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Hugo Grotius has always been viewed as a theorist of either international or natural law. However, these designations obscure the civic focus of his work, from his early republican treatises through to De iure belli ac pacis . From sixteenth-century humanist and legal-humanist Aristotelianism, Grotius constructed a framework of natural right which enabled him on the one hand to locate the origins of the civil community in natural man's juridical capabilities, but on the other to give this ‘city’ a large measure of juridical autonomy in respect of the moral norms of natural law. In this he diverged significantly from the contemporary scholastic handling of natural law. Grotius further developed his understanding of the civil community and its right through elaborating a theory of the unity of the city, based originally on the Aristotelian notion of reciprocity but ultimately using a range of neo-Stoic sources to conceive of the civil community as a unitary reality.
Annabel Brett (Fri,) studied this question.