The Francis Wayland Institute
Christianity ·
Liberty · Property ·
Peace
P.O.
Box 11781 ·
Pensacola, FL 32524 ·
850-474-1626
Rights of War and
Peace
by Hugo Grotius, edited and with an Introduction by Richard Tuck, 3 volumes,
1,350 pages, with annotations, bibliography, and index; published by Liberty
Fund as part of their Natural Law and Enlightenment Classics.
"I saw in the whole Christian world a license of fighting at which even
barbarous nations might blush. Wars were begun on trifling pretexts or none at
all, and carried on without any reference of law, Divine or human." ~ Hugo
Grotius
Since the nineteenth century, Hugo Grotius’s Rights of War and Peace has
commonly been seen as the classic work in modern public international law,
laying the foundation for a universal code of law. However, in the seventeenth
century and during the Enlightenment, the work was considered a major work of
political theory that strongly defended the rights of individual agents—states
as well as private persons— to use their power to secure themselves and their
property. Grotius’s continuing influence owed much to the eighteenth-century
French editor Jean Barbeyrac, whose extensive commentary was standard in most
editions, including the classic, anonymously translated, English one (1738),
which is the basis for the Liberty Fund edition. The present edition also
includes the Prolegomena to the first edition of Rights of War and Peace (1625);
this document has never before been translated into English and adds new
dimensions to the great work. Hugo Grotius is one of the most important thinkers
in the early-modern period. A great humanistic polymath—lawyer and legal
theorist, diplomat and political philosopher, ecumenical activist and theologian—his
work was seminal for modern natural law and influenced the moral, political,
legal, and theological thought of the Enlightenment, from Hobbes, Pufendorf, and
Locke to Rousseau and Kant, as well as America’s Founding leaders.
Richard
Tuck is a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, and Professor of Government at
Harvard University.