On the Law of War and Peace. Book One

A great treatise that laid the foundation of modern international law!

Hugo Grotius was a famous Dutch jurist and statesman, philosopher, dramatist, and poet. He laid the foundations of the international law of the New Age by developing a political-legal doctrine based on a new methodology, which contains original solutions to a number of problems of general theory of law and the state, as well as radical— for its time—programmatic provisions.

In Grotius’s key work, the treatise “On the Law of War and Peace”, published in 1625 in France and dedicated to Louis XIII, a system of principles of natural law, the law of nations, and public law is developed and formulated. In writing it, the Dutch scholar pursued the following goals: to address pressing problems of international law and to prove that, during war, the voice of the law should not be drowned out by the thunder of weapons. Grotius lived during the Eighty Years’ War between the Netherlands and Spain and the Thirty Years’ War between Catholics and Protestants of Europe. He condemned aggressive, expansionist wars and believed that such conflicts should be waged only for the sake of establishing peace and should be governed by the principles of natural law. This author’s standpoint became the basis of the treatise “On the Law of War and Peace”.