The Natural Laws of Politics

In reaction to the religious wars, writers not only began to defend the primacy of state interests over those of religious conformity but also insisted on secular explanations for politics. The Italian political theorist Machiavelli had pointed in this direction with his advice to Renaissance princes in the early sixteenth century, but this secular intellectual movement gathered steam in the aftermath of the religious violence unleashed by the Reformation.

The French Catholic lawyer and politique Jean Bodin (1530–1596) sought systematic secular answers to the problem of disorder in The Six Books of the Commonwealth (1576). Comparing the different forms of government throughout history, he concluded that there were three basic types of sovereignty: monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. Only strong monarchical power offered hope for maintaining order, he insisted, and so he rejected any doctrine of the right to resist tyrannical authority. While Bodin’s ideas helped lay the foundation for absolutism—the idea that the monarch should be the sole and uncontested source of power—his systematic discussion of types of governments implied that they might be subject to choice and undercut the notion that monarchies were ordained by God, as most rulers maintained.

During the Dutch revolt against Spain, the legal scholar Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) furthered secular thinking by attempting to systematize the notion of “natural law”—laws of nature that give legitimacy to government and stand above the actions of any particular ruler or religious group. Grotius argued that natural law stood beyond the reach of either secular or divine authority; natural law would be valid even if God did not exist (though Grotius himself believed in God). By this account, natural law—not scripture, religious authority, or tradition—should govern politics. Such ideas got Grotius into trouble with both Catholics and Protestants. His work The Laws of War and Peace (1625) was condemned by the Catholic church, while the Dutch Protestant government arrested him for taking part in religious controversies. Grotius’s wife helped him escape prison by hiding him in a chest of books. Grotius was one of the first to argue that international conventions should govern the treatment of prisoners of war and the making of peace treaties.

Grotius’s conception of natural law also challenged the widespread use of torture. Most states and the courts of the Catholic church used torture when a serious crime had been committed and the evidence seemed to point to a particular defendant but no definitive proof had been established. The judges ordered torture—hanging the accused by the hands with a rope thrown over a beam or pressing the legs in a leg screw—to extract a confession, which had to be given with a medical expert and notary present and had to be repeated without torture.

To be in accord with natural law, Grotius argued, governments had to defend natural rights, which he defined as life, body, freedom, and honor. Grotius did not encourage rebellion in the name of natural law or rights, but did hope that someday all governments would adhere to these principles and stop killing their own and one another’s subjects in the name of religion. Natural law and natural rights would play an important role in the founding of constitutional governments from the 1640s forward and in the establishment of various charters of human rights in our own time.