlands only insofar as it remained limited.

Arminianism became politically relevant when their cause was taken up by Oldenbarnevelt.

He and his allies were called Remonstrants after a document they put before the states of Holland in 1610, a so-called Remonstrance.

Political tensions within the northern provinces became increasingly entangled with religious disputes, as Republicans like Grotius threw their lot in with the Remonstrants, and conservatives

like

The taste for wine, which was then characteristic of their nation, they had not forgotten.

At the table of the elector of Brandenburg, much mirth was caused by the gravity of the statesmen of Holland, who, sober themselves, confuted out of Grotius and Puffendorf the nonsense stuttered by the tipsy nobles of the empire.

One of those nobles swallowed so many bumpers that he tumbled into the turf fire, and was not pulled out till his fine velvet suit had been burned.

In the midst of all this revelry, business was not neglected.

And if you don't believe that resupplying the port within a major metropolis, one of the only metropolises of that kind, we're talking relatively speaking, would be a war crime against what was called the law of nations.

And if you don't believe me on that, read what Emmer de Vettel and Hugo Grotius wrote about that.

As you made the reference to the current day, I'm sorry, the United States would not allow a Chinese vessel to come into a port unnoticed or a Russian naval ship

to come in.

So I'm speaking more of the human... tragedy around it and the scope and scale of severity of destruction.

Carl Schmitt penned what is arguably the most significant scholarly treatment of the origin and praxis of a law of nations and the conceptual basis of world order at planetary scale since Grotius' De jure belli ac pacis, if I pronounce that incorrectly, I apologize, the law of war and peace.

"...of all the aspects of Schmitt's magnum opus, ambitiously titled Nomos of the Earth, that warrant a serious analysis in the present epoch, none is more relevant to the current global power political paradigm than Schmitt's description of the ontological nuances of the political domain." a discrete sphere of human activity unto itself, according to Schmitt, and concomitantly the processes and essential features of discovery, appropriation, and conquest, and ultimately assimilation of territorial spaces into extant political cultures and the structures that sustain them.

Can you explain that paragraph and what you're expressing there in terms that someone as dumb as I am can understand?

Although it's more readable and you know, less esoteric.

You know, you don't, business cycles isn't going to make a whole lot of sense to you if you don't have a rudimentary understanding of pretty complex economic theory.

And almost to the earth, it'd help if you've read stuff like Grotius and Hobbes, obviously.

But, you know, conceptually, it's not outside the bounds of what somebody who's not a student of political theory or the law will understand.

And in

fact also have father figures from the 15th century like Grotius who we name as their origin points.

Like we could just do the same thing

here.

His great work on the law of nature and of nations appeared in 1672 and came out in English in 1703.

It built on Hugo Grotius, the Dutch jurist this series met in the Merchant Republic, who argued for a natural law binding on nations as on men knowable by reason.

Pufendorf took up that tradition and carried it forward.

His work belongs to the natural law tradition Grotius shaped and to the intellectual world in which Locke wrote.

So Wise began where the tradition begins.

He would consider man, he wrote, in a state of natural being as a freeborn subject under the crown of heaven and owing homage to none but God himself.

That vocabulary was not foreign to Boston.

In October of 1758, John Adams, a young man trying to be admitted to the Boston bar, went to see one of the city's leading lawyers, Jeremiah Gridley.

You know, all these kind of jumble of events to establish what the actual path might be.

And I mean, the only, the only kind of theorist that I've heard articulate this in a serious way, you know, is Hugo Grotius.

Um-

[chuckles]

but I don't think that's part of the conversation.

So, uh, but anyway, I certainly take your point about how it's developing and-

I, I admire your, um, invocation of Hugo Grotius, which even in this, uh, erudite, uh, audience that I know you have, is probably not a household name.

But, uh, you as a, at least, um, a-