International Law and the Emergence of Mercantile Capitalism

Grotius to Smith

Bibliographic Data

ID23145459
AuthorsMartti Koskenniemi (corresponding author)
Year2014
Pages1-37
Publication date2014-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeCHAPTER
VenueLes Fondements du Droit International (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherBrill | Nijhoff (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1163/9789004261655_002
OpenAlexW775198255
ISBN9789004261655
LanguageFR
Citations received8

This chapter discusses the Hugo Grotius' achievement within the world-wide emergence of new types of economic relationship that have sometimes been abbreviated as the empire of civil society. The natural rights theory put forward by Grotius was an important step in the development of legal and political thought that peaked in the publication of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations in 1776. The basic legal elements of property and contract that one usually links with capitalism were already present in the Spanish scholastics. The view, homo economicus , operates both as a logical and an empirical construction in a way that purports to possess universal validity. As it arose at the end of the 18th century, and became the predominant vocabulary of human interaction in the 20th, it finally fulfilled the promise that had always drawn ambitious men to natural and international law. Keywords: Adam Smith; capitalism; homo economicus ; Hugo Grotius; international law; The Wealth of Nations

Adam smith · Capitalism · Economics · Empire · Homo economicus · International law · Law and economics · Natural law · Neoclassical economics · Political science · Politics · Property rights · Sociology · Corporate Law and Human Rights · Law · Political Economy and Marxism · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought

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