Beyond Sovereignty

Abstract

Most texts examined so far were designed to explain where power lay within a local, seemingly autonomous political community. But local circumstances were shaped by the international situation, and the relationship between the local political community and the wider human society of which it was part became an increasingly important issue towards the end of the sixteenth century. In the face of continuing Habsburg dominance on the European continent, Protestants like Alberico Gentili began to articulate new ideas of a shared human society and of the law of peoples (ius gentium), using these to justify military intervention. The relationship between the law of peoples, the law of war, and Christian principles came to be debated more intensely, especially as political tensions deepened. With the outbreak of the Thirty Years War in 1618, calls for solidarity among co-religionists intensified, but this period also saw a major new account of the laws of nature which explicitly distinguished these from Christianity (although not from religion). In De Jure Belli ac Pacis (1625), Hugo Grotius argued that the authority of the civil magistrate needed to be connected to the natural law if his commands were to be seen as legitimate, while he defined this natural law in terms of ‘strict right’, distinct from considerations of virtue, distributive justice, or Christian charity. His achievement was to suggest how human beings with diverse opinions about salvation and merit could live peacefully together.