Grotius, Law, and Moral Scepticism: Theory and Practice in the Thought of Hedley Bull
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Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) was accorded a prominent position in the canon of that approach to ‘classical theories of international relations’ developed by Martin Wight, Hedley Bull, and others in the British Committee on the Theory of International Politics—an approach that was both the inheritance and the legacy of the much-missed R. J. Vincent. Wight posited a ‘Grotian tradition’ of thought, which he used in counterpoint with other traditions (Machiavellian/Hobbesian, Kantian) to elucidate important problems in international relations. Bull adopted from Wight much of the language of the three traditions, while pointing explicitly to their limitations, but Bull’s systematic rigour caused him to distinguish sharply between the writings of Grotius and the tenets of a ‘Grotian tradition’, and he was decidedly cautious as to the senses in which any such tradition could usefully be said to exist. Bull more than Wight produced analyses of particular works of Grotius intended to demonstrate, quite apart from any connections with ‘neo-Grotians’ or a ‘Grotian tradition’, their intrinsic interest for modern students of international relations. In these various enterprises Wight and Bull were influenced by the varying but increasing interest in Grotius among international lawyers from about the middle of the nineteenth century, and especially by the efforts of Van Vollenhoven and Lauterpacht in the wake of the two world wars to expound a ‘Grotian tradition’ of international law for the twentieth century. This chapter deals with aspects of Bull’s use of Grotius, focusing in particular on Bull’s reluctance to follow Grotius’s views on the nature of law and on the possibilities of moral commitment in the face of the challenge of moral scepticism. Writing about Grotius in international law and relations has treated Grotius primarily (although not exclusively) through analysis, against the background of his biography and the history of his period, of a small though important subset of his extensive oeuvre. Vastly the most important of these has been De Jure Belli ac Pacis (On the Law of War and Peace, JBP), completed in 1624 and first published in 1625. That JBP received significant attention is evident from the numerous subsequent editions (Grotius himself worked on editions published in 1631, 1632, 1642, and 1646) and translations, although a comprehensive study of its intellectual impact has not yet appeared. Grotius also had an impact on contemporaries and subsequent generations through Mare Liberum (Freedom of the Seas), which was published (anonymously at first) in 1609, apparently with a view to providing juridical support for positions taken by Grotius’s patron Oldenbarnevelt in the domestic and international political manoeuvring leading to the 1609 truce between the United Provinces and Spain. The main lines of JBP, and the entirety of Mare Liberum, were anticipated in De Jure Praedae (The Law of Prize) (JP), written in the period 1604–6 as a work of legal advocacy connected with the seizure by a vessel of the Dutch East India Company (the VOC) of the Portuguese carrack the Catharine. Because JP was substantially unknown until the rediscovery of the manuscript in 1864 and its publication four years later, JP had little direct impact on the development of ideas, although it has attracted considerable scholarly attention as evidence of Grotius’s thought in the milieu of the period, and it is of great value in understanding the structure and arguments of JBP. The work of Quentin Skinner, J. G. A. Pocock, Richard Tuck, and others of the historiens historisants represents a methodological reproach both to the decontextualized analysis of historic texts of Western political theory, and to loose assertions about the existence of 400-year traditions of thought. These writers have sought to locate each author in close intellectual context, recovering the normative vocabulary available to the author from earlier writings then accessible, tracing the author’s intellectual formation and inheritance, and connecting the author’s texts with the political, theological, social, and intellectual debates or circumstances that seem to have affected them. For the historiens historisants, as Pocock once put it, ‘history of theory cannot be written as that of a dialogue between figures in a canonical tradition’—the organisation of history into a canonical dialogue is to reduce history to historical drama, in which the canonical actors are isolated in each other’s company and can be interacting with each other only in accordance with the ideal of the author. The canonical dialogue may be theory, but it is not history of theory. ‘The text as the theorist reads it is not the same things as the text as event, or part of an event, reconstituted by historians. If the historian must abstain from deconstructing the theorist’s encounter, the theorist must abstain from trying to reconstruct history. . . . If the two are combined, the result must be pseudohistory, myth-as-history, or Popperian historicism.’ For a historian of the Pocock/Skinner school, Grotius ‘demands assignation to contexts: to his own, which we must recover if we are to understand him, and to our own, in which we must read him if we are to interpret him.’
Source Publication
Classical Theories of International Relations
Source Editors/Authors
Ian Clark, Iver B. Neumann
Publication Date
1996
Recommended Citation
Kingsbury, Benedict, "Grotius, Law, and Moral Scepticism: Theory and Practice in the Thought of Hedley Bull" (1996). Faculty Chapters. 1006.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/1006
