State of Nature Versus Commerical Sociability as the Basis of International Law: Reflections on the Roman Foundations and Current Interpretations of the International Political and Legal Thought of Grotius, Hobbes, and Pufendorf
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Three foundational approaches to international order and law beyond the state were framed in early to mid-seventeenth-century Europe, by Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), and Samuel Pufendorf (1632–94), at the same time as the recognizable modern idea of the state was itself being framed. Grotius, Hobbes, and Pufendorf each took distinctive approaches to the problems of whether and how there could be any legal or moral norms between these states in their emerging forms. They differed in their views of obligation in the state of nature (where ex hypothesi there was no state), in the extent to which they regarded these sovereign states as analogous to individuals in the state of nature, and in the effects they attributed to commerce as a driver of sociability and of norm-structured interactions not dependent on an overarching state. The core argument of this chapter, presented in section II, is that the differences between them on these issues are of enduring importance. To situate them in what we regard as a key element of their intellectual context, that is the Greco–Roman lineage of ideas on law and on order and justice beyond the state, we outline in section I the Carneadean debate and argue for the importance of Roman law and of Greco–Roman political ideas in sixteenth-century writings of Vitoria, Vazquez, Soto, Gentili, and others whose works influenced the seventeenth-century writers. Section II builds on this view of the importance of Roman influences, in engaging with several current historiographical debates about interpretations of Grotius, Hobbes, and Pufendorf. Section III comments very briefly on the adaptation of, or responses to, some of these seventeenth-century ideas in certain strands of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century thought, concerning what by the end of that period had become a recognizably modern idea of international law; the particular focus is on lines of development from David Hume and Adam Smith to Jeremy Bentham and Georg Friedrich von Martens. Any inquiry of the sort we undertake here entails some confrontation with a fundamental question: Should contemporary thought on international politics and international law be shaped by understandings of its history? Many scholars now engaged in rich debates in the historiography of political thought concerning issues beyond the polity, especially the historiography of early modern European thought on these issues, bring to these debates a set of interests and questions that are tied to the world in which we live now. At the same time, several of the leading historians of political thought (particularly those associated with the Cambridge School) who have helped develop fresh and influential interpretations of early modern writers concerned with normative international thought, place great emphasis on studying these early writers strictly in their own context, and are rightly wary of anachronism in trying to make them speak to us today. In our view, several of the most significant recent interpretations of early modern international political and legal thought, some of them adumbrated by historians linked to the Cambridge School, have much to offer those interested in current problems of international law. In this chapter we will try to demonstrate this. We will refer in particular to debates related to the work of Richard Tuck on self-preservation as the foundation of Grotius’s natural law, to interpretations Noel Malcolm advances of Hobbes’s views of the state of nature, and to Istvan Hont’s arguments about the development of ideas of commercial sociability from Pufendorf to Adam Smith. In engaging with current debates among historians of political thought about the orientations and commitments of these thinkers, we endeavour also to transpose these debates to questions about international law with which these modern historians are not necessarily so centrally concerned. To foreshadow three basic questions we will address in this way: 1. Did Grotius construct a natural law based on self-preservation, as a means to meet the sceptical objections of Montaigne and Charron (as Tuck argues)?; or should Grotius be read as building natural law in a Ciceronian tradition? 2. What is the significance of Hobbes’s view of the relation between individual and state, and of his essentially prudential rather than moral account of natural law beyond the state? Or, to put it another way: Are the political realists right about Hobbes, or can he plausibly be read (as Malcolm does) as a philosopher of international peace? 3. What has been the importance of the understanding, which Istvan Hont presents as extending from Pufendorf to Adam Smith and beyond, of commerce as a driver of social and moral order beyond the state?
Source Publication
Philosophy of International Law
Source Editors/Authors
Samantha Besson, John Tasioulas
Publication Date
2010
Recommended Citation
Kingsbury, Benedict and Straumann, Benjamin, "State of Nature Versus Commerical Sociability as the Basis of International Law: Reflections on the Roman Foundations and Current Interpretations of the International Political and Legal Thought of Grotius, Hobbes, and Pufendorf" (2010). Faculty Chapters. 987.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/987
