Grotius
Noun
Meaning
Dutch jurist and diplomat whose writings established the basis of modern international law (1583-1645)
Source: WordNetSynonyms
Examples
According to Grotius, letters of marque and reprisal were akin to a "private war", a concept alien to modern sensibilities but related to an age when the ocean was lawless and all merchant vessels sailed armed for self-defense.
Hugo Grotius (1625), Thomas Hobbes (1651), Samuel Pufendorf (1673), John Locke (1689), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762), and Immanuel Kant (1797) are among the most prominent of 17th- and 18th-century theorists of social contract and natural rights.
Grotius postulates that each individual has natural rights that enable self-preservation and employs this idea as a basis for moral consensus in the face of religious diversity and the rise of natural science.
Grotius says that the people are sui juris (under their own jurisdiction).
Contemporary Dutch virtues of independence, fortitude and industry were fully recognizable among the Batavians in more scholarly history represented in Hugo Grotius ' Liber de Antiquitate Republicae Batavicorum (1610).
However, German church-historians Ernst Wolf and M. Elze disagreed and claimed that Grotius' concept of natural law did have a theological basis.