The Right of States to Self-Preservation

Since Richard Tuck published his influential study The Rights of War and Peace in 1999, the works of the Italian civil lawyer and Regius professor of civil law at the University of Oxford, Alberico Gentili (1552-1608), have received much scholarly attention. Tuck presented Gentili as the foremost representative of the ‘humanist’ tradition in the domain of the law of war, and he also attempted to show that the early political writings the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius (1583-1643) wrote as ‘a major apology for the whole Dutch commercial expansion into the Indies’, were very much in this same tradition. Although Tuck referred in this context mainly to De Indis as well as to the first edition of De jure belli ac pacis of 1625 and conceded that Grotius introduced a different, more substantial account of human sociability in the later editions of his main work, his assessment of Grotius’ natural law theory has triggered numerous critiques and prompted scholars to compare Gentili’s and Grotius’ position on various issues.