Hugo Grotius

Dutch political theorist, diplomat and jurist (1583 to 1645) whose account of sovereignty and natural rights shaped the modern state system as much as it shaped legal doctrine. In De Jure Belli ac Pacis (1625) he argued that a body of natural law, discoverable by reason and binding even if one were to concede, contrary to fact, that God did not exist (his own etiamsi daremus formulation), governs relations among sovereign states in the absence of any common earthly authority above them, an argument that made sovereign equality among states, rather than any universal empire or church, the working assumption of the emerging European state system. That same natural-rights foundation, grounding legitimate authority in reason and human sociability rather than in scripture or divine right, fed directly into the social contract tradition that Hobbes, Pufendorf and Locke each developed in their own directions. Grotius served as Pensionary of Rotterdam before imprisonment and exile over the religious-political conflict between Remonstrants and Counter-Remonstrants, later serving as Sweden's ambassador to France.