The Rights of War and Peace: In Three Volumes

A note on the translation

1743 a note on the translation This is a translation of the Prolegomena to the first edition of De Iure Belli ac Pacis (1625). As will be seen by a comparison of it with the Barbeyrac text, a number of passages in the later editions are not present in it, and others have been rewritten (I have discussed some of the more important differences in the Introduction, p. ix). The division of the Prolegomena into numbered paragraphs was introduced for the first time in the edition of 1667 (along with subdivisions to the paragraphs in the main body of the text); and in an attempt to convey what Grotius himself intended, and what readers such as Hobbes, Locke, or Pufendorf saw when they read the book, I have omitted the divisions. The result looks strange to a modern eye, but it captures Grotius’s prose style and avoids some of the clumsy interruptions to his argument which the 1667 editor introduced. I have translated the key term ius sometimes as “law” and sometimes as “right.” As is well known, there is no adequate translation of this term into English, unlike other European languages (wherefor exampledroit capturestheambiguityof theword).Ingeneral, however, Grotius tends to use it to mean what we would call “law,” as in ius naturale, natural law (not natural right in the sense, e.g., of Hobbes). I have tried to indicate what the original Latin term is in other difficult cases, such as utilitas (“utility,” “interest,” or “advantage”).Utilitas in the Roman and later tradition was consistently contrasted with honestas or aequitas (“integrity” or “fairness”) (see, for example, Cicero’s De Officiis), and Grotius uses the term with this in mind. ...