The Reception of Hugo Grotius’s De Jure Belli AC Pacis in the Early German Enlightenment

Abstract

When Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel discussed Hugo Grotius’s De jure belli ac pacis in the third volume of his “Lectures on the History of Philosophy”, the period of intensive debate about the Dutch author’s main treatise on natural law was long over. Thus, Hegel was able to note laconically (and not without justification) that “now” nobody reads the “Three Books on the Law of War and Peace” anymore. But he hastened to add that the work had been highly influential1 The analysis that follows shows the considerable historical distance that separated Hegel from the productive phase of its reception. On the other hand, he succeeds in summarizing — in an abstract fashion and against the background of his own philosophical standards — the criticisms and the recognition that characterized the reception of Grotius in the German Enlightenment. The starting point for Hegel’s ambivalent assessment is the methodological peculiarities of De jure belli ac pacis, which the philosophers of the Enlightenment had also criticized repeatedly from the beginning. Since Grotius compiled “historically and in part from the Old Testament” what the nations accept as law, he resorted “entirely to empirical reasoning and collecting”.² The proofs and deductions which he offered remain unsatisfactory from a philosophical (and certainly from a Hegelian) perspective. However, the fact that Grotius failed to penetrate the historical material on the theoretical level is, at the same time, a major theoretical advantage, which had a positive effect on the further development of the philosophy of law.