ABSTRACT
There have been many differing accounts of war, many different ways of thinking about war and about public and private violence more generally: in short, many different orders of war. Historically we know of some of these, most, however, have been lost to us, just as the words and deeds of our modern age will also be lost. When we think of human thoughts and actions in the context of celestial and natural histories stretching out over millennia, then much of our petty squabbling and squeaking fades away from central view. In wider terms, old questions are still relevant here: what does my justification for an act of violence mean to the stars? Such questions will not and cannot go away. However, the daily mess and busyness of life in the present do not spare too much time for broader, perhaps cosmic, modes of contemplation. Human beings kill, our social and public lives contain much violence. In determining how we are to live among ourselves and, in focussing upon the desire for a future which might be better than the present, the question of how war is ordered is a pressing one. The previous chapter considered the limits and inadequacies of modern just
war theory and did so through examining one of the historical fathers of the just war tradition, the scholastic theologian, Francisco de Vitoria. This chapter presents an approach to the problem of war which inherits the natural law theory of Vitoria, but which departs from scholastic natural law so as to develop a secular natural law of minimum content. This thin version of natural law is developed in part by Hugo Grotius and then more fundamentally by Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes’s approach attempts to de-theologize and demoralize the problem of war and can be termed the juridical ordering of war. This involves a re-thinking, or re-ordering of the relationship between right and violence around the juridical figure of the sovereign with an emphasis upon the concepts of peace and survival. The tradition begins to remove the language of ‘justice’ from of the consideration of war and instead lays the groundwork for a modern conception of the legitimacy of violence centred upon the figure of secular state sovereignty.
