The context o f Grotius’ career

When the history of recent moral philosophy was written at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century, a consistent account was given of the role of Hugo Grotius. In the eyes of men like Samuel Pufendorf, Christian Thomasius, Jean Barbeyrac, and their successors, he was the one who ‘broke the ice’ after the long winter of Aristotelianism; who provided a new theory of natural law which could supplant both the discredited theories of the scholastics and the anti-scientific and sceptical writings of Renaisance authors such as Montaigne and Pierre Charron. He was the inventor of a new ‘science of morality’, which was taken up in various ways by all the major figures of the seventeenth century, including Hobbes, Locke, and Pufendorf himself. His first important follower, they also all agreed, was John Selden, though the relationship between the two men was by no means a straightforward one (see Tuck 1979, pp. 174–5).

As we shall see, there is a sense in which these historians were absolutely correct; Grotius did see something for the first time which was to be crucially important in the succeeding century, namely that there could be a systematic moral and political philosophy which met the objections levelled against such an enterprise in the late sixteenth century. But this insight was hard-won, and embodied in a series of works which were to some extent pièces d'occasion; to understand the generation of his political philosophy, it is necessary to look first at his public career.