Some Remarks on the “Sources” of the Grotian System of International Law

Abstract

It may not seem a very ambitious project to show which sources Grotius used in his two systematic expositions of International Law, De jure praedae and De jure belli ac pacis. One could simply refer to the indices of authors cited by Grotius in the English translations of the “Classics of International Law” series and analyse these impressive lists, looking, inter alia, for significant differences between them. However, such an approach, though no doubt useful, is only a very partial answer to the question of the “sources”, or perhaps even the “foundations”, of the Grotian system. I would suggest that it could even be seriously misleading. First of all, we have to assess Grotius' academic tools, with their mixture of references to the Scriptures, the patres ecclesiae and classical poets and philosophers in preference to sixteenth and seventeenth century authors. What is their function? As our interest is in international law, and not in philology or theology, we may well wonder how we are to deal with this mass of materials, most of which seems at first sight quite irrelevant to our subject. The abundance of wide ranging quotations in De jure belli ac pacis led Voltaire to accuse Grotius of pedantry, a charge that was also made against him as a politician and a diplomat by his contemporaries as well as by historians. If we do not consider this sufficient reason for disregarding, inter alia Plautus, Ovid, St. Ambrose and St. Augustine as “ornamental” rather than “structural” elements in the Grotian system, we may be encouraged by the example of as ardent an admirer of Grotius as Telders. His severe pruning of the overburdened text of De jure belli ac pacis was meant to reintroduce the book into general use as “the first treatise on international law ever written that aimed at completeness”. 6