Hugo Grotius's View of the State
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- Опубліковано 9 лют 2025
- Our website: justandsinner.org
This video is a short clip of a longer talk on Thomas Hobbes's view of the state as expressed in his book Leviathan. This video overviews one of the most influential thinkers both on Hobbes and on Western political thought more generally, Hugo Grotius. It is Grotius who first grounds the state in the conception of rights (or really a singular right).
Was just thinking of if Descartes's philosophy could be applied to politics in the same way. Grotius has very interesting thoughts on this.
I like Thomas Aquinas' view of the State as well, as the "Captain steering the ship instead of every sailor trying to pull it in a direction"
I was just translating his annotations on the consolation of Cassander the other day! I have a special place in my heart for the early-mid era Remonstrants (the later ones, not so much lol).
Pearce, Memorial, or the apartments
As a voluntaryist/ anarcho-capitalist, self-preservation and government are two opposites. From first principles like the non-aggression, self-ownership, and consistency, and private property, the government inherently infringes upom such rights to fund themselves, and to enforce their demands. All the roles of government can and should be done voluntarily through free association without the threat of force. That's why I support the views of people like Lysander Spooner or Murray Rothbard.
The problem is people conflate the term government with roles traditionally done by government, so they don't consider a private or free alternative that wouldn't be funded through the extortion of taxes. For example, private militias and private security are the alternative to a public sector military or law enforcement agency.
I used to be an ancap. Back in the high school days lol. Rothbard, Mises, Menger, Bawerk, Weiser, Hoppe, Friedman, Murphy, Block, Hayek, Lachmann, Kirzner, Huemer, & co have some decent stuff on related issues, though many of them aren’t anarchists. My intuition for anarchism sort of just fell away after my junior year tbh.
@TheOtherCaleb You would have to compromise your principles to support statism. If you mean you're a pragmatist, when it comes to something like voting, you can do that without having to support coercion, compulsion, extortion, force, etc. For example, most libertarians that are statists are pragmatists, since they don't support 99% of the authority of the government, but take a binary position on most things. For example, Dave Smith is a libertarian who recognizes that a full, free market is ultimately the morally superior case, but is a pragmatist when it comes to voting and such.
From a moral point of view, I recognize there is time for compliance and time for non-compliance, which is what Paul is talking about in things like Romans 13. He's mostly talking in the context of tolls and the court system.
Would he say that there is nothing worth dying for?
Wow this comment section is way above my head.
Excerpts on Grotius from Herman Bavinck’s article “Ethics and Politics” from his Essays on Religion, Science, and Society:
“At any rate, it becomes very clear that Hugo Grotius is not the fathe natural law; he only made some changes in the theory, and it soon became clear that these were not improvements. First, he continued what the Spanish theologian Gabriel Vasquez had in some way already done before him Grotius made natural law, at least hypothetically independent from God.
Second, through a one-sided deduction from reason, he changed natural law into rational law. As a result, natural law came to be regarded more and more as a system of laws and rules, that was fixed outside of history and could be established in an explanation of the rights of man. Grotius's theory also brought along a worse evil than if reason and free will really were the foundation of justice: one had to hold to a hypothesis of a prehistoric state, either idyllic or barbaric, but at least a natural state without justice. In this way, natural law was considered as so hypostatized and mechanized that it lost all life and soon succumbed under the sharp criticism of the historical and sociological school. For many years, natural law was considered an antique concept that could be safely stored in a historical museum or was like a weed sprouting here and there that could be pulled out, roots and all.” (Page 272)
“If morality and justice are so closely related, then it is very difficult to point out the distinction between the two. Maintaining the relationship is (and also was historically) considered more significant than pointing out the distinction. Apart from the Stoma's distinction between complete and incomplete duty, the question was first posed when Grotius increasingly
separated natural law from ethics and based it on the foundation of a social contract. The result was that coercion had to be incorporated into the idea of law, because a contract among people offers little certainty if it is not main-→ tained by coercion. Thus morality and justice came to stand apart from each other. Justice had nothing to do with morality, meaning the inner disposition, but only with the deed (and a deed can be coerced by the strong arm of the government) and morality obtained its own sphere, totally separated from the sphere of justice.” (Page 276)
When you opened with the comparison to Descartes, this section from Bavinck came to mind. He does commend Grotius over against another thinker as it pertains to his ideas just actions taken during wartime, but it would be cool if you or others who commend Grotius could engage with the above ideas.
Bavinck can’t even get which reformers were supralapsarian and infralapsarian correct (in fact, he gets it hilariously wrong), so I have no reason to trust him on Grotius. Moreover, the fact that Grotius was following thinkers like Vasques, and probably Bellarmine, Possevino, Lessius, de Paz, de Lugo, Becani, & co on natural law is not only acceptable, but good.
Didn’t he borrow a lot of this from Francisco De Vitoria?
ye