Liberty Fund’s edition of The Free Sea is the only translation of Grotius’s masterpiece undertaken in his own lifetime, left in manuscript by the English historian, Richard Hakluyt (1552–1616). It also contains William Welwod’s critique of Grotius (reprinted for the first time since the seventeenth century) and Grotius’s reply to Welwod. These documents provide […]
Since the nineteenth century, Hugo Grotius’s Rights of War and Peace has been the classic work in modern international law, laying the foundation for a universal code of law. 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 English one […]
Grotius’s The Truth of the Christian Religion was first published in Leiden in 1627 in Latin. Written in plain and direct language for his countrymen, this short work aimed to show those who would encounter pagans, Muslims, and Jews that the Christian religion was the true revealed religion. In addition to “fortifying” the beliefs […]
[…] the one prepared by Gwladys L. Williams and Walter H. Zeydel for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. It combines the original text and new material. Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) was a lawyer and legal theorist, diplomat and political philosopher, ecumenical activist and theologian. Martine Julia van Ittersum is a Lecturer in History at the […]
This conference was based on the reading and discussion of the two most famous works by Hugo Grotius: Mare Liberum (1609) and De Jure Belli ac Pacis (1625). The focus was on the place of natural law in these two works, considering its sources, its content, its relationship to liberty,…
Hugo Grotius is now most commonly known as the founding theorist of international law, but he is also universally regarded as one of the founders of modern moral and political philosophy who greatly influenced the thinking of men such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and David Hume. This colloquium focused…
This conference explored the ideas of property rights, contract, and trust in Grotius, as well as his overall conception of a liberal political order. The primary texts used were The Rights of War and Peace and Commentary on the Law of Prize and Booty.
The conference examined Grotius's natural law thinking, with an emphasis on its Roman ethical and legal foundations.
Embark on a literary journey this summer with Liberty Fund’s captivating summer reading list! Travel the ocean with Grotius’s Law of Prize and Booty; enjoy the buzzing of the bees in your garden with Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, and get shipwrecked on Neville’s Isle of Pines. Tocqueville’s Voyages can come along on all […]
[…] right to defend oneself, to own the property on which one has labored, and to services contracted for with others. Although he appealed to the authority of Grotius and Locke, the grounds on which he defended natural rights were distinctively his own. Natural Rights is the first modern edition and translation of his published […]
