In dominum pristinum statuere: Hugo Grotius’ Theory of Restitution and the Return of the Former Condition of Things

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the theory of restitution in Hugo Grotius’ writings on the conduct of war and on conditions of ante bellum in his 1604/1605 De Iure Praedae and in the 1625 De Iure Belli ac Pacis. It looks closely at three aspects of Grotius’s restitution theory: first, its association with corrective, compensatory and expletive justice response to wrongdoing; second, its understanding as an expression of a uniquely human desire for social community; and, third, its relation to the broader imaginary of the law of postliminium. This elucidates different, though overlapping, meanings of return at play in the modern restitutive discourse, including the return of expropriated objects to their previous owner; the subject’s return as home-coming and repatriation; and the subject’s return to a previously occupied position or condition.