Abstract
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.2 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.3 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.4 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,5 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.6
Special thanks to Philip Allott, Ian Clark, Andrew Hurrell, Lewis Kornhauser, and Liam Murphy for helpful discussions of ideas in this chapter.
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Notes
Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight (eds), Diplomatic Investigations (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1966), p. 89. The most wide-ranging use of these approaches is Martin Wight, International Theory: The Three Traditions (a manuscript based principally on influential lectures given in the 1950s, edited by Gabriele Wight and Brian Porter and published in 1991, 19 years after the author’s death, by Leicester University Press).
Martin Wight, ‘An Anatomy of International Thought’, Review of International Studies 13 (1987), p. 222. Wight acknowledged the artificiality of approaches based on traditions and their interplay — see e.g. ‘Western Values in International Relations’, p. 90 — but he was disposed more to experiment with sub-traditions or alternative traditions than to question the basic approach.
Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (London: Macmillan, 1977), esp. ch. 2;
Bull, ‘The Importance of Grotius in the Study of International Relations’, in Hugo Grotius and International Relations, p. 65. For Bull’s comments on Martin Wight’s use of traditions of thought, see ‘Martin Wight and the Theory of International Relations’, British Journal of International Studies 2 (1976), p. 101.
Jacob Ter Meulen and P.J.J. Diermanse, Bibliographie des écrits imprimés de Hugo Grotius (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950).
Roelofsen, ‘Grotius and the International Politics of the Seventeenth Century’, in Hugo Grotius and International Relations (1990), pp. 109–12. Elements in the VOC encouraged publication of Mare Liberum, although Grotius’s text also provided a basis for arguments inconsistent with the VOC’s interest in establishing monopolies in the East Indies.
W.J.M. van Eysinga, ‘Mare Liberum et De Jure Praedae’, in Sparsa Collecta: een aantal der verspreide geschriften (Leiden: Sijthoff, 1958), p. 324; and C.G. Roelofsen, ‘Grotius and the International Politics of the Seventeenth Century’, p. 104, n. 41. Mare Liberum proved to be a chapter from De Jure Praedae.
Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), esp. vol. 1, pp. x—xv;
Skinner, ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, History and Theory 8 (1969), p. 3;
Pocock, ‘The History of Political Thought: A Methodological Enquiry’, in Peter Laslett and W.G. Runciman (eds), Politics, Philosophy and Society, 2nd series (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), p. 183.
John S. Nelson (ed.), Tradition, Interpretation, and Science: Political Theory in the American Academy (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1986), pp. 21–42, p. 29 and p. 27.
John Gunnell, Political Theory: Tradition and Interpretation (Cambridge, MA: Winthrop, 1979).
Tuck, ‘The “Modern” Theory of Natural Law’, in Anthony Pagden (ed.), The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 99;
Tuck, Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) attributes to Grotius a significant place in the development of such theories.
Cornelis Van Vollenhoven, ‘Grotius and Geneva’, Bibliotheca Visseriana 6 (1926), p. 1;
P. H. Kooijmans, ‘How to Handle the Grotian Heritage: Grotius and Van Vollenhoven’, Netherlands International Law Review 30 (1983), p. 81.
T.M.C. Asser Instituut (ed.), International Law and the Grotian Heritage (The Hague: T.M.C. Asser Instituut, 1985) p. 294.
Falk, ‘Introduction: The Grotian Quest’, in Charles Edwards, Hugo Grotius: The Miracle of Holland (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1981), p. xiii;
Boutros Ghali, ‘A Grotian Moment’, Fordham International Law Journal 18 (1995), p. 1609 (asserting en passant that Grotius is ‘the father of international law’).
Tadashi Tanaka, ‘Grotius’s Method: With Special Reference to Prolegomena’, in Yasuaki Onuma (ed.), A Normative Approach to War: Peace, War, and Justice in Hugo Grotius (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 11–29.
Philip Allott, Eunomia: New Order for a New World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990);
Richard Ashley, ‘The Powers of Anarchy: Theory, Sovereignty, and the Domestication of Global Life’, in James Der Derian (ed.), International Theory: Critical Investigations (New York: New York University Press, 1995), p. 94.
Fritz Minch, ‘Staat und Völkerrecht: Zur Terminologie bei Grotius’, in Staat und Völkerrechtsordnung: Festschrift für Karl Doehring (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1989), p. 625.
Knud Haakonsen, ‘Hugo Grotius and the History of Political Thought’, Political Theory 13 (1985), p. 239.
Michael Donelan, ‘Grotius and the Image of War’, Millennium 12 (1983), p. 223. Haggenmacher takes only mild literary licence in suggesting that in one sense Grotius always has the controversy about The Catharine in view. Grotius et la doctrine de la guerre juste, p. 619.
J.B. Schneewind, ‘The Misfortunes of Virtue’, Ethics 101: 1 (October 1990), pp. 42–63.
J.D.B. Miller and R.J. Vincent (eds), Order and Violence: Hedley Bull and International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 54.
Lassa Oppenheim, International Law, vol. 1 (London: Longman, 1905), pp. 58–93. This framework was also used by Wight — see International Theory, p. 14.
Maurizio Viroli, From Politics to Reason of State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
Tuck, Philosophy and Government 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), traces influences of, and departures from, Machiavelli, and emphasises the break between Ciceronian and Tacitist patterns of thought in the second half of the sixteenth century.
Tuck, ‘The “Modern” Theory of Natural Law’, in A. Pagden (ed.), The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 99.
Ian Harris, ‘Order and Justice in The Anarchical Society’, International Affairs 69 (1993), p. 725.
Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985);
Terry Nardin and David Mapel (eds), Traditions of International Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
A. Claire Cutler, ‘The “Grotian Tradition” in International Relations’, Review of International Studies 17 (1991), pp. 56–8.
Terry Nardin, Law, Morality, and the Relations of States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983).
Hont, ‘The Language of Sociability and Commerce’, p. 259, referring to a letter of Pufendorf to Baron Boineburg of 13 Jan. 1663
Fiametta Palladini, ‘Le due letteri di Pufendorf al Barone do Boineburg: quella nota e quella “perduta”’, Nouvelles de la République des Lettres, 1 (1984), p. 134.
Andrew Linklater, Beyond Realism and Marxism: Critical Theory and International Relations (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), ch. 1.
Bull, Justice and International Relations (Hagey Lectures, University of Waterloo, 1984).
David Kennedy, ‘Images of Religion in International Legal History’, in Mark Janis (ed.), The Influence of Religion on the Development of International Law (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1991).
Andrew Linklater, Beyond Realism and Marxism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), esp. p. 21. Linklater argues that Bull’s work, in the last few years of his life, on justice as a value standing alongside order, manifested both a commitment to community and a bridging of the gap to the concerns of revolutionist or critical theorists. To Bull this might have seemed a characteristic revolutionist position, denying the possibility of the kind of value-laden self-inquiring detachment Bull always espoused, in order to forge an alliance the better to promote engagement and change.
Alasdair Maclntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), p. 326.
David Kennedy, ‘A New Stream of International Law Scholarship’, Wisconsin International Law Journal 7 (1988), p. 1, esp. pp. 7–10; and the discussion of the ‘heroic practice’ of sovereignty and anarchy in contemporary international relations theory by Richard Ashley, ‘The Powers of Anarchy: Theory, Sovereignty, and the Domestication of Global Life’.
Friedrich Kratochwil, Rules, Norms and Decisions: On the Conditions of Practical Reasoning in International Relations and Domestic Affairs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), esp. pp. 1–20.
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Kingsbury, B. (1996). Grotius, Law, and Moral Scepticism: Theory and Practice in the Thought of Hedley Bull. In: Clark, I., Neumann, I.B. (eds) Classical Theories of International Relations. St Antony’s Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24779-0_3
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