Hugo Grotius

Life and ideas

Hugo Grotius was a Dutch jurist, poet and diplomat, a child prodigy who entered the University of Leiden at the age of eleven. He was imprisoned in 1618 after a political and religious struggle in the Dutch Republic, escaped in a book chest in 1621 and lived in exile in Paris. There he wrote De iure belli ac pacis (On the Law of War and Peace), published in 1625 in the midst of the Thirty Years' War. He argued that there is a law of nature, based on human reason and on the human need for society, that binds all people and states, and that it would stand, in a famous phrase, even if one supposed that God did not exist. From it, together with the consent of nations, he derived rules on property, treaties, the justification for war and conduct in war. His work is often seen as the foundation of modern international law.