Sören Koch

The right to wage war (jus ad bellum): the German reception of Grotius 50 years after De iure belli ac pacis

It is common knowledge that Hugo Grotius’s workDe iure belli ac pacis, first published in Paris in 1625, was one of the most influential works on natural law and the law of nations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. However, the history of its reception has not yet been analysed thoroughly, at least not from a legal historical perspective. Even though limited to a specific issue, time and location, Aure’s treatise is a first attempt to do so. Regarding the subject of investigation, the analysis focuses on the right to wage war ( jus ad bellum). In terms of time and space, the treatise concentrates on the German reception of Grotius between 1660 and 1680. From this period Conrad Friedlieb von Friedensberg (1633–1714), Valentin Alberti (1635–97) and Johann Wolfgang Textor (1637– 1701) are chosen to exemplify how and to what extent Grotius’s ideas on jus ad bellum were ‘altered two generations after Grotius published them’ (11). Further elaborating on this purpose, the author carries on to state: