5 - Hugo Grotius

Summary

REPUBLICANISM

According to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century historians of the new moral science, as we saw in the preface, the pivotal figure in the history of the discipline was Hugo Grotius. Nothing in the modern study of the same subject calls into question their judgement; indeed, the story which I have told hitherto amply confirms it. Grotius was in some ways an even more important figure than his Enlightenment admirers recognised (or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say, than any one admirer recognised), for he took part in the construction of two theories about a political life which were to be of fundamental importance for the next two and a half or three centuries. As a young man, he participated in the development of a theory of republican liberty appropriate to the post-Tacitean age, and to the circumstances of an imperialist republic, his native United Provinces. After doing so, he turned his attention to the construction of a comprehensive post-sceptical moral science. His role in the first development tended to be forgotten in the eighteenth century, but it had led Algernon Sidney (for example) to hail Grotius as one of the greatest political theorists of the age (Scott 1988 p. 19); his role in the second was a commonplace in the Enlightenment, but the power of the post-Kantian history of moral philosophy has until recent years led to it, too, being forgotten.