1st Edition

Hugo Grotius and the Modern Theology of Freedom Transcending Natural Rights

By Jeremy Seth Geddert Copyright 2017
252 Pages
by Routledge

250 Pages
by Routledge

250 Pages
by Routledge

Human rights are thought to guarantee pluralism by protecting individual liberty from imposed religious conceptions of virtue. Yet critics often argue that this secular focus on merely avoiding violations can also enable unfettered individualism and undermine appeals to the common good. This book uncovers in secular rights pioneer Hugo Grotius a rights theory that points toward the enlargement... Read more

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1: Grotius and Modern Natural Rights: Beyond A Secular History

Chapter 2: Natural Right and Natural Rights

Chapter 3: Two Concepts of Justice

Chapter 4: The Origins of the State: How and Why?

Chapter 5: The Bounds of Coercive Authority: Sovereignty and Rebellion

Chapter 6: Rights and the Responsibility (Not) to Punish

Chapter 7: Punitive War and International Responsibility

Chapter 8: Divine Government: Why You Can’t Ever Really Pay For Your Crimes

Chapter 9: Transcending Natural Rights, or Rethinking the Foundations of Modern

Political Secularism

Index

Biography

Jeremy Seth Geddert is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Assumption College. He has published on natural rights, early modern political thought, religion and politics, and the just war tradition.

'Jeremy Seth Geddert brings Grotius down from the shelf of dusty old international law books, and presents to us a thinker who is at once innovative and bold, and yet has deep roots in the venerable tradition of political thought. Geddert’s Grotius challenges many of the assumptions embedded in our political vernacular—the language of rights—and compels us to reconsider our fundamental ideas about matters of enduring moral concern involving war and peace, constitutionalism, and criminal law.' - Lee Ward, Alpha Sigma Nu Distinguished Associate Professor of Political Science, Campion College at the University of Regina

'Geddert has produced an analysis of the key notion of justice in the thought of Hugo Grotius that now constitutes a new benchmark within the relevant scholarship.  It is notable for the way it challenges the prevailing orthodoxy that Grotius originates modern rights theory as mere subjective claims. In its place Geddert locates the development of rights within a far broader conception of justice.  He mines a wide range of texts, political and theological, to show how Grotius addresses the priority of the common good as the framework for our most cherished convictions.' - David Walsh, Professor of Politics, The Catholic University of America

'Hugo Grotius and the Modern Theology of Freedom contains a detailed analysis of Grotius’s complex classification of justice and rights (chapters 2–3), followed by chapter-length discussions of five distinct political rights (chapters 4–8). These latter chapters aim to show that attributive justice indeed directs the exercise of individual rights safeguarded by expletive justice.' - Johan Olsthoorn, University of Amsterdam / FWO-Flanders