Prof Nehal Bhuta to present 'The State Theory of Hugo Grotius' as part of IHR seminar series
Mon 23 November 2020
As part of a series of virtual seminars organised by the Institute of Historical Research, Nehal Bhuta, Professor of Public International Law at Edinburgh Law School, will be presenting his paper on 'The State Theory of Hugo Grotius'.
The event will take place online on Wednesday 2 December at 17:15, and will be convened by leading figures in intellectual history: Gregory Claeys, Janet Coleman, Hannah Dawson, Andrew Fitzmaurice, Angus Gowland, Jeremy Jennings, Michael Levin, Niall O’Flaherty, William Selinger, Quentin Skinner, Gareth Stedman Jones, Georgios Varouxakis and Waseem Yaqoob.
Grotius is not generally considered a state theorist, but a theorist and jurist of natural law. But his accounts of natural right, sociability and sovereign power – all building blocks of his carapace of a natural legal order – generate also an exoskeleton of political order that leans upon but is not reducible to the legal order of natural law. As such, Grotius's juristic sensibility and his Roman legal methods, generate not so much a political theory of the state as a set of generative parameters for the conceptualization of the state in which the concrete constitution of state authority is historical and plural, even as it is integrated into a universal legal order. State authority is made possible and accountable under a system of natural legal right, even as its constitution is a historical achievement that should not readily be disturbed and in which a large range of freedom and unfreedom is lawful and should be accepted.
Grotius theory of the state holds important lessons and implications for our contemporary world, where over the last 25 years we have grappled constantly with the problem of what a state is, the circumstances under which we might justifiably breach its sovereignty, and the profound difficulties of re-making state orders when they have failed, collapsed or been destroyed by foreign intervention.