ABSTRACT
It was Hugo Grotius who was generally reckoned by writers at the end of the seventeenth century to have created a new science of morality by inventing a new way of talking about international relations. This chapter turns to what Grotius did, and the significance of his new ideas. By birth and upbringing, Grotius belonged wholly to the humanist world; he was a spectacularly precocious classical scholar, who devoted the first twenty-five years of his life to the traditional pursuits of the young humanist, the writing of poetry and history. Grotius's idea of state sovereignty at this stage in his life was important, and has been little studied; but the consequences of his assimilation of individuals to states would have been quite different had he possessed a weaker notion of sovereignty. Another ways of appreciating Grotius's idea is through a consideration of his account of justice—something about which Pufendorf was later to express puzzlement.
